Why Bother with procedural generation for monsters?

Procedural generation for monsters helps save time, effort and energy that can be spent elsewhere. you will be able to use the saved time to focus on your dynamic story, or flesh out that big bad evil guy you have always been talking about, the world is your oyster.

With Beastlands, the content that is generated does just that, we will be going through and picking a monster, and fleshing out a monster with a couple of easy steps that will impact how long it takes to create encounters and meaningful events.

How do you achieve procedural generation with monsters?

Procedural generation with monsters works pretty well when some of the variables are static. Making some of the features that make a Beast a Beast, figuring out the combinations can be tricky. Certainly having to think about what the monster’s anatomy of a celestial monster, what body parts are involved with that? What features do most celestials share?

What Beastlands, my website will make a great base for a monster to build on top of, The biggest benefit is not having to come up with this custom content yourself. You can scan a couple generated monsters to see if it works for your scenario.

After you find your monster, you can scan the data available to you:

• Strengths and weakness
• What story can their stats tell
• The description of the monster
• What are the creatures goal

these are all things you can piece together to start drawing a bigger picture.

Now that we have a monster, how do we flesh it out?

using the data and trying to find a monster that will fit the niche we cut out for it. because procedural generation took care of all of the smaller details we can start creating a story around the monster. for this part you might need to get a little creative, you will have to make assumptions that are based on the data that is provided in the stat block and basic descriptions.

Then we just have to ask these questions:

• Where does it live?
• What are its habits?
• What is its temperament?

These few questions start painting the bigger story and the web that connects the creature to your story. Depending on some of the answers, they will give a good idea of where to place your newly found beast of burden.

Closing thoughts, and future posts for Beastlands…

So after going through and making monsters with procedural generation, it becomes apparent how useful and efficient it is to have a generator do the brunt of the work for you. eventually, I would like to also cover more on procedural generation that will cover.