What you meet, and whether it bites

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Building a creature from its world.

Animals in any ecological system interact with each other, forming food chains, obeying instincts, defending territory, and generally living out their lives. When people enter such an ecological system, they will encounter the animals of the system, prompting natural reactions, such as attack or flight. So long as a world can support life, animal encounters and other natural events are common, regardless of the current terrain.

Nearly all animals may be classified into four basic categories: herbivore, omnivore, carnivore and scavenger. Within each category a variety of animal types exist, based on specific feeding and hunting habits — grazers, chasers and pouncers are examples of the idea. The resulting description indicates the actions an animal will take without resorting to such confining labels as bear or tiger, and while a referee may well elect to use such names, the system also allows players the freedom to encounter truly alien beasts.

A referee may choose to establish his own ecological system on a specific world, ignoring the encounter system outlined here. The system is intended to allow broad latitude in both animal types and attack and defence mechanisms, while remaining essentially logical and reasonable — so it is a default rather than a constraint, and the sections that follow are what you get if you take the default.

Animals have a similar range of characteristics to humans, and only those two are renamed. Strength, Dexterity, Endurance and Intelligence mean exactly what they mean on a character sheet — which is what lets an animal be attacked, injured and killed by the ordinary combat rules without a second system for creatures. Intelligence for most animals is 0 or 1.

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The character a world gives the life on it.

A world’s ecology can be extremely diverse. However, the referee may elect to implement specific themes on a planetary basis, to create consistency and flavor in presentation. Distinctive features help make each world stand out to the players as unique experiences.

The printed examples of a theme run from basic symmetry to reproductive methods and the associated genders, and from the number of limb pairs to the common sensory organs. The implementation of a planetary theme lies at the discretion of the referee — there is no throw, no table and no list to pick from.

It is the cheapest thing in this chapter and it does the most work. One decision, applied to every creature the generator produces on that world, turns a shuffled bestiary into a place — and it costs nothing, because the theme rides on top of the statistics rather than changing them. A six-limbed hexapod with a grazer’s numbers is still a grazer.

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Where the encounter happens, and what lives there.

Terrain has an impact on the type of animals one might encounter. Giant aquatic creatures are not found in forests, after all, nor are feathered flying creatures found flying at the bottom of the ocean. The first step in creating an animal is to choose the creature’s terrain, as terrain can have a significant impact on an animal’s statistics.

Read the last column of every row before anything else. Fifteen of the sixteen terrains give F –6 on a movement throw of 6, so a flying creature is possible almost anywhere and is six size steps smaller when it appears — flight is what the chart makes rare and small. The exception is Deep ocean, which gives S –2 instead: nothing flies at the bottom of the sea, and the chart says so by having no F in the row at all.

The Size DM and the movement DM stack, and on the water terrains that is the whole point. Deep ocean carries +2 for the terrain and up to +8 more for the movement roll, so its best case is +10 — against a forest, where the terrain gives –4 and the first four movement results add nothing at all. That is a gap of fourteen size steps on the same dice. Put a raw 10 through both: the deep ocean reads forty tonnes and the forest reads fifty kilogrammes.

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Hunter, gatherer, eater and the rest.

The referee should then determine the animal’s type and subtype. If the referee is building up an encounter table, the animal’s type is obvious: the type necessary to fill in this entry on the table. Otherwise the referee must choose an appropriate type — carnivore, herbivore, omnivore or scavenger — or throw 1D6 on the animal encounter table template to choose one randomly.

The four columns hold fifteen distinct subtypes between them and they are not evenly divided: herbivores and omnivores have three each, scavengers have four, and carnivores have five. The terrain DM pushes the throw up or down the column, and because the columns are ordered the DM has a direction — a forest at –4 tends toward Filter, Gatherer, Pouncer and Carrion-Eater, while an open ocean at +4 tends toward Grazer, Gatherer, Chaser and Intimidator.

The exact level of the skills varies depending on the particular creature — the descriptions name which skills a subtype has, not how good it is at them. All animals have at least Athletics 0, Recon 0 and Survival 0 regardless, so the named skills are the ones a creature is likely to have ranks in rather than the only ones it possesses.

One subtype gets no characteristic modifier and no skill at all. The Intimidator is described purely by its behaviour, which means a scavenger that establishes its claim by frightening others is, mechanically, an unmodified animal of its size — and everything frightening about it has to come from how the referee plays it.

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Mass, and what it does to the statistics.

