Creature Features

The abilities listed here are all about the basic nastiness found in a number of beastly and monstrous creatures in the Dresdenverse.

Your saliva is a powerful narcotic, leaving a victim insensate in the short term. With just a little more exposure, your victim goes straight from senseless to senselessly addicted. For those poor saps, detoxing is a bitch — it's easier, and more pleasant, just to play along with whatever you demand of them.

Narcotic Saliva You may use your narcotic saliva in a number of ways. The most common way in a fight is to spit it at your target or get close enough to lick him. This is handled with the Fight skill in either case and may only be done to someone in the same zone as you — preferably in very close physical proximity — and it is rolled as a maneuver (page 207). If successful, you place a temporary aspect on the target representing the momentary effects of your venom.

Alternatively, you may make a Fight attack — setting aside any damage bonus you might have—to inflict mental stress instead of physical stress. Any consequences resulting from such an attack represent the more lasting effects of the venom—if you score a moderate consequence or worse, or if you take your target out, you've really gotten your hooks into him (see below).

Typically, however, this saliva is administered out of combat—usually with an act of intimacy (kissing) or unintentional ingestion (spiking the punch). Roll Deceit with a +2 bonus against the victim’s Discipline. This is considered a “consequential contest” (see page 193); if you win, you inflict a relevant consequence (usually Addicted) on the victim, severity determined by the contest.

Addicts are in pretty bad shape when dealing with you—you don’t even need to spend fate points to take advantage of this. You get to tag (see page 106) their addiction aspect every time you enter a new scene with your new victim/pal, making it very easy to gain—and keep—the upper hand.

You're an underwater creature, with the benefits that come from that.

Can’t Drown You never take stress or consequences from drowning (this is not the same as an immunity to choking or other means of suffocation).

Easy Swimming You may ignore all water-based borders while swimming, making your underwater “sprints” all the more effective.

You’re able to spit or otherwise throw some sort of self-generated projectile over a short distance. You’ll need to lock down this breath weapon to a single type of effect—e.g., acid, fire, lightning, etc.—when you take this ability.

You can attack targets up to one zone away from you with your breath weapon. Roll Shoot; if you hit, you deal +2 physical stress (essentially, this is a thrown Weapon:2 that you can self-generate). As with any weapon, you might be able to use your breath to perform combat maneuvers if you can justify it, setting temporary aspects on the scene or on your opponent.

You have claws, fangs, or other natural weapons that let you add damage when attacking with your “bare” hands. Unless you have the ability to conceal your nature or change your shape (whether through Flesh Mask, shapeshifting powers, or the application of a Glamour), your claws are always visible.

Natural Weapons You have claws (or something similar) which act as Weapon:2 for your Fight attacks. This bonus stacks with stress increases due to Strength abilities (page 183), but won’t stack with other Weapon:[X] effects per the usual weapon stacking guide

Your claws are venomous. Use Fight to Create an Advantage; if successful, the target gains a Poisoned aspect. In each subsequent exchange, the target must roll Endurance to defend against an attack from the poison equal to your Fight score. Once the target concedes or is taken out (falling unconscious), the attacks stop (see page 203 for guidelines on being taken out). However, the damage is already done; without proper medical attention, a taken out victim will die soon (within a few hours, perhaps less), though not immediately.

Proper medical attention will remove the aspect and end the effect. This is an opposed roll—you can roll Fight (since that was the skill for the original attack) to set the difficulty to mitigate the poison.

You’re very small, or able to become very small at will if you’re a shapeshifter — at the very largest, you’re dwarfed by even a small human child. This ability is always in effect unless you have the ability to shapeshift.

Hard to Detect You gain +4 to Stealth attempts to remain hidden.

Small is Big Being small, you’re much better at picking up on very small details, gaining a +2 to any perception (Alertness, Investigation) rolls needed to spot them.

Wee While small, your Endurance skill is taken to be no greater than Mediocre for the purpose of determining your health stress capacity. Your ability to manipulate objects and other uses of the Might skill are considered relative to creatures of your small size, rather than human sized. (Since most difficulties are determined for humans, this will usually impose a penalty between –2 and –4, or in some cases, forbid the use of Might at all.)

When your size is a factor in combat, you can only inflict 1 physical stress per attack (but this could be improved by damage bonuses from weapons and the like). Your ability to cross distances (using Athletics) is unaffected, but you gain a +1 to Athletics for dodging

Some part of you is a beast, an animal—often due to shapechanging abilities or something similar. This brings along the benefits of that animal’s senses.

Musts: Define the type of beast you share a kinship with at the time you take this ability.

