Monsters

The following rules describe how to create monsters for the Swords of Infinity system.

Building a Monster

The process for building monsters very closely resembles how characters are created. Monsters, however, have a few extra mechanics that can be added to them to make them more interesting.

Concept

Like with characters, a monster is built around its concept. Is this monster a troll? A dragon? A formless horror spawned in some hellish netherworld? The monster's concept helps to define its Ability Scores, Composition, Traits, and more.

Ability Scores

A monster's ability scores can be generated the same way as for characters. The following values can be used as a shorthand when using point buy to generate Ability Scores:

• 180 points (average Ability Score of 30), used for very tough monsters
• 150 points (average Ability Score of 25), used for most monsters
• 130 points (average Ability Score of 20), used for weak monsters

Composition

The combination of arms, legs, wings, and other parts that may or may not make up the monster, its composition lists out all of the Damage Targets that the monster has and lets players know which parts of it they can attack.

Difficulty Level

A monster's Difficulty Level (DL) is a quick way to reference how challenging a monster will be for a player character to challenge in combat. Each Difficulty Level represents 100 points spent to build the monster, and so is analogous to the player character's Experience Level. A lone character facing off against a monster of Difficulty Level equal to his own Experience Level should just barely be able to best it using the Pushing Past Limits mechanic.

Point Buy

Monsters are built by spending from a pool of points, typically derived from its Difficulty Level. These points can be spent on skill specializations, special abilities, traits, immunities, and more as described below.

Skill Specializations and Special Abilities

Specializations and Special Abilities are purchased using the same exponential scale that is used for character generation and device crafting. The table describing this scale has been reproduced below. For a refresher on Special Abilities see the section in the character creation rules.

Score	Point Cost	Cost to Next Level	Total Experience Spent to Next Level
1-10	1	10	10
11-20	2	20	30
21-30	3	30	60
31-40	4	40	100
41-50	5	50	150
51-60	6	60	210
61-70	7	70	280
71-80	8	80	360
81-90	9	90	450
91-100	10	100	550

Size

Small:

• more dex
• more perception
• less strength
• less vitality

Large:

• more strength
• more vitality
• less dex
• less perception

Designing Encounters

Hordes

kill a dude when damage => vitality, then reduce number of members and horde bonuses