Where to find stats for dire animals?

question
#1

The WIS spell Dire Form in Master edition allows you to “assume the form and STATS” for a dire animal. Are these dire animal stat blocks available somewhere? If not, how would you recommend building them?

Thanks!

#2

there is a little compendium about animals already published in the resources section here

#3

No dire stats that I could find but i did find this thread leading to a DTRPG link

#4

Number 16 in the epic loot table gives some guidance. Dire bear: add a heart and double your bonuses while in this form. That’s a good rule of thumb for any sort of creature you might become.

#5

What if you gave them 2-3 Tags specific to the animal in question, and boost every roll with a d6? A Milestone could increase that die to a d8.

#6

Thanks for all the suggestions! This was a lovely response to a first post. My take away is that it’s less “take some pre-existing STATS” and more “this changes your STATS some way that you’ll figure out”. It does seem a bit odd to me that Dire Bear would give a +3 WIS +0 STR character a substantial improvement to WIS and no improvement to STR.

@Micah369 I like the idea of the player just getting to “assemble” the animal they want with tags and a choice of bonuses (e.g. STR for Bear vs. DEX for Cougar). I’ve been curious about how tags are used in ICRPG in practice. Do tags just get used to provide narrative permission, or would they get mechanically defined in some way? I’m thinking about how I would introduce this to some of my players that appreciate the “safety railings” of 5E spelling out what is and isn’t possible (homebrewing aside).

@capocuoco I did my best rummaging around but couldn’t find anything else about animals on here. Any memories of another keyword I might start from?

#7

A really simple mechanical use of Tags is to make certain rolls EASY. Another is to change Effort types, Claws as a natural WEAPON, etc. Players have to be comfortable pitching ideas (I have the EXPLORER tag, could I use that to find clean drinking water?) GMs have to be comfortable negotiating based on intention rather than strict rules text.

All that to say, yes, your Tags will become mechanical, but I don’t think they have to be at first.

I think the give and take is that players get a lot of freedom, but they have to give up a solid command of the rules.

#8

Tags will become mechanical

That really made it click into place for me, and I think will be great for explaining it to my players.

#9

I think it’s super cool getting to design your own abilities as you go. Not everyone will like it, but to me it’s really fun when players start asking creative questions and coming up with cool uses for their background tags.