Beast Senses Whether in human form or otherwise, your senses are strongly tuned in a fashion fitting a particular type of beast (you must specify the senses when you take the ability, based on what the beast is known to have). Whenever it seems reasonable that you’d have some sort of beast-born advantage of the senses (for example, a keen sense of smell while making an Alertness or Investigation roll), you get a +1 on the roll.

Beast Trappings You are able to do one minor thing that normal people can’t do, related to the abilities of your beast-kin. This might be tracking by scent (for a wolf or other predator), finding your way around while blind or in total darkness (like a bat), or hiding in plain sight (like a chameleon). This ability works like an extra skill trapping (see page 120) for the skill of your choice.

Alternately, you can choose a skill trapping that already exists and create a circumstance under which you gain a +1 on the roll that fits your beast kinship. For example, you might say that, because you’re kin to leopards, you gain a +1 to Stealth when barefoot.

Beast Friend You may achieve at least an instinctual understanding (if not actual communication) with beasts of a similar type. This can allow you to make assessment actions (see page 115) to suss out a particular animal’s motives.

You’re very large, or able to become very large at will if you’re a shapeshifter—at the very largest, as tall as a house. This ability is always in effect unless you can shapeshift.

Easy to Hit, Hard to Hurt You’re a pretty big target, giving any attacker a +1 to hit you when target size is a factor. But that increase in body mass means you can soak up more punishment, adding two boxes to the length of your physical stress track.

Everything is Small You cannot meaningfully interact with any man-sized objects using skills like Burglary and Craftsmanship (but knowledge-related rolls are unaffected), and you’ll have trouble fitting through normal doorways and into rooms (this will confer an automatic border value of 1 when changing zones as appropriate). But it also means you get a +2 to your Might rolls to lift or break things—on top of any supernatural Strength bonuses you might have—and a +1 on Athletics rolls to cover distance with your gigantic stride.

Big is Scary You get +2 on any Intimidation attempt against a target likely to consider your size an advantage.

Easy to Detect Your Stealth is automatically considered to be Mediocre, and you may never gain more than one shift on a Stealth roll.

You’re dead, but you keep walking around. It’s kind of gross. You've got to be dead.

Corpse Body Your body is a corpse. This means that you cannot recover from consequences with time, because your body does not regenerate. Any physical consequences you suffer are permanent until you take some kind of effort to remove them (know any good taxidermists?) or seek supernatural assistance to reconstruct your body.

Death is a Nuisance Unless wholly destroyed or killed by special means, you're already dead, and that doesn't seem to have fazed you much. No “death” result is ever permanent unless special means are used (usually as determined by your creature type).

Dude! You're Dead! And that's pretty scary to a lot of people. When dealing with folks unaccustomed to the walking dead (and that's most “regular” people), gain a +1 on Intimidation. The downside? Take a –1 penalty on nearly every other social skill (except Deceit). For every level of physical consequence you've sustained, increase the penalty/bonus by –1/+1. That said, the effect is short-lived with any one target—as they become accustomed to a reality where the dead walk, they eventually become inured to it as an additional reason to be terrified.

You are part of a pack and share a certain kind of unspoken, animal communication with one another. You must define who is in your pack, and they all must share this ability.

Pack Communion When near another member of your pack, gain +1 to your Alertness. When in the same zone as others of your pack, you may communicate with one another wordlessly. Only single words and simple concepts may be communicated: attack, protect, follow, distract. By focusing your senses, you may make an Investigation roll to pick out the approximate location of others of your pack. When ambushed, if any one of your pack spots the ambush (by succeeding at an Alertness roll), all packmates are considered to have won the Alertness roll as well.

You can climb on things the way a spider would.

Like a Spider While climbing, you may treat any surface, no matter the angle, as no more difficult than climbing up a vertical surface with plenty of handholds. Ceilings? No problem.

You have a supernatural sense of some sort, enabling you to detect something no one could normally detect (e.g., smell hope), or to perceive something normally in situations where you otherwise couldn't (see in complete darkness). With each supernatural sense, you must identify whether this is a purely mystical sense (using Lore) or a more physical sense (using Investigation and Alertness as appropriate).

Strange Sense In situations where you might be penalized or otherwise told that it’s impossible to sense something, you can nevertheless attempt to sense the thing you've defined, without penalty.

You may instead define a small set of up to three thematically related supernatural senses.

Take this instead of Strange Senses. You have a wide array of supernatural senses, easily up to a dozen.

You have wings of some sort — gossamer as a faerie, leathery and batlike as a demon—enabling you to fly. Your wings are always present and visible unless you have an ability (Flesh Mask, shapeshifting powers, or the application of a Glamour) allowing you to hide them. You should define the appearance of the wings when you take this ability.

Flight You can fly, eliminating or reducing certain kinds of borders (page 212) and enabling travel upwards into zones (page 197) that can't normally be reached. Winged flight is governed by the Athletics skill, just as running is.