This unofficial tool helps build monsters for Burning Wheel. Use the fields to enter your monster's stats, traits, and skills. The calculations are done for you!
I recommend you start with a concept for your monster, and describe its Form. This should guide everything else about the creature. Is it huge? Then it probably has great Forte and Power, but also terrible Agility and Speed. Does it live in the ocean? Then it likely has scales or blubber and a Swim speed. Is it a barely-sentient plant? Then it probably has quite low Perception. Build a clear idea and use those to set their attributes and BITs.
The guidelines below are sourced from two places: attribute ranges, calculations and the advice on attribute shades come from the books, or are inspired by Luke Crane's previous works (with permission). The sections on monstrous BITs, Skills and Combat are my thoughts, driven by my personal beliefs on how to make these monsters usable. YMMV, and that's why almost everything gives you room to enter text and use the cards how you see fit.
I would like to give thanks to Luke Crane and the kind folks at BWHQ for permission to release this tool and for making this game in the first place.
Name is simply the name of your monster. This is a required field. Tags are used to find your monster when searching in the Community Bestiary. I recommend adding as many as apply to make it easier to find your creature. Images are only used when generating a PDF. Landscape images will show at the top of the monster PDF, square and portrait images will be placed in the body. Type is used to determine the coloration of cards, and used as a tag for searching.
Asterisks indicate that a section is required to add a monster to the Community Bestiary. Nothing is required to create a PDF except a monster name.
Note sections are provided to allow you to clarify something, whether that be a Trait, Skill or the way a creature is armored. These are not required fields, but allow you to be as inventive as you want with your creature.
G/W checkboxes indicate Grey or White shading. I recommend this rubric for shading:
The following attributes are automatically calculated based on your monster's stats and shades:
Health is the average of Will and Forte modified by your answers to the Health Questions. Steel is a measure of courage and resolve. It's calculated automatically based on Will, Power, and Forte, and your answers to the Steel Questions. Reflexes determines how many actions you take in combat. It's an average of Will, Agility, and Speed. Wounds are calculated automatically based on your monster's Power and Forte stats. If you manually edit them, you'll be overriding the automatic calculation. Trait Modifiers can be used to increase or decrease Calculated Attributes without changing the base attributes.
Form is a description of your creature. What does it look like, what does it act like? What is remarkable about it compared to other creatures? I recommend using this to do the heavy lifting for designing your creature, rather than giving it a ton of Traits and Skills that make it hard to use at the table. Traits should be kept to an absolute minimum (unless one of your players has Aura reading or does Enchanting, you probably don't need them at all), or you will end up with a creature that's unwieldy when you try to play it. Give it 1-3 Traits if absolutely necessary. If they are not, rely on the Form to keep things simple. Skills should also be minimal. Many monsters will need exactly one Skill: Savage Attack. Those that need more often only need one or two more. Make note of its primary Skill and their dice in that skill. If it has a secondary Skill, make it primary skill dice -1. For tertiary Skills and etc., primary skill dice -2.
Beliefs are not required for monsters. Use them only if they make sense. I personally would not use them unless the monster is sentient and has a goal relevant to the scene they appear in. Instincts, at least one of them, are necessary for a good monster. That's often all you need for simple creatures that have no Beliefs about the characters. I usually try to limit these to just one or two.
Weapons can be added and customized. The system will calculate melee damage (I, M, S) automatically, you only need to set the weapon Power. There is also an option to set a weapon to missile, you will need to set the DoF and enter damage for these. Armor can be entered any way you like. For simplicity, I recommend a list of numbers, like "2, 1," representing torso and the rest of the body. If that isn't enough, you can go limb-by-limb or add a note to account for the exactitudes of the creature's armor. Try to avoid this. You want to play with these monsters, not read a report on them.
Monsters in the original Monster Burner were subject to GM modifications and the table's approval. Nothing in them has to be done this way. You can change root stats at will, and subtract or add to calculated Stats with Trait Modifiers. You can invent Traits, weapons, armor. You can use a sheet of paper and ignore this tool. What matters is that you and your table enjoy the creatures that appear in your game.
This is a game. And games should be fun.