For each creature, throw 2D6 for its Size and apply any Size DMs based on terrain and movement. The creature’s Size determines its Weight, Strength, Dexterity and Endurance together — a result of 7 means a mass of 100kg, a Strength of 3D6, a Dexterity of 3D6 and an Endurance of 3D6.

Dexterity peaks in the middle and falls off both ends. It climbs from 1D6 at the smallest rows to 4D6 at row 6 — a fifty-kilogramme animal is the nimblest thing on the table — then falls back to 3D6 for rows 7 and 8, to 2D6 for rows 9 to 11, and to 1D6 from row 12 onward. Strength and Endurance are identical on every row of the table and climb together the whole way. So a big animal is a clumsy one by construction, and the animals that are both strong and quick are the ones between a hundred and two hundred kilogrammes.

The weights roughly double all the way to row 12 — 1, 3, 6, 12, 25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,600, 3,200 — and then stop doubling and climb in flat steps of five tonnes from 5,000 kg to a ceiling of 40,000. An unmodified 2D6 throw reaches row 12 at most, so every row from 13 up exists only because a terrain and a movement code pushed it there, and the top of the table needs the deep ocean to reach at all.

Pack is thrown on 2D6 plus the subtype modifier, so the top row needs a good throw and a Pack bonus together — Grazer, Intermittent and Reducer are the three subtypes at +4, and they are the ones that can arrive five dice deep. At the other end a Siren at –4 is pushed to the bottom of the table: it arrives alone on one throw in six, and its commonest result is still 1D6, so a lure is not the same thing as solitude.

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Teeth, claws, hide and shell.

Throw 2D6 separately for the animal’s weapons and for its armour, and generate a speed multiplier from its subtype. This is the step that turns a set of characteristics into something that can hurt you, and the damage it does is read off its Strength rather than off the weapon.

The type modifiers span fourteen points and that is the whole design of the table. A herbivore at –6 lands in the hooves and horns rows; a carnivore at +8 lands in the claws and teeth rows with the bonus dice; and an omnivore at +4 sits between them. So the weapon a creature has is very nearly determined by what it eats, and the 2D6 only decides which of two or three plausible arrangements it got.

Armour is the only throw in the generator that reads the size RESULT rather than a characteristic, and the distinction is worth reading twice: a size result of 12 adds 12, whether the creature masses 3,200 kilogrammes or the terrain pushed it there from a smaller throw. The modifiers then run opposite to the weapon ones — a herbivore gets +4 where it took –6 for weapons, and a carnivore gets –2 where it took +8. Prey is armoured and predators are armed.

This is the table that joins the size step to the weapons step, and it is printed under the weapons heading rather than beside the size table that produced the Strength. Without it a generated animal has a set of natural weapons and no damage behind them — one die of damage per ten points of Strength, plus whatever bonus dice the weapon row added.

Exactly two subtypes have a minimum speed of 2 and they are the two that catch things by running — the Chaser and the Grazer, a predator and its prey, both at 1D6-2. Everything else bottoms out at 1 or at 0. Three subtypes can be genuinely motionless: the Siren, which lures rather than pursues, the Trapper, which waits, and the Filter, which does not chase food at all. A speed of 0 is not a defect in those rows; it is the feeding strategy stated as a number.

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The compact string that states a creature.

A finished animal is written as a short block of five lines — three that carry the creature and two, the name above and the description below, that are optional — in the same spirit as a world profile or a ship description: everything the generator produced, in an order a referee can read at speed while the players are waiting.

The printed illustration is a six-kilogramme Eater — an omnivore — that flies over hills, with a profile of 6A5168, appearing 2D6 at a time. It has Athletics-0, Melee (Natural Weapons)-1, Recon-1 and Survival-2, attacks with claws for 2D6, has hide worth 1 point of armour and moves 6 metres. The source describes it as a tough little flying alien pest that loves to shred things and eat them.

The second line is the one worth learning, because it is the whole creature. Read left to right it gives you the two questions a player will ask — how big is it and what does it want — before it gives you a single die. The profile in the middle is six pseudo-hexadecimal characters exactly as a character’s is, so the fifth is Instinct and the sixth is Pack, and a referee who reads them as Education and Social Standing will make an animal into an educated aristocrat.

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How a creature fights, and when it stops.

Unless otherwise noted, animals operate just like characters in combat. That single sentence is the whole of the special case: there is no separate creature combat system, no monster statistics beyond the ones already generated, and no rule an animal follows that a character does not.

The one thing the generator produces that a character sheet does not is a natural weapon, and a natural weapon needs a range category before it can be used at all. That is what the table below supplies, and it is the only mechanical difference this section owns. How an attack is thrown, how damage is applied and what a wound does are the ordinary personal combat rules, unchanged.

