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As the title says, really. I checked the other 'new GM' thread here even though it was for D&D, although it span fairly off-topic.

Basically, I'm planning a 1-3 session, largely linear "I've never played PF or even GMed anything in my life, let me get the hang of things here" sort of thing, and if all goes to plan, people have decided I'm not crap at it, and I enjoyed doing it, then there'll be a larger, semi-linear campaign afterwards--because improvisation isn't my strong-point, and I'd prefer having some sort of plan, however vague, to fall back on, like it a side-quest they can do if they wander off in the 'wrong' direction that might naturally carry them forward regardless. I've laboured this point for the months I've been pestered about GMing, so they shouldn't be expecting 101% free-reign sandbox by any means.

I'm reasonably confident in world-building and structure, and I've got a general 'plot-line'--nothing too complex, just something that threads together and can be explained vaguely in a few sentences--but where I'm tripping up is monster creation.

Being the kind of person I am, nothing short of 'this precise monster' will do. If I want, say, a tribe of humanoid Scorpion-people armed with scimitars and shields, I can't and won't settle for Gnolls just because they're available in the same sort of location and I don't have to create them myself. That won't sit well with me at all. Don't get me wrong, if there's something pre-made that does largely fit and is more or less what I want, I will probably use it, but count on me wanting to at least make one or two minor stat changes and not knowing exactly how to go about doing it.

Rambling aside, I've tried to find resources on the internet to help, and because I've not done anything close to this before, most of it is just that much short of being clear about what to do.

What I know is:
What I want.
Their purpose.
The general CR range I want (or at least the point in the plot I expect them to appear, such as what the very initial threat will be, what will occur during random encounters, and what certain side-quests will have).
What weapons and armour they'll be using.
What abilities I'd want them to possess.

What I'm struggling to generate is:
Their characteristics (not just the 'how' of generation, but also the 'why' it's being generated that way, as well as how to assign skills).
Exp they'd give.
How to handle loot (because if you kill five blokes who all had hand-crafted silver daggers as backup weapons, naturally you should be able to loot them all and flog them somewhere as opposed to moving swiftly on and getting treasure at the end).

I've come mainly from D10(0) systems (OW, DH2), and haven't played a D20 system since a 3.5 campaign a few years ago that was cut short thanks to HDD failure on the GM's side, so I'm still trying to get back used to it all.

If someone is able to suggest a Monster Creation sheet or is able to just provide some gentle coaching then I'd appreciate it. This is for the benefit of several existing Dakka members, though, so PMs would be preferable as I'll probably want to divulge details.

Cheers in advance.

Have you looked at the Advanced Race Guide? The rules (like many PF rules) are free at Paizo’s website. I’ll point you straight to the race builder page:

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advancedRaceGuide/raceBuilder.html

That’s for designing races on par with the PC races. There is also the monster generation stuff:

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/monsterCreation.html

I’ve never personally delved into these systems, as it’s been quite the long time since I’ve sat behind the GMs screen. So I don’t know how well they all work out. But they should be a place to start.

That second link is the one I've been trying to use. It does a good job of explaining some things but overall still leaves me fairly confused, and since it's not something I can exactly ask to elaborate, has left me at a rather dead end.

For fluff I would look up the Bagog cult from Cults of Terror. This is the chaos cult of scoprion-centaurs, it is Runequest not Pathfinder and the rules will not transfer, but the cult could as background fluff.

In a nutshell the Bagog cult is set into tribes run by a scopion queen who is the largest of her kind. All scorpionfolk have the torsos of humans like a cantaur and the lower bodies if scorpions. Bagog cultists are hated everywhere, so their cult has to be extra vicious to survive.

The queen will ritually eat from every captive taken by the tribe, this will occur while killing them, not afterwards. The ritual will cause the soul of the victim to be reborn into a scorpionfolk hatching from the queens own eggs. These chaos folk retain most of the memories of their previous lives so many can be powerful adventurers. This alone helps the cult and race survive. The cult can control large numbers of regular and giant scorpions but have no other allies. Scorpionfolk can also kill and eat each other, absorbing some of the opponents memories and powers, but this is inefficient and except for ritual initiations of several scorpionfolk at once (which hardens the survivors) fratricide is not permitted.

There are two further exceptions, the male war leader of the tribe may be challenged and eaten, though only with the queens permission. The queen herself may be challenged by another female, queens (and those who raise to become queens by eating their predecessor) gain a greatly enhanced memory swallowing ability. Scorpion queens also grow to huge sizes. Generally they are very tough to kill. The Queen is the only fertile female in the tribe with breeding with other scorpion folk in a mating dance, which results in mentally stunted scorpionfolk, good enough for arrow fodder only. Queens can also mate with scorpions to breed giant scorpions as pets. As scorpions have negligible intelligence they can only be commanded by magical binding, but because Bagog is also queen of scorpions the cult has the ability to bind scorpions (and only scorpions) this way casually. Queens lay clutches of eggs and can do so reasonably regularly, but prefers to arrange a feast of sentient victims in order to produce quality offspring to further her tribe. Though doing so risks breeding a challenger.

Apostates to the cult of Bagog lose thier immunity to scorpion venom and their stings wither. Scorpions and scorpionfolk will kill apostates on sight, and will never consume flesh of their dead bodies, no matter what knowledge they may absorb.

