Creatures in numbers

The game never shows you a creature’s numbers. You see what it does, and look mode tells you how hurt it looks. This page gives the numbers exactly, as the rules use them, taken from the game’s data. How creatures behave is on the Creatures page. Their special powers (throwing, summoning, breath, spells, and the rest) are on Creature powers.

The tables are split by family, a page each:

• The dead and spirits: the undead (zombies, ghouls, wights, vampires, liches, skeletons) and the spirits.
• Fiends: demons, devils, yugoloths, and the gates a miscast opens.
• The fey: sprites, pixies, redcaps, dryads, and the rest of the courts.
• Elementals: the elementals of air, earth, fire, ice, lightning, and water, and their motes.
• Animated things and mimics: animated objects, constructs, and mimics.
• Giants, trolls, hags, and dragons: giants and ogres, trolls, hags, and the dragons.
• Kobolds, goblins, and orcs: kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs.
• Drow, duergar, and deep gnomes: the peoples of the deep: drow, duergar, and deep gnomes.
• Beasts and vermin: animals, giant vermin, and the things of the marsh.
• People and other creatures: townsfolk, outlaws, cultists, and every creature of no family above.

This page says what each table’s columns mean.

Stats and skills

The first table gives each creature’s level and the experience a kill is worth while you are at that level. You get less when your level is higher (see Experience). It also gives its rarity and its skills.

The second gives the six stats, each with its modifier in brackets. Where a score could grow further, its potential follows it, but creatures do not train or grow yet. Skill values are on the scale of the Skills page, and weapon skill ranks on the scale of Weapon skills.

Hit points, Defence, and resistances

A creature’s hit points are its Toughness plus what its kind adds, just as yours are your Toughness plus what your race and class add.

The Defence shown is the creature’s with nothing worn or wielded. It is 10, plus its Dexterity modifier, its natural armour, and the Dodge its skills give. An incorporeal creature adds its Wall bonus while it stands inside a wall (How creatures fight). A creature placed with a weapon, armour, or a shield adds what those give, by the same rules as yours (see Combat).

The Protection shown is its natural armour’s, and what it wears adds to it. Resistances take their share off each kind of damage after Protection (see Damage types).

Attacks

This table shows what each creature does with nothing in its hands: its natural attack (a bite, a hoof) or its fists. The numbers count its Strength modifier and its ranks, and give how long a blow takes it.

A creature placed with a weapon fights with that instead, by the same rules as you (Combat). A kobold may carry a spear, and an archer shoots the bow it carries (Ranged combat). Creatures that never fight belong to factions with no enemies (see Creatures).

What a hit may cause is a chance for each effect, rolled when the hit lands and the target lives. A disease is then resisted with a check (see Diseases).

By role

Two creatures of the same level are not the same fight. Each kind has a role, and the role sets its numbers around its level, L. Each part below is rounded down.

To hit. A natural attack hits at a quarter of L.

• A quick creature (or an assassin) adds an eighth of L, at most +20, and its blow threatens a critical from 19.
• A brute takes an eighth off. Its critical comes only on a natural 24, but does three times the damage.
• A shambler or a caster takes the eighth off too.
• A creature placed with a weapon hits at a quarter of L and fights with its weapon’s numbers.

Hit points. Its hit points are a standard amount (about 12 + 2.9 L) times the role’s factor, within 35 % either way. The factors are 0.5 for the quick, the small, and the casters, 0.6 for the spirits, 1.5 for the shamblers, and 2.0 for the brutes. The first levels are softer: a creature of level 1 has 40 % of that, level 2 55 %, level 3 70 %, level 4 80 %, and level 5 90 % (its Toughness and what its kind adds cut alike).

What its blows carry. The poisons, diseases, and holds of a creature of level 1 to 5 are rare and mild: at most a 1 % chance at level 1, 3 % at levels 2 and 3, 4 % at level 4, and 5 % at level 5, one degree of a status effect at most, and no poison at level 1. A creature whose blow is its own (a spider’s or a centipede’s venom, the blood a leech draws, a mimic’s grip) may have up to 12 % from level 2.

Speed. Its speed comes from its kind’s temperament: 800 to 1250 for most, and 950 to 1050 for the rank and file of a people (orcs, hobgoblins, drow, duergar). A dread creature moves at 600 or 700, slow and awful, or at 1400 and more.

Surprise

These are the creatures with a craft for surprise.

• Their sneak attack adds its dice to a hit that finds you unaware or surprised. It also makes it harder for you to keep your wits: the difficulty column is 13 plus this, against your Dexterity and your own initiative.
• Their initiative helps them keep their wits when you catch them unawares, and saves them time if they do not.
• Their spot counts against you when you slip past them in the dark.
• A creature that lurks waits where it stands for you to come beside it, until it is hurt (see How creatures behave).

Every other creature has none of this. Its initiative check is its Dexterity alone, and it strikes the unwary with no extra dice.

Pace, senses, and size

• Speed says how much time a creature’s actions take. 1000 is yours, and twice that does everything in half the time (see Turns and movement). In brackets is how long a normal action takes it.
• Sight is how far it sees, with which vision, under the same light as you.
• Hearing is the faintest sound it notices. Lower hears more, and its listen skill is counted in.
• Footsteps is how loud its steps are on normal ground. Other terrain makes them louder or softer (see Hearing).
• The second table gives its weight, its size, and its carrying limit. It is burdened past a third of that, as you are (see Burden).
• Tameable says whether it may be a companion at all, and its nose how far it smells a foe when it is one, through the dark and a closed door.

See also: Creatures, Stats, and Combat.