ClawCarver

Nice! I was recently rereading some old White Dwarfs (White Dwarves?), thinking about the dual-statted AD&D/RuneQuest scenarios they sometimes ran, and musing about writing a dual-system adventure for Swords & Wizardry/OpenQuest or something of the sort (Crypts & Things/Magic World, maybe). Your Manual of Monsters could be a big help. The occasional layout infelicity aside, I'm impressed with the work you've done here. Cheers!

I've just caught up here. Nice to see some movement again. Blowing the dust off my BRP Jorune file and consulting the Creatures chapter therein, I find that I have: Bronth: SIZ 3D6+12 (average 22/23, maximum roll 30) Corastin: SIZ 3D6+14 (average 24/25, maximum roll 32) Croid: SIZ 3D6+15 (average 25/26, maximum roll 33) Not far removed from your own calculations, overall. For what it's worth, I also have SIZes for Boccord (3D6+6), Muadra (2D6+2), and Thriddle (2D6+4). Cheers, Alan

Ah, Michael Shea - the best evoker of Hell since Heironymus Bosch! I'm a fan of his work, and I have always had a soft spot for thief/rogue characters in RPGs. Like bigandy above, I've never tried to run a strictly Nifft-based campaign, but I have cheerfully plundered the products of Shea's prodigious imagination for adventure ideas. I also agree that a Stormbringer-meets-CoC version of BRP ("Storm of Cthulhu"?) seems like a very good fit for Nifft's world, with its numerous pores to teeming demonic subworlds. That's it, really. Just wanted to add to the Nifft-love here.

I heartily concur! It's also great to have someone else do all the hard work that I've been too lazy and/or distracted to do. Eagerly anticipating further posts...

Me gusta gusto! I can only echo the sentiments already expressed. It's good to hear you're on the mend and also good to see you back here. Alan

All fair points. I think we're back to educated guesswork, some rough calculations taking into account all the factors you mention, and whatever seems right to you as GM. On a related note, skeletons in the BRP big gold book (and RQ3) get SIZ 2D6+6, the same as living humans. Well, if SIZ is based on mass, that can't be right. My understanding is that the skeleton makes up no more than 20% of the mass of a human. (Most of the remaining mass, of course, is water.) So skeletons should have SIZ divided by 5. Since they have no CON, and their Hit Points are based directly on their SIZ, something's got to give. Either skeletons are going to pose a significantly reduced threat with their piddling 2 or 3 Hit Points, or the GM has to step in and say, "Ah, but the necromantic energies used to animate the bones confer extra toughness and resilience" or something similar. I'd be interested to know if anyone has addressed this niggle, and how they dealt with it.

"It was Desti killed the beast."

The more important question, of course, is: Kong v Corondon. Who wins?

Oh, indeed. I think that for writing/running a one-off adventure, SIZ ranges are less important. The Ceratosaurus that showed up outside Arkham in "Gate from the Past" (I'm showing my age here) was SIZ 36, and that's that. But when statting lots of dinosaur species for my FLESH game, or converting creatures from other systems like Jorune, or obviously if you're writing a sourcebook for others to use, then coming up with a reasonable SIZ range (for adults of the species*) is a necessary task. Sometimes easy, sometimes less so. Sure. And although I said that the corondon resembles nothing on Earth, if I squint at it, it kind of looks to me like a cross between a giant crocodile and a centaur. But my point was that we simply don't know the weight of a corondon and we never will. Nor do we know how much they vary in size. But it doesn't really matter because we can make it up. Not by picking a figure out of the air (which I didn't do), but by comparison and calculation and a bit of common sense (which is how I arrived at my figure of 10.5 tons - I even used graph paper!). I said previously that these things often require a bit of educated guesswork. Maybe I didn't stress the educated enough. I suppose what I was trying to say is that there is no right or wrong SIZ for a corondon (or any other fantastic creature, for that matter), since it doesn't exist. There's just reasonable (e.g., 68) and unreasonable (e.g., 10 or 100). And I'm intrigued by Vagabond's secret formula. Oh, and to my mind, SIZ 68 is probably around the maximum for a corondon. Hell's teeth, with its firepower, that's big enough! *It's probably tacitly understood that the stats for animals in the BGB refer to adults, but I wish it were stated explicitly.

