Making Arrows of Indra NPC Statblocks is Fun and Easy!

Making Arrows of Indra NPC Statblocks is Fun and Easy!

So recently I made a few NPCs that I wanted to stat out for my Arrows of Indra  playtest campaign.  You know, if you read my blog, that I often don’t bother to fully stat-out PCs, much less go through all the trouble of fully generating them; but I specifically wanted to do so in these cases, as a kind of test.  And as it turns out, doing so was quite painless!

I quickly rolled the stats using the standard method, chose race and class, and decided what level I wanted the NPCs to be.  After that, I applied level-based abilities automatically, and for the background and class skills I chose to roll them all randomly using the method provided.  Arrows of Indra provides the option for players to have certain limited ranges of choice in their skills; a player can choose to raise his existing background skills rather than roll, or to choose from the basic Class Skill list, rather than roll (the difference being that only by rolling does he have a chance of getting on to the Advanced Class Skills), but I decided to do it all randomly.  The end result was characters that were generated really quick, and that work really well for what I wanted them to do.

Just for reference, here’s a couple of the (abridged) statblocks:
1.Fighter level 6: Attack:+5m/4r hp:32 AC:17/18r SV: 13, Skills: Sword +2/3, mace+1, combat maneuvers (defensive attack at -2), charioteer.
eq: Lamellar armor + shield, Khanda Sword (1d8+4 damage; total attack bonus: +7), Mace (1d6+1 damage, total attack bonus: +6)


2.  Thief level 2: Attack:+0/1r  hp:10 AC:15 SV:14 Skills: literate, backstabx2, pp/ol/ft/snk+3 lis+1 climb+4 disguise+2
eq: Leather Armor, Kukri dagger (1d4 damage, total attack bonus: +0), Spear (1d6 damage; total attack bonus: +0), Sling (1d4 damage; total attack bonus: +1)

That’s about it; as you see, there’s nothing much there, in the mechanics themselves, that will differentiate the game in actual play from other OSR games.


RPGPundit

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(originally posted October 20th, 2012; on the old blog)