Race Generator Help

Additional Help

Overview: This generator is designed to facilitate quick and easy creation of new races and modification of existing races. While there are a great number of fields, most of these automatically fill with relevant values after you choose your race's basics: size and type.

Similar generators:
These are links to similar pages written by others. If you don't like my race generator, try:
Asmor's Monster Maker - Quick & dirty, this JavaScript race calculator gives data for a creature based on 9 fields you fill in (type, size, stats, HD).
Kencyclopedia Creature Creator - This server-side generator walks you through the creation process, using the data from Dragon Magazine 276. This means you don't have to think of (physical) stats; they're done for you.

Size: The size of a typical adult member of the new race.

Size	Example	Dimension	Weight
Fine	Housefly	6 in or less	1/8 lb or less
Diminutive	Toad	6 in - 1 ft	1/8 lb - 1 lb
Tiny	Cat	1 ft - 2 ft	1 lb - 8 lb
Small	Small dog	2 ft - 4 ft	8 lb - 60 lb
Medium-size	Human	4 ft - 8 ft	60 lb - 500 lb
Large	Horse	8 ft - 16 ft	500 lb - 4,000 lb
Huge	Wagon	16 ft - 32 ft	4,000 lb - 32,000 lb
Gargantuan	Narrow side of a barn	32 ft - 64 ft	32,000 lb - 250,000 lb
Colossal	Broad side of a barn	64 ft or more	250,000 lb or more

Type: A general description of the creature. The choice of type determines Hit Die type, good saves, base attack bonuses, and certain special abilities.

Aberration: An aberration has a bizarre anatomy, strange abilities, an alien mindset, or any combination of the three.
Animal: An animal is a nonhumanoid creature, usually a vertebrate, and either lived on Earth in historical times or is a larger version of such a creature.
Beast: A beast is a nonhistorical, vertebrate creature with a reasonably normal anatomy and no magical or unusual abilities.
Dragon: A dragon is a reptilian creature, usually winged, with magical or unusual abilities.
Elemental: An elemental is composed of one of the four classical elements: earth, air, fire, or water.
Fey: A fey is a creature with supernatural abilities and connections to nature or some other force or place. Fey are usually human-shaped.
Giant: A giant is a humanoid creature of great strength, usually at least of Large size.
Humanoid: a humanoid usually has two arms, two legs, and one head, or a humanoid torso, arms, and head. Humanoids have few or no supernatural or extraordinary abilities, and usually are Small or Medium-size.
Magical Beast: Magical beasts are similar to beasts but have supernatural or extraordinary abilities.
Monstrous Humanoid: These are humanoid creatures with monstrous or animalistic features, often having supernatural abilities.
Ooze: An ooze is an amorphous or mutable creature.
Outsider: An outsider is a nonelemental creature that comes from another dimension, reality, or plane.
Plant: This type comprises vegetable creatures.
Shapechanger: This type of creature has a stable body but can assume other forms.
Undead: Undead are once-living creatures animated by spiritual or supernatural forces.
Vermin: This type includes insects, arachnids, arthropods, worms, and similar invertebrates.

Subtype: The parenthetical field after the type is the subtype. All humanoid creatures have subtypes. For example, a drow's stat block includes "Humanoid (elf)". This means that a drow is of type Humanoid and subtype elf. Certain subtypes have rules implications: cold, fire, and incrporeal. The generator explains these qualities at the bottom of the generated form (add the "fire" subtype to a creature, click "generate", and see what I mean). Outsiders have subtypes according to alignment: Chaotic, Evil, Good, and Lawful. Other subtypes: Aquatic, dwarf, elf, goblinoid, gnome, halfling, orc, etc.

Hit Dice: The creature's Hit Dice automatically fill based on the size and type. You can change the HD to any value you choose, and the generator will automatically recalculate base attack and base save bonuses.

Ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intellegence, Wisdom, and Charisma. The generator sets the first three (the physical stats) based on size and type, but they can be changed to any values. Use three dashes (---) to represent a nonability.

Natural armor: Choose a number representing the creature's thick skin, scales, or other natural protection. Examples: human (0 natural armor), kobold (1 natural armor), hill giant (9 natural armor), and tarrasque (30 natural armor).

Armor & shield: If the creature typically wears armor or wields a shield, select one or both from the list, then select its type (normal, masterwork, or +1 through +5).

Target AC: If you want your non-armor-wearing creature to have a certain armor class, simply type it here and the generator adjusts your natural armor accordingly. The AC will be set to the chosen number if possible (or the natural armor will be set to 0).

Attacks: The generator pre-sets attack damage based on size and type and atomatically selects the most damaging one. These values can be adjusted at any time, including a change to a manufactured weapon (such as greataxe). If you use the CR estimators, only enter the best set of weapons it can attack with at one time.

Speed: Fill in this area with the creature's complete speed, as you want it to apperar in the final copy. a typical speed would be "20 ft, fly 40 ft (average)." The first number given is the tactical walking/running speed; for unencumbered humans, this is 30 ft. Other methods of movement are listed after this, with their name (and manuverability, if the movement is flying). General methods of movement include walking, flying, swimming, climbing, and burowing.

Alignment: The race's alignment spread. It begins with "Always," "Usually," or "Often," and continues with the alignment or alignments ("neutral good" or "chaotic evil").

Skills: The race's typical skills and their modifiers; for example, "Listen +3, Spot +3".

Feats: The race's typcial choice of feats.

SA: List the race's special attacks here by name.

SQ: List the creature's special qualities here. Do not include an ability here if it is already checked below.

Checkboxes: Check any boxes pertaining to this race. For Internet Explorer users, many of these names can be double-clicked for additional information.

CR: The race's challenge Rating. There are three ways to decide a CR: Charles' CR Estimator, Dragon's CR Guesstimator, and manual entry; simply select the appropriate optio to switch between these ways.

Charles' CR Estimator: In my opinion, this is the most sophisticated tool avaliable to estimate races' CRs. It takes into acccount how damaging attacks are, how hard the race is to hit, how tough it is to kill, and many oter factors. This estimator is Copyright 2001, Charles Greathouse, but you retain any rights you might have to use a race you create, even if it uses this CR. Note that this estimator uses the assumtion that a creature who does not attack is not challenging, so expect CR 0 if you remove all attacks.
Dragon's CR Guesstimator: This estimator is based minly on hit points, although it also takes into account the creature's AC. It also takes into account the number of "special attacks ad useful special qualities," so I assume that one-half of SQ are useful. It weights them at "1 or 2," so the generator takes an average value of 1.5.
Manual entry: You can simply wrie in an appropriate Challenge Rating. When you do so, the type automatically changes to "manual entry." Choosing manual entry also stops the generator from changing what you have set the CR at.

Known bugs: There is no way to add magical weapons to races; for example, the ghaele (a celestial) is listed as wielding a greatsword instead of a +4 greatsword.

Legal information is on my OGL page.