Hi, Ian. You've mentioned your alternative approach in the context of Jorune before, I know. The only problem I see (and it's relevant to this thread) is that if you are "adjusting somewhat by weight" then you still need to know the creature's weight to begin with. And that takes us back to the issue I raised earlier: it might be relatively easy to extrapolate the weight/mass of a giant human, gorilla, or snake, but how much (to use a Jorune example) does a corondon weigh? It's seven metres tall, but nowhere in the Jorune books are we told how much it weighs, and its body is shaped quite unlike anything on Earth (and we can't even see from the picture how long its tail is), so educated guesswork is all we have to go on. My own "guesstimate" for a full-grown corondon would be something like 10.5 tons (9.5 metric tonnes), for a SIZ of 68. But your corondon may vary. And if we DO know the weight in advance, then we can just look up SIZ on the table. Having said all that, I appreciate the fact that you're trying to work this stuff out in a less woolly, more "scientific" way. I'd be interested to know how you'd deal with something like - I dunno, let me see... How about a good ol' AD&D chimera? (5 feet tall at the shoulder, apparently.) Alan

Glad to be of service! I confess to being utterly ignorant of the existence of Clifford the Big Red Dog until now. Maybe he's just not so well known in the UK, although Wikipedia assures me that the TV versions have been broadcast here. As far as I can see (thank you, YouTube!), Clifford's size varies considerably from scene to scene, so he'd be a tricky one to stat. All true. In BRP terms, I think Kong beats the Tyrannosaurus in the 1933 film (I just watched again) despite its greater SIZ because he has higher DEX, tremendous STR and CON, he gets two attacks per round, and he has a very good Grapple skill.

I know you're semi-joking, but I decided to have a go anyway. We need to know the physical stats for a representative sea snake. A bit of Internet research tells me that the average length of Pelamis platurus (the yellow-bellied* sea snake) is 58.8cm and its average weight is 78.5g. So, let's say we want to create a sea serpent that's 100m (about 330 feet) long. We're multiplying the creature's length by 100m divided by 0.588m, which is approximately 170. Therefore we need to multiply its weight by 170x170x170, or 4,913,000! OK. 4,913,000 times 78.5g (0.0785kg) is 385670.5kg, or approximately 386 metric tonnes. So our sea beast is SIZ 164. Moreover, a 10-metre "slice" weighs, on average, 38.6 tonnes. However, we can't use this to extrapolate larger or smaller serpents, because they will also most likely be thicker or thinner respectively. By the way, I'm acutely aware that this thread has succumbed to what I would call Topic Drift, and none of the foregoing has anything to do with Superworld. Unless, of course, your superheroes are going to be fighting giant gorillas and sea serpents ... which is at least theoretically possible. *The common name describes the animal's coloration, not its cowardly disposition.

True. I treat SIZ as mass. This means that a Pteranodon, despite being about as "tall" as a man and having a wingspan of over 6m (20ft), has a SIZ of 3-6, based on an estimated mass of between 16 and 37 kilos. Using height/length just seems too complicated. Ah, but no. Mass/weight increases as the cube of height/length. So a tenfold height increase would mean a thousandfold weight increase, taking our 200-pound man to 200,000lbs, i.e. 100 short tons, or SIZ 100! Nope. By the same calculation, our 60-foot Kong would be 500,000lbs, i.e. 250 short tons, or SIZ 141. Three times the height equals 3x3x3 (27) times the weight. Multiplying 500lbs by 27 gives us 13,500lbs, which is 6.75 short tons, or SIZ 63. I'd make him a little larger (since 20ft is more than three times 6ft), but this feels right to me, and puts him on a par with a large 7-tonne Tyrannosaurus (SIZ 64 or thereabouts). I hope this all helps. I agree that it's fiddly. I also agree with Soltakss that there's nothing too scientific about it (although, as I've just shown, you need to throw some maths into the mix) and you just have to tweak things until it feels right for you. Talking of tweaking, somehow I screwed up the link to Atgxtg's table. I think I've corrected it now. Cheers! Alan

I can only answer the last of those questions. I'm working on a BRP version of FLESH, the classic cowboys-versus-dinosaurs 2000AD comic strip, which obviously involves statting lots of dinosaurs, some of them very big. Stats for dinosaurs have been published in various BRP/RQ resources, but as far as I can see they are often contradictory and wildly inaccurate. So I consult as many reputable reference works as possible to determine the mass/weight of different genera of dinosaurs, and work backwards on the SIZ table. So, an adult brontosaurus (or, if I'm being pernickety, Apatosaurus) probably weighed somewhere between 24 and 34 metric tonnes. According to Atgxtg's corrected and expanded SIZ table (a very useful resource), that gives us a SIZ range of 79-83. No question, though, SIZ is a tricky one, especially when converting from other games or statting creatures from films, novels, etc. How much does King Kong weigh? I dunno. What about balrogs, erbs, tauntauns, toruks? Again, I dunno. A bit (or a lot) of educated guesswork is involved.

This is splendid news indeed!