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Monster Parts

RULE

Battlezoo Bestiary > Monster Parts

As the creature leapt from the tree, I called upon my tokens to put up a barrier between us, but it decided to spew fire at me instead. Ah, how fortunate! I recently imbued my clothing to resist any harm from fire. Not only did that mean the blast barely singed me as I ducked to the side, it also meant once I killed the thing that I could use its parts to increase that imbuing even further! The only way this could possibly get better was if it knew some useful fire spells too...

—Zara, Monster Mage

The Monster Parts system allows PCs to upgrade weapons and armor using pieces from foes they defeat. It is a perfect fit for adventures that take place far from civilization, where the PCs need to scrounge and forage for all the gear they need. However, the aesthetics of using the parts of defeated monsters to improve and customize gear can be exciting and rewarding for PCs in all sorts of campaigns. Monster parts can replace some or even all of the standard rewards that PCs would receive, depending upon what works best for your group.

With this system, PCs can gather parts from monsters they defeat and use them to upgrade weapons, armor, and even skill items. The upgrades come in two major types—refinement improves the fundamental abilities of the item, and imbuing adds increasingly powerful special properties, which can sometimes branch along multiple paths. As weapons and armor become more refined, they can eventually be imbued multiple times, becoming truly fearsome armaments. In order to achieve these upgrades, the PCs need to defeat monsters with parts that meet the requirements for the refinement or imbuing.

If you’re a player, your next step is to check out the Quick Start Guide for PCs on the next two pages, which will let you know what you need to do to use the new system. In the end it’s pretty simple: you kill monsters and use their parts to first create and then upgrade your weapons, armor, and gear, but as with all new things, it can take a little while to get used to the new way of handling treasure.

Next, you might want to check out some of the benefits you can gain on your items by refining or imbuing them, so you can start planning the paths you’ll take and potentially aiming to kill specific types of monsters that provide the parts you’ll need.

You can enhance your game further with the backgrounds, items, and especially the innovative archetypes at the end of the chapter, which allow a character to learn spells and special abilities from the monsters they defeat in battle.

If you’re a GM, you can start instead with the Quick Start Guide for GMs on page 128. You’ll need to make a few quick decisions on how you want to use the new system, which you can figure out together with the group.

Don’t worry, all the math and extra work has been calculated for you, so once you know what you want to do, you’ll find a comprehensive set of tables that do the work for you when it comes to figuring out how much value of monster parts to give the PCs so that they can create awesome new items out of monster parts. If you’re midway through your campaign and want to convert midstream, there’s also advice for how to swap over to the new system quickly and easily with the minimum amount of friction and time spent updating characters, so you can get right to the action.

There are even extra sidebars throughout the section with all sorts of additional tweaks and tips, as well as ways to combine these rules with other variants like automatic bonus progression and relics. The only limit is your own imagination!

Quick Start Guide for PCs

If your character is using the Monster Parts system from this book, you can use the following steps to create awesome items for yourself and your teammates out of monster parts.

Step 1: Slay Monsters

This part works like normal. Normally, you need to kill monsters before you can harvest their parts, though if your group is more peaceful, you might be able to find monster parts as quest rewards, or even unlock the powerful magical effects of monster parts freely given.

Step 2: Gather Ingredients

Next, you gather ingredients from the monsters you defeated. The GM will tell you how much value the monster parts have, as well as their Bulk. To prevent you from having to carry a lot of materials and keep track of them all, you might want to consider using them right away, but if not, you can hold onto them as long as you want. For more information, see Gathering Ingredients on page 132. If you have plenty of downtime, you can try to get more total value of monster parts from a monster’s corpse. For more information, see Gathering More From Monsters on page 135.

Step 3: Refine Item

Refining an item with monster parts is the first step towards creating an awesome custom item with the parts you’ve found. During this step, you can either create the base mundane item from scratch by providing monster parts equal to its Price, or you can start with an existing mundane item. Once you’ve chosen the item, refine it to make it more powerful, using as many monster parts as you like, as long as they meet the item’s refining requirements. For instance, you can refine a sword out of parts from a monster that had slashing or piercing unarmed attacks. As you reach certain threshold values while refining, your item will level up, increasing its item level and potentially gaining more benefits. You can’t refine an item higher than your own level. For more information, see Refining on page 136, and for an example, see Example of Refining on page 141.