Adventure Creatures

From Atlanteans to Zombies, our investigators have compiled a selection of well over 150 modern-day people, strange beings, and animals. Each entry provides information on a typical representative of the creatures, but that’s not always the one that brave heroes will encounter. It’s always worth remembering that any specific creature encountered may have abilities above, below, or outside the norm-perhaps even ones never seen in that species before due to some twist of fate or scientific or magical intervention.

What You Need

You get the most out of this book if you’ve already read (or at least own) the D6 Adventure Rule book However, we’ve included a genre conversion at the end of this book for those who’d like to use these creatures in D6 Fantasy or D6 Space encounters.

Animals vs Sentient Beings

You’ll notice that game characteristics are given in one of two ways: with natural abilities or with Advantages, Disadvantages, and Special Abilities. This is to help you distinguish between those with animal instincts only (which are the ones with natural abilities) and everyone else.

Animal Skills

Although clever, most animals and some monsters are not as intelligent as people are. They don’t actively use skills, though they may have some to represent their unconscious application of them, such as willpower to resist being told what to do. Animals and monsters usually decide on the best course of action that will lead to their own survival, unless they are trained otherwise.

Scale

Many of the creatures in this book include a scale value. (Those that don’t have a scale value of zero.) Scale takes into account that large creatures are easier to hit but harder to injure, while small creatures are harder to hit but easier to injure. For information on how to use scale in your combat encounters, see the Increased Attribute Special Ability. Some creatures have a bonus in parentheses after attributes and Strength Damage values. This number in parentheses indicates the modifier char the creature receives from having the lncreased Attribute Special Ability for the related characteristic.

Disadvantages

The effects of the Reduced Attribute and the Hindrance: Movement Disadvantages have been figured into the characteristics of the creatures, so do not apply them again.

Body Points and Wounds

The Body Points for each entry were determined by multiplying the number in from of Physique’s “D” by 3, adding the pips, and adding 10.

All entries in this book have been given three Wound levels (Stunned, Wounded, and Severely Wounded). Use the Wound Levels chart, dropping Dead to the Incapacitated level. Thus, if the creature takes nine or more points of damage or takes a fourth Wound level, it’s Dead.

In either case, adjust the numbers up for harder-to-harm creatures, or down for those that are easy to get rid of.

Animal Control

To keep a sense of balance in a game, game master should restrict Animal Control to ordinary creatures (such as birds or cattle) and disallow its use on the more unusual creatures and monsters (such as night mares and psionic parasites). Additionally, characters many not use Animal Control to hold power over any creature with Advantages, Disadvantages, and/or Special Abilities in their write-ups or where otherwise noted.

Designer Creatures

Monsters and animals (those creatures that game masters wouldn’t allow players to take as characters) may have a minimum of 1D in any attribute (generally Knowledge and Coordination). but they have no attribute maximum. Use Disadvantages and Special Abilities as inspiration for the game mechanics of various natural abilities for the creature.

Creatures and Their Fear Factor

Animals and similar creatures often try to scare interlopers in their territories, either to weaken them or frighten chem away. To simulate this, the game master may have the creature make a threatening gesture and make an intimidation attempt Since the intimidation attempt is an instinctual reaction, it only may be performed once per encounter, bur it affects all who witness it. For example, swans cry out and flap their wings, while whales slap their tales.

Should the intimidation attempt succeed, the target character or group flees, possibly pursued by the creature if it is hungry or provoked enough.

Attacks of Large Creatures

Exceptionally large creatures generally do not go after a single threat (although they can, especially if sufficiently provoked).

Rather, they usually attack an area as large as their scale modifier, causing collateral and incidental damage to those in that area. As a result, if a combatant has a scale of 9 greater than its opponent, it can ignore the penalty to its combat difficulty while making an area attack; in addition, if more than one target is within range of the attack, then these multiple attacks are made without a multiple target penalty. (The standard combat difficulty is used for each target, or their dodge local if the target has been dodging, as per normal rules.) Thus a human crying to attack with a flamethrower the general area a couple of rats are in would ignore the -9 marksmanship penalty as well as the multiple attack penalty, while still retaining the +9 damage bonus.

Note that area attacks are almost universally destructive, and as a result larger opponents often eschew them. A giant might throw boulders to attack pesky humans in an open field, but she would avoid doing so in her own home.

D6 Adventure Creatures (WEG 51021), © 2005 Purgatory Publishing Inc.
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