About This Site

Start by clicking Characters, Bestiary or Community Bestiary in the navigation menu, then selecting a tag that suits what you're looking for. You can select more than one tag to narrow things down, and unselect tags to broaden the search.

You can also search; this can often be helpful for common archetypes (e.g. guards, smiths), but it isn't perfect.

The Monster Burner is fairly straightforward once you start using it, but it has its own directions at the top of the page that provide much more thorough guidance than I can provide here.

Each card has tags listed in the top right to give you a sense of the character's primary lifepaths. This is followed by the card title, which is usually descriptive (e.g. City Priest), but are sometimes evocative (e.g. Hexer Brat).

W/P stands for Will/Perception.

PFAS stands for Power, Forte, Agility, Speed. These are given suggested numbers, but can be adjusted if need be.

Health and Steel are calculated by the book.

Resources and Circles are based on a third of the burned character's resource points, divided by 15, and rounded down. I sometimes adjusted these for cards that imply extreme wealth or influence.

Traits and Skills are usually from lifepaths. Exponents are not provided intentionally, as these cards are intended to give you ideas, not to be prescriptive.

Beliefs and Instincts are are suggestions and intended to be a starting point for a character. They can be ignored, replaced or added to based on your game's need.

Hesitation, wounds, and weapon damage are all calculated per the book using the listed stats.

Lifepaths are listed at the bottom of the card, under combat stats. These allow you to double check my work or make changes to something that almost fits your concept.

Monster cards are far more open to GM interpretation than characters. While Burning Wheel provides lifepaths for characters, no current BWHQ material gives rules for making monsters. So they have very different treatment that's based on the concept for the creature.

Form is the biggest departure from burning a character. Form is my own departure from the source material, intended to give a strong visual image of the creature and replace character and descriptive Traits as a necessary part of the monster.

I made this decision in order to simplify monsters and make them more usable at the table. After a GM has read a Form, they should ideally be able to visualize the monster themselves without referring to the cards.

W/P stands for Will/Perception. Most monsters are near or just slightly over or under the human norm of 4/4. Very old monsters generally have higher Will, and those with special abilities inherent to their Form tend to have higher perception.

PFAS stands for Power, Forte, Agility, Speed. These are based on how close their strength is compared to a human.

Health and Steel are calculated using the same rules as characters.

Resources and Circles have no guidance, I typically used the formula of giving 0 in both to nonsentient, and more of both the older or more powerful a creature.

Traits and Skills are intended to bend a creature toward a certain concept. For example, the Imp has leering and hideous laughter as Traits, and poisonous platitudes as a Skill. These bend it strongly toward being a creature that rejoices in havoc and instigation. Compare that to Lucifer, another demon, who has Traits like Immortal, Force of Nature, and Spirit Nature, and Skills like Summoning, Falsehood, Ambition-wise and Persuasion. Lucifer is a temptor that can offer his victims power, or at least make them believe he can.

Beliefs and Instincts are are suggestions only, and are not ironclad. They can be ignored, replaced or added to based on your game's need.

Hesitation, wounds, and weapon damage are all calculated per the book using the listed stats.

The monsters are entirely my own invention. These are largely untested and should be used with a careful hand.

They are intended to be thematic, with their Form, Beliefs, Instincts, Traits and Key Skills pushing toward a particular approach in play. For example, the Centaur's first Skill is Drinking, and it's Instinct is Never stop drinking. The Tree of Sacrifice's Traits give us its defining feature: the Vile Benediction, and its Instinct, drink the blood fo the sacrifice, tells us that this is a dark symbiosis between the tree and its supplicants.

Most Traits for monsters are descriptive only. However, if a Trait is italicized and has no note, it is a Call-on or Die Trait from the rulebooks and may have a substantial effect on play. Invented C-O and Die traits should be accompanied by a note explaining how they function.

These are not intended to be a replacement for your good judgment as GM; they are just intended to make it easier to conceive a character without having to memorize the page number for every trait and skill.

Also, these are made by hand (I'm not a programmer), so there are likely some misspellings, miscalculations or oversights. If you'd like to verify my work, you can follow the LPs listed at the bottom of the cards. If you catch any mistakes, feel free to email me at eric@littledomesday.com and I'll try to fix it.

Anybody can add to the Community Bestiary using the Monster Burner tool. Simply use the "Save to Bestiary" button at the bottom of the form. There is no obligation to do so (you can just generate a PDF if you like), and there is no approval process.

Though the Community Bestiary is open to all entries, there are some rules for entries:

• The entry must actually be a creature. Illegible entries, random collections of symbols, nonsense, etc., will be removed.
• The creature must be complete, entries missing necessary fields will fail to upload.
• Extreme language, descriptions of gross violence, explicit sexual content, or any other obscene or highly offensive content may result in a card being removed. Please keep any such content PG-13 (PEGI-12) in the Community Bestiary.
  PDFs can contain any content you like, but I'd like this site to be friendly toward younger users.
• Any cards that denigrate real people or encourage, glorify, or call for real-world violence or harm will be removed.
• As the sole administrator, all of these will be applied in my sole discretion. There are no appeals once a card is removed.

Since the site by design stores no personal information, the original creator of a Community Bestiary card has no more access to them than anybody else. If you made a mistake on a card, you can always upload a new version, or you can contact me directly at eric@littledomesday.com and ask me to manually make a fix.

Yes. Contact me directly at eric@littledomesday.com and I will review them per the Community Bestiary Standards rules on this page.

The art is AI generated using Midjourney.

Though I had hoped to source art from datasets created by willing, informed artists, it doesn't seem like this is the way the industry is going. As there is no budget for real art (building and running this entire site has cost less than a single decent piece of art), I have implemented a suggested compromise in the art toggle—if you prefer not to view the AI art, you can turn it off on any of the card pages.

Yes, yes, and yes. None of the art is copyrighted (it's AI art and can't be copyrighted), the cards were made by heavily modifying this Pen on Codepen, and all the cards were built using the rules from Burning Wheel Gold Revised. I make no claim to any of it.

I'm old fashioned and think the web is best when it isn't corporate. So this site was intentionally designed to not use cookies or collect user data. The only preferences it stores locally are your art/monochrome/dark mode preferences for the site.

If you have any privacy concerns, shoot me an email at eric@littledomesday.com.

Add some monsters to the Community Bestiary! I'd love to see more content for this game!

Every part of the site was initially made for my own use, and as the tools got better I decided to make them public to support the community for my favorite TTRPG. I am not collecting donations or selling anything and intend to keep it that way unless hosting costs get unmanageable.

I'm just a fan who wanted to make a tool for other Burning Wheel GMs. I am not affiliated with BWHQ in any way, though the creation of this site and the Monster Burner were sanctioned by Luke Crane before I made them public.

If you want to get in touch, you can email me at eric@littledomesday.com. I am happy to consider any suggestions or requests for the site. (No promises, this is just a personal project!)