Converting Creatures to Blades & Black Magic
The list of creatures and monsters found in Blades & Black Magic is great, but kinda limited. Here’s what I am doing to help fill in the gaps and expand that list.
Why the List Is Limited
By design, Blades as a game has a focused, swords & sorcery theme. That means a number of the monsters that are in other games are not found in that book. There are some supernatural creatures in it, but the vast number are not included.
I totally get that–the S&S feel is definitely a thing, something that I really like and understand. That is the style of my Middle Lands campaign. But for my Ealdun campaign–a more high fantasy one–I wanted more.
What I Am Doing
To scratch this itch, I am gathering the creatures found in Blades as well as other games, and putting them into the Bestiary on this site. The games I am looking at are CR Brandon’s Heroes & Other Worlds, as well as the classic version of The Fantasy Trip. I am also looking at the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual and the current version of Swords & Wizardry.
I’m taking the creatures from Blades and adding them pretty much as-is. The ones from HOW, I’m relooking at the ST and damage levels, to make sure they are more in line with Blades the d6 average for damage. I am also checking each one against TFT, just as a sanity check.
After that I am looking at bringing creatures from D&D and S&W. I’m gathering all of the stats & write-ups from each of the games anyway, to pick and choose what I want to keep.
Finally, I am taking more of an OSR approach to the Bestiary, instead of a more detailed one. I have gone back and forth over the years on this, and am settling for something more than raw stats, but less than a detailed discussion about the ecology of the breeding habits of every beast.
Of course, if you want to ignore the conversions I make, and want to do this yourself, I have written a few guides for converting creatures to Blades. These can be found in the Tools section on this site, broken out by game.
What Next?
Well, as fast as I can, I am posting new creatures in the Bestiary. There are a lot to do, and I am kinda limited on time. Still, I will be doing what I can to flesh out the catalog of creatures, and updating their descriptions as best I can.
I’m starting with Blades creatures, and then moving on to HOW and any remaining TFT ones. For each creature, I’m noting how they fit into my three main settings–Ealdun, Middle Lands and Shaman’s Valley–if at all.
Overall, though, I am pretty excited about all of this work. I have a thing (read: obsession) for Bestiaries, and love working with monsters. Writing up these creatures is a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to give back to our community.
Marko ∞
I agree with this completely. Let me state right up front that I fully understand why C. R. Brandon limited the monsters in Blades — one, the S&S ethic really doesn’t need too much in the way of the “high fantasy” monster list. Anything you run across in the S&S genre is either a buffed regular creature of some kind or pretty much a one-off ugly that smacks of HP Lovecraft more than it does of a dragon. Second; time — C.R. is trying to get a game system on the street, and the rules themselves are where he spends his time (and rightfully so, might I add), so whacking together a brief list of “typical” creatures for your heroes to fight just makes sense, especially in a game world where the worst things you will ever encounter are other human beings.
Having said that however, I want to add that I LOVE me some bestiaries! It’s really nice having a huge list of creatures you can draw from to populate your world, even if it IS primarily an S&S world. After all, who’s to say that Homo Orcanthropus isn’t just another divergent evolutionary line (the approach Steve Jackson took way back in TFT classic) and might still exist in isolated tribes lost in the jungle or mountains? After all, R. E. Howard did that with Reptile Men! So YAY! that you are doing this!
Also, I would like to suggest mining the GURPS Conan splat books for possible creatures. By definition, anything appearing in Conan fits the S&S genre pretty well, and from what I’ve seen of the GURPS Conan stuff, they are very close to following the actual stories, and anything written for GURPS should be fairly easy to convert to Blades… And (shameless plug for GURPS Conan here), I think all of the GURPS Conan books have now been released for the Amazon Print on Demand store for GURPS, so you can even get hard copy if you want!
Anyway, I’m very happy you are expanding the bestiary; not only for the ease of using Blades in a High Fantasy setting, but also just to expand the list of creatures available in general for the Blades/HOW/TFT/DCG gaming universe!