We’re starting a new blog series today: the Sigil Bestiary! In each blog post, we’ll show you one (or two if we’re feeling fancy) enemies/opponents/monsters that you can encounter and overcome in the Sigil System. All in all there are a 100 entries in the Sigil Bestiary, and once this blog series is done, we’ll compile them all into a mod for the Sigil System and release it as a snazzy-looking pdf.
Bestiary Stats
Each opponent in the Bestiary will come with four Skills, one Perk, one Quirk, a set number of Wounds and then some Equipment. The four Skills condense the twenty regular Sigil System Skills into something easier to manage for the GM, especially when dealing with many NPCs. Each Bestiary Skill can be thought of as a Skill Group, and anytime you’d roll for a Skill within that group, you just roll the Bestiary Skill instead. Here’s how the Bestiary Skills and Sigil System Skills match up:
| Combat | Explore | Social | Mental |
| Fight | Perception | Deceive | Logic |
| Shoot | Investigate | Diplomacy | Will |
| Athletics | Stealth | Intimidate | Special |
| Constitution | Drive | Intuition | Fine-Craft |
| Might | Burglary | Wealth | Broad-Craft |
Opponents in the Bestiary also don’t have Hit Locations unless the GM wants to make combat deadlier and more formidable for the players. Unless stated otherwise, treat each opponent as just having one Hit Location for their entire body.
The brutish Orcs
So with that out of the way, the first opponent to show off to you is the Orc, that quintessential RPG enemy. Orcs are the antithesis of all that is good about humanity. They are brutish, savage creature that love nothing more than death and destruction. The only things they manage to create is misery and fear, and so it is up to eliminate the hordes of Orcs from the face of the world.
| Combat | 60 | Social | 25 |
| Explore | 50 | Mental | 25 |
| P. Wounds | 4 | M. Wounds | 2 |
Perk: Cannibal: The Orc can eat the flesh of another sentient creature to heal a Wound of equal or lesser severity as the amount of flesh consumed.
Quirk: Rage: In combat, the Orc must use his whole turn to attack the closest enemy or to move towards the closest enemy, unless the GM spends a Sigil each turn.
Equipment: In terms of equipment, Orcs come with scavenged, ill-fitting, and ill-maintained armour granting them an armour value of only 5. For weapons, Orcs come in three varieties. You can have him wielding only a two-handed Heavy Melee Weapon (-30 to hit, but +15 damage); a one-handed Medium Melee Weapon (-20 to hit, +10 damage) and a shield worth 15 armour; or a Medium Ranged Weapon with Medium damage (+10) and a light Melee Weapon (-10 to hit, +5 damage).
Sanctuary: An orc’s sanctuary is in the wilderness far from the light of civilisation, where the beast’s evil can fester and spread: When in his sanctuary, the GM may spend a Sigil per orc to give each a free turn before combat initiative starts. Also, at the start of each new round roll a d100; if under 10 twice that many orc reinforcements join the encounter. Lastly, while in the Sanctuary, the Rage Quirk does not apply to cannibalising corpses.
And there you have it, the Orc is all his murderous and evil glory. In the next blog post we’ll show something a little calmer, and not fit merely for a combat encounter.