Six of the seven are melee and they split three and three between extended reach and close quarters, exactly as you would expect: claws, hooves and horns reach further than teeth, a stinger or a thrasher, which need the animal on top of you. Projectile is the only ranged entry in the table, and the only natural weapon that lets an animal open a fight from anywhere but arm’s length.

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Rolling what you meet.

The system for creating animals can be used to generate creatures on the fly, but it works best when the referee prepares an encounter table for each terrain likely to be encountered. This not only gives statistics for wilderness adventuring, it also provides a large amount of potential background data for expanding the world.

The templates provide only an animal’s type — carnivore, herbivore, omnivore or scavenger — and, on the 2D6 version, an event. Everything else about each row is generated by running the five steps. The two are shaped very differently: the 1D6 template gives a flat one-sixth to each entry and puts three herbivores in six rows, while the 2D6 template is a bell curve that makes herbivores the middle and commonest result and pushes carnivores to the ends. An event lands on a 10, which is one throw in twelve.

That is an example of a completed table rather than a table to use as printed. It follows the 2D6 template exactly — scavenger, omnivore, scavenger, omnivore, three herbivores, carnivore, event, two carnivores — with each row worked through the five steps and written into a single line. The event row spans the whole width, because an event has no size, subtype or weapons to record.

In play, each day an adventuring band may possibly have one or more encounters with animal life. As a general rule the referee checks once while the band is travelling and once while it is halted — for rest, exercise, encampment or whatever. There is a one-third chance, 5 or better on 1D6, that an animal encounter occurs in any of the specified terrain types, and the referee may modify that frequency for planetary or local conditions.

Specific encounters at specific locations are always possible in addition. A referee who has already populated a ruin with particular animals is not subject to the random encounter rules there — the table is what fills the space between the places you prepared, not a replacement for preparing them.

By their lifeless nature, vacuum worlds and any other world without life tend to have encounter tables comprised primarily of events. On an airless world an event could be a silt pool that operates like quicksand, a magnetic anomaly, a solar flare, or tracks left by previous explorers — which is how a world with nothing alive on it still has an encounter table worth throwing on.

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Whether it attacks, watches or leaves.

When characters disturb an animal or otherwise draw attention to themselves while within its territory, throw 2D6 and consult the reaction table. If the result is neither attack nor flee, then the animal stands still until provoked again — in which case throw again.

This is the step that keeps the generator from being a combat table, and it is the one that is easiest to skip: it is printed after the encounter tables, it is not one of the five numbered steps, and everything before it produced numbers that look like a monster. An encountered animal is not attacking until this throw says it is.

The Eater is the most dangerous row on the table and it is an omnivore. It attacks on 5 or better — thirty results in thirty-six — which is more likely than any carnivore with a number, and its own description says it will eat anything it encounters including characters. The Killer at 6+ is next. At the other end, a Carrion-eater needs 11 or better and the Filter, Intermittent and Reducer need 10, so most of what you meet stands and watches.

Most rows leave a band between the two thresholds and that is deliberate rather than a defect. A Killer attacks on 6+ and flees on 3 or less, so 4 and 5 are the results where it does neither — it stands still, and a party that provokes it again throws afresh. The widest such band belongs to the Intermittent, which needs 10 to attack and 4 or less to flee, leaving five results in the middle. Three rows leave no band at all: the Eater, the Hijacker and the Intimidator each attack on exactly one better than they flee, so they always do one or the other.

Meeting people, and what they want.

An encounter is defined as an unexpected or casual meeting with someone or something. A large part of the referee’s job is the administration of encounters: through them the referee presents information, opportunities and conflicts for the players to interact with, which is the core of any gaming session.

There are six types of social encounter — routine, legal, patron, random, rumour and scenario — and the table below suggests how often each should be checked and what the chance is. The tables in the sections that follow are offered as inspiration rather than as canon; referees are encouraged to create tables more in line with their own universe or with the specific adventure they are running.

Two of the six have no chance at all, which is the table telling you something rather than leaving a gap: routine and scenario encounters happen when the referee needs them, because one is background and the other is the adventure. The four that are thrown for split by frequency — legal and random are daily, patron and rumour are weekly — so a week spent in port is seven throws for the law, seven for a random encounter, one for a patron and one for a rumour.

Routine encounters involve meeting normal people while doing normal activities — interviewing potential crew members in a starport diner, buying ammunition from the clerk in a gun shop. Such scenes are rarely important in and of themselves. From a roleplaying perspective they create a background of expected behaviour that makes scenario and random encounters stand out by contrast, and they move characters logically from the time and place of one important scene to the next.

