The Beast Within: Creatures of RunePunk

Hello All.

This past week I spent detailing out the Bestiary Section of the GM’s Guide. First of all, a quandry existed about how to make sure it was comprehensive enough for the GM’s needs. You see, while RunePunk is designed to accomodate any creatures you care to put into it (and I do mean anything), I wanted to make certain that both the GM and players got to appreciate the uniqueness that sets RunePunk apart. To that end, I finally decided upon a flexible approach detailing out a number of creatures and providing the GM with a set of options they could use to further personalize the experience without leaving them at sea. I couldn’t just end with creatures however, because there are a lot of denizens in ScatterPoint and there are two distinct environs- the City Districts and the Barrens. To that end, I opted to detail out a handy array of common types of races and archetypes for the GMs perusal as well as including the normal Wild Cards that appear throughout the story line. All told, I’m pretty happy with them. The list came together quite well from compiling multiple notes and playtests of things. The usual thing any GM does anyway. All the descriptions have been complete and I’m about half-way through statting them all out. Luckily with Savage Worlds, knowing is half the battle, and assigning specific statistics and abilities is a lot of fun. A weird thing that I’ve come across is the handy way I’ve been referencing my own creations in the work more and more, such as Creature X may use (insert racial edge here) at well. The spiral is rapidly closing.

What’s left? I give a close scrutiny to the Plot Line again and make sure to flesh out anything that may appear a bit vague or sketchy.

All in all. I’ve learned a great deal from this journey that I’ll carry forward as I continue to develop for both RunePunk and various other projects in the future.

I intend to talk about some of the finer points of creating a bestiary in the next few weeks after this section of the book is finally put to bed.

Regards,

Sean