Alien Archives's missing mechanics?

**Treviron Riaxx** · February 11th, 2018, 04:09

Was disapointed to see that the archive was basicly just a list and tokens. Was hoping the npc/monster generator in the book would also be part of it.

Is it planned to be added eventually, or is it just a plain monster statblock/list/token/pics.

**Muagen** · February 11th, 2018, 11:57

One of the bullet points on the Steam Store page:

A robust NPC-creation system to let Game Masters build any aliens or creatures they can imagine.

I think the intent is to have one operational, but there seem to be a lot of early bugs to squash in the ruleset at-large, right now. I expect that as the kinks get worked out everything will start working as intended.

And then 3.3.5 will come around and throw a monkey wrench back in the gears. :P

**Treviron Riaxx** · February 11th, 2018, 17:32

That's just taken directly from the book.

**Muagen** · February 11th, 2018, 18:34

Originally Posted by Treviron Riaxx

That's just taken directly from the book.

So... this isn't a generator that's going to make it into the module?

**Treviron Riaxx** · February 11th, 2018, 18:46

The features are just copy pastes of the back of the books, so if they are going to include one good. If not then they should be more careful on their copy pasting.

**thebwt** · February 11th, 2018, 19:23

I've not seen an indication of a monster creator like advanced bestiary for PFRPG was ever planned. That said, if they made a specialized module for it similar to harrow deck I'd pay for that. They'd need to then itemize all the grafts in the current alien archive and future ones, since that's the cruft of the content.

**Treviron Riaxx** · February 11th, 2018, 19:26

Just feels overpriced if their not adding what made Alien Archives worth buying as a book. Because right now it's just the pdf with tokens that's made to work with the core mechanics.

**ddavison** · February 12th, 2018, 01:33

Don't forget that it also includes tokens for the modules without having to also buy the Pawn box. The Pawn Box PDF is $24.99 in PDF form all by itself.

**ddavison** · February 12th, 2018, 01:39

Originally Posted by thebwt

I've not seen an indication of a monster creator like advanced bestiary for PFRPG was ever planned. That said, if they made a specialized module for it similar to harrow deck I'd pay for that. They'd need to then itemize all the grafts in the current alien archive and future ones, since that's the cruft of the content.

Speaking from our experience with the Advanced Bestiary, the amount of development time spent on that set of features wasn't really a good investment and the number of possible permutations made it complex very fast. Even with the amount of time and effort spent, there were numerous edge cases that couldn't be directly handled. RPGs rules are not normally written by techie people with an eye towards automation. For that reason, we try to steer clear of any promises of new functional components. I'm sure we will evaluate it at a later date and we might even be able to add some cool new features based on it... but it's not anywhere on our short term list.

**Treviron Riaxx** · February 13th, 2018, 23:12

I mostly want Drag and drop templates AKA Racial Grafts and Monster Grafts... was really hoping for that support as it would make customizing the Creatures or making new creatures a bit easier. Just that would of made me very happy.

And creating hybrid races a bit easier... and optional.

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