An adventure is defined as a story for players to experience, comprised of a series of related scenes or encounters. Those related encounters are called scenario encounters, because they serve to further the plot of the adventure toward its climax, and the referee creates them as dictated by the story they will tell.

Random encounters offer players a sense of variety. These colourful encounters often include individuals pursuing goals unrelated to those of the adventurers themselves, and from a roleplaying perspective they help create the illusion of a universe that exists outside the adventurers’ experiences — which is what produces a sense of verisimilitude. They are determined by throwing a D66 on a table such as the one below, and non-player character reactions may be determined randomly or selected according to the nature of the situation.

The thirty-six entries are in alphabetical order rather than in any order of danger, so the D66 is a shuffle and not a curve — every entry is equally likely, including the last, which hands the throw back to the referee. One of them is not an encounter at all but a hook: Potential Patron, at 42, points straight at the patron table two sections down. Two are robots rather than people, which is worth knowing before you decide how a conversation goes.

Meeting the law, and what it wants.

Legal encounters involve interactions with local planetary law enforcement. Some worlds have stricter laws than others, and this is represented by the world’s law level: the higher it is, the more likely that offworld visitors will be harassed by local law enforcement.

When the referee determines that a legal encounter happens, a local police officer will stop the adventurers and require identification. Further complications are at the referee’s discretion. That is the whole printed procedure — one stop, one demand for papers, and everything after it left open.

What makes it worth checking daily is not the stop itself but what the party is carrying when it happens. The law level that decided the frequency of this encounter also decided what is prohibited on this world, and the two are read together: a daily identity check on a high-law world is a daily opportunity for somebody to be found with something the world has already banned.

What the world then does about it is a matter for the referee, and the printed passage says so in as many words. This section owns the encounter — the stop, the demand and the frequency — and hands over at the point where a charge is laid.

Someone with a job and the money to pay for it.

A patron is a non-player character that gives financial or other support to a person, organization, cause or activity. Referees often use patrons to engage player characters in adventures: a patron encounter is the beginning of an open-ended adventure idea — the hook — and the patron provides both the mission an adventure is built on and the reward for completing it.

Adventurers frequently seek out patrons as a source of employment. Less frequently, a patron may seek out the adventurers, based on their reputation. The referee may throw a D66 on the table below or create a patron independently, and unique patron tables might be created for specific worlds or adventures.

Most of the thirty-six are careers a player character could have walked out of chargen holding, which is the point: a patron is somebody with the same background as the party and more money than time. Three of them cannot legally employ anyone — Pirate, Smuggler and Terrorist — and one, Fugitive, has a reason to be hiring people who do not ask questions. Those four are where the table stops being a job board.

Some referees prefer to improvise, considering little more than a patron’s name and the mission at hand. The format above is for those who want a reusable encounter instead, and its last element is what makes it reusable: the printed worked example gives the players one story and the referee six different truths behind it, so the same encounter can be run six times at six different tables and produce six different adventures.

The six variants in the illustration are worth reading as a pattern rather than as a plot. The patron is right; the patron is wrong about who; the patron is lying; a third party the patron has not thought of; the missing person arranged it themselves; and nothing has happened at all except a subordinate’s fraud. That is a complete set of ways a mission brief can be untrue, and it transfers to any hook you write.

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What you hear, and how true it is.

Rumours are best thought of as encounters with information rather than with people or events. They fill one of two roles: they plant the seed for a potential new adventure, or they provide background information that makes the universe seem larger than just the characters’ experiences.

A rumour can take many forms, including but not limited to graffiti on the walls, a newspaper or online article, an overheard conversation, a secret note and a televised broadcast. The delivery is what makes it feel like a place; the content is what the table below decides.

Because rumours are encounters with information, the player character has no patron should they decide to pursue one. If the matter does not pan out, the character has no one to blame but himself — which is the sharpest difference between this section and the one before it. A patron is somebody you can go back to; a rumour is not. Given the promise of potential reward, enterprising characters are likely to attempt to exploit the information they have uncovered anyway.

Nine of the thirty-six entries are false, misleading or worse — exactly a quarter of the table. Completely false information, information leading to a trap, two kinds of misleading background, a misleading clue and a partial fact that may be misleading are all in there beside the ones that are true. That is the design: a rumour table that only produced true rumours would be a quest list, and the players would treat it as one.