For Pathfinder a Bagog cult would be best used as scorpion centaurs with level of barbarian or cleric if female. Some may have limited class levels in almost any class, others will be slowed - though still physically formidable, and the cult will have pet scorpions of various sizes. Due to the intelligence of the tribe being concentrated in a few of its members you could have low level adventures based around encountering fringe assets of a tribe, and higher level encounters against the main body of the tribe with a boss battle against the hue scorpion queen - who will have many cleric levels, giant scorpion pets and elite guards.
Scorpionfolk are no push over, their only real weakness is that they are hated by just about everyone who knows enough to consider them a threat and that while individually mighty scorpionfolk individually cover a large area (about the same as two horses for a scorpion folk with a torso the size of a man) and thus can be ganked or bottlenecked by numerous biped opponents.
Scorpionfolk avoid 'dungeons' excepting wide caversn because of this and are mostly abn outdoor encounter preferring to skirmish a bit like centaurs do. Though as you could imagine scorpionfolk are far more dangerous than the average centaur.

I appreciate the effort, Orlanth, but the Scorpionfolk bit really was just an example. Sorry if I was too unclear and wasted your time; I was just trying to say I wouldn't abandon my own enemies for pre-mades simply on the basis of it being simpler and easier.

EDIT: Re-read your post that you were expecting PMs.

 Avatar 720 wrote:


What I'm struggling to generate is:
Their characteristics (not just the 'how' of generation, but also the 'why' it's being generated that way, as well as how to assign skills).
Exp they'd give.
How to handle loot (because if you kill five blokes who all had hand-crafted silver daggers as backup weapons, naturally you should be able to loot them all and flog them somewhere as opposed to moving swiftly on and getting treasure at the end).

First off, good on ya for seeking advice on this. It's a good move as a GM to try and pull in any and all resources to try and make your games as memorable and enjoyable for both yourself and your players. Creating your own race for your campaign world is the best way i find to really make the world your own and not just a carbon copy "Greyhawk" or "Forgotten Realms" game. SO, to the meat of it. For characteristics i generally like to start with your basic human in whatever monster manual you might have. No bonuses right? For each stat just consider what a basic "Avatarian" would have in comparison and just add that onto a human's stat line accordingly. Start looking through your same monster manual for other creatures with similar stats and abilities. Choose the closest one and start there for XP rewards. If your Avatarians are slightly stronger, bump up the rewards a bit, if slightly less then lower it. Loot is a tricky thing. I find this a major problem when dealing with my players. One solution i came up with was to have a custom race use custom weapons that required exotic weapon feats to use properly. No one else in the region really wanted to buy them cuz no one really wanted to actually use the things thus lowering their re-sell value. Not sure what kind of physiology they will have but what if they only had like 3 fingers or some such or a big claw and their weapons sort of required that to be useful? Those are some options. Another thing on loot, if its a scripted encounter or something i like to pre-roll the loot as one of the first things. See what each one of your monsters has. If anything could be useful to them let them use it. I've had a player nearly feint when he seen a goblin shaman start using a wand of Cure Light on other goblins early in one of our campaigns. Also, remember that normally, when a dude is wearing armor and then gets killed in it, his armor is shredded (normally) at that point. Basically just keep track of how many times a guy gets hit before he goes down. For each hit there should be an increasing amount of damage done to their armor. I assume in whatever game you play loot is sort of based on the experience rewards. Don't feel like you HAVE to go by that.

A quick side to general handling of treasure...Basically i look at the entire quest in the campaign. Lets say if I know i'm going to have 4 encounters that are semi-predetermined I might roll up all the treasure for each one and treat the lot of it as one big 'loot pool'. If i rolled up some super good item in the first or second encounter I can actually swap it to a later encounter (or vice versa) to make the quest progression smoother. I had a problem with keeping some players on task and this really helped them complete goals since they reasoned their might be a much better payout by the final encounter of a quest.

Going back to your first point of 'why' all of the above is the way it is. This is sort of an epistemical question. What made them? Did they evolve naturally? Created by a god? If so, what kind of god? Are they magically created from something? If so, how might that magic have affected them (skills, abilities, etc.). Where do they live? What kind of climate is that? What are their social units like? What is their culture? All of these questions should start to build a robust "why" for your creatures and goes very far as a guide for how to play them, what kind of possessions they might have. Going back to the loot thing. In combat, how do your creatures do it? Organized? Haphazardly? Do they have a leader/alpha? If so, when you roll up all the loot for the encounter, take the best items and equip them on the leader. This is also where I would start thinking about skills (yes only after all the why's). If their culture is hunter-gatherer i'd expect to see some survival skills mixed with hunting and tracking. If they are purely predators i'd expect to see more awareness skills over survival. If they have a cultured society that isn't strictly warrior based some of them might have some craft skills. Now that might not seem relevant but if a creature only has 12 skill points but is a potter that means he might have up to 4-6 skill points LESS than the same creature who came from a purely warrior society.

I feel like i'm starting to ramble but I prefer to make my creatures by hand rather than use some automated thing. Automated things are fine if they are some kind of filler scum, but not for a creature that will feature more than in just one campaign. Hope any of this helps.

 Avatar 720 wrote:


Being the kind of person I am, nothing short of 'this precise monster' will do. If I want, say, a tribe of humanoid Scorpion-people armed with scimitars and shields,

Never mind.

You might not appreciate the cult of Bagog, My players wont either by the end of next week, and they know far less about Bagogites than I just explained to you, and are playing an inherently deadlier game system.

Monster creation can be a bit complicated, based on what roles you want them to cover, but treasure and XP are fairly simple: It's based entirely off the CR of the encounter.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.