Arrays and Grafts - Monsters for GMing Starfinder

 The Alien Archive is the initial "monster book" for Starfinder. But if you compare this with D&D's Monster Manual, it's rather thin - both literally and in terms of content. Each two-page spread tends to have a creature or two under a certain theme (such as two examples of Reptoids or two Drow statblocks) but there are some real gaps. There's a grand total of one devil presented in the book, and no demons or daemons (what in D&D would come to be called Yugoloths,) which is a super-high CR that would likely serve as an endgame threat (it's a colossal - which is bigger than gargantuan - devil that can transform into a starship).

However, if you go to the back of the book, there's a section on how to create your own monsters. I've only scratched the surface of this, but it does seem a super-useful tool when you need some quick stat blocks.

The book presents you with three arrays for each challenge rating starting at 1/3 and going up to 25. These arrays are combatants, experts, and spellcasters. Combatants are going to be major physical threats, attacking with weapons and other sorts of attacks. Experts are going to be more skill focused, and might be more of a challenge to deal with outside of combat (though they do have combat stats) while Spellcasters are, well, spellcasters.

Again, I've only scratched the surface, the charts here give you the fundamental basics of how to use them in the game - you get HP, AC (both of the KAC and EAC varieties,) saving throw bonuses, attack bonuses, and attack damage (usually with some harder-hitting major attack and a less powerful alternative).

What this made me realize is that if my party winds up going into a sketchy bar to try to meet some source who can, say, tell them about the guy who's been selling hacked cybernetic implants that take over the host's body and turn them into assassins (basically the plot of a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episode) and the local gang isn't too happy about people asking questions and tries to kill the party for putting their noses where they don't belong, I can just flip to the back of the Alien Archive and grab an appropriate CR array to give the party a decent fight.

Now, the arrays aren't everything. There are also several "grafts" that you can add to them. To a large extent, this will just give the creatures racial features - so for example, if that thug trying to shoot your technomancer is a Lashunta, you can give them that species' limited telepathy.

Grafts go pretty far and wide - it also includes things like creature type, so you can make Archons or Devils or Undead that conform to these arrays, gaining the natural features of a being like that (for example, your undead monster isn't going to worry about breathing.)

There are also grafts to apply various class features. This I'm a little hesitant to use, as I think generally class mechanics are more complicated than monster mechanics should be - a player only has one PC to control while a GM has all the NPCs.

Still, I think getting used to picking up these arrays on the fly could be very helpful for running the game. I'm super excited to try the system out and start telling space opera stories.