The thirty-six rows hold twenty-two distinct results, so the duplicates are the weighting. Exactly three entries appear three times each — broad background information, general location data and misleading background information — while eleven appear only once, among them a helpful datum, an important fact, an obvious clue and a reliable recommendation to action. Most of what you hear is atmosphere, and the genuinely actionable entries are the rare ones.

How a stranger starts out disposed toward you.

The referee determines the starting attitude of any character the adventurers encounter during the game. The characters can then try to influence that attitude using Social Standing and various interaction skills, such as Liaison and Carousing.

The ladder is five steps wide with Indifferent in the middle, and the two ends are symmetrical: Hostile will take risks to oppose you and Helpful will take risks to aid you. Everything between them is an opinion; only the ends are a willingness to pay for it. A single exceptional success can carry a stranger from Indifferent to Helpful in one throw, and a single exceptional failure can undo it.

Players get to choose their characters’ attitudes, so interaction skills cannot force a player character to behave in a specific way. Typically the only way a player character can be forced into a particular behaviour is through the use of psionics or some other external force — which makes this the one social rule in the chapter that runs in exactly one direction.

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What you meet in space.

Space is amazingly vast, and starships are incredibly small in comparison. Aside from points where people tend to congregate — within 100 diameters of an inhabited planet, or a potential refuelling location — the chance of encountering another vessel is small enough to occur essentially only at the referee’s discretion.

Random encounters with intelligent beings in the deep are extremely unlikely, and player characters would be correct in assuming that such an encounter was not a random occurrence. Referees are encouraged to use the astrogation sub-table for random encounters under those conditions, simply to avoid violating the players’ suspension of disbelief by producing non-starship encounters in a place where a starship would mean something.

A 2D6 curve puts the ordinary things in the middle and the rare ones at the ends. Merchant Vessel sits on 7, the commonest result, with Space Junk on 6 and Personal Vessel on 8 either side of it — so most of what you meet is traffic and debris. An Alien Vessel needs a 2 and a referee’s choice needs a 12, one throw in thirty-six each, and the two results most likely to shoot at you, Hostile Vessel on 9 and Military Vessel on 10, sit where a good throw finds them.

Ten of the eleven results carry a sub-table, thrown on 1D6 after the master table has chosen a category. Only the referee’s choice on 12 has none, because it is not a category. The ten are printed alphabetically rather than in the order the master table produces them, so the table for a result of 4 is printed second from last.

Most entries on those tables are self-explanatory, but seven of them carry rules. A comet’s dust and particles interfere with sensors, imposing DM-2 on Comms checks while in the tail; an unusual object or vessel may be found at the heart of one, but such occurrences are very rare and reaching such sites risks impact with space debris. An interplanetary dust cloud imposes the same -2 on Comms, and the referee may impose a second space encounter inside it or simply a risk of impact.

Debris from a collision or attack, lost equipment or garbage, and a micrometeorite storm all do the same thing: the vessel is in danger of being impacted by small objects with great force, and suffers 1D6 damage for every point of the vessel’s Thrust rating unless the pilot succeeds in a Pilot check to avoid the debris. Faster ships take more — which is the only rule in this chapter that punishes a good drive.

A jettisoned cargo pod means another vessel has thrown its cargo into space, generally to protect the safety of its crew from physical threats or legal action; the contents are determined by the trade goods rules and often come with complications about who dropped it and why. Solar flares release tremendous amounts of electromagnetic energy along with highly charged protons and electrons, and being caught in one is 1D6x100 rads every hour until the flares pass, handled by the radiation exposure rules.

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How far off it starts.

If two vessels randomly encounter each other while travelling in the depths of interplanetary space, the encounter will begin at Very Long range. More often, ships engage near a planet, at Medium range. Where the encounter starts is what decides how many turns exist before anybody has to do anything about it.

The range bands themselves, and everything they mean for a weapon’s difficulty, belong to the space combat rules; this passage only chooses which of them an encounter opens at. What it costs to open one band closer is measured there rather than here, and it is why the Comms check is worth making before anyone has decided whether the other ship is a problem.

Most civilian vessels, and military vessels not currently engaged in manoeuvres, carry a transponder operating as an identification friend or foe system, to distinguish friendly from enemy spacecraft on sensors. When these are active, other vessels gain DM+4 on detection efforts. It is generally against interstellar law to operate a civilian vessel without such a transponder — but some ship crews have been known to disconnect theirs when engaging in illicit activities, which is why a contact with no transponder is information in itself.

Some encounters ignore these rules entirely and occur at a range determined by the referee. The starship encounter types are named as exactly that exception, so a throw on the master table can put a vessel wherever the situation requires and the Comms check never happens.