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Thursday, January 8

Quick NPC Stats for USR

 Book Three Worlds of Adventure includes a bestiary for Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery. Fully-stat'ed animals and monsters the Crypt Keeper can use to quickly populate their Sword & Sorcery world.

Even though Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying is a simple roleplaying game, crafting and creating NPCs does require much supposition and guesswork on the part of the Crypt Keeper. Rules-lite roleplaying systems, if they have one thing in common, is the expectation the game master will do much of the world building and additional rules creation as fits the genre. This makes relevant supplements written for the obscure, niche games are doubly valuable. 


But if you are not sitting down to write a book for other referees to use you can save yourself time with useful shorthand for the statistics and mechanics of the game. Here is the shorthand I devised for Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery;

  • One Attribute die instead three. Instead of listing all three attributes of Action, Wits, and Ego just assign one die type to cover the spread. For example, listing d8 instead of Action d8, Wits d6, Ego d10 as would normally be written.
  • Pick Hits, don't roll for them. Whatever you think the NPC should have is what they should have. 
  • List attack and defense as briefly as possible. For example, +2 A means any roll against the Action Attribute receives a +2. Or +2 short sword. This means the wielder applies this bonus only when using this specific weapon. 
Therefore, a mad Battle-Ape could look like this: 

Gorilla Guard d8/7, +2 A when Berserk, +2 DR. 

What is left out is the headings for three attributes and Hits. We use a d8 for everything, and the creature has 7 hits. Any "physical" actions it takes receives a +2 if the beast is in an enraged state and the triggering events would be known by you, the Crypt Keeper. And the +2 damage resistance from both hide and armor is not detailed in full. What is here is enough to run an encounter with these creatures whenever they come up. 

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