Mundane Beast

Mundane beasts resemble magical creatures, but utterly lack any magical or supernatural abilities. They are the result of failed magical experiments, pervasive antimagic, or random mutation.

None. Mundane beasts appear exactly as normal members of their species. Shapechangers appear in their natural form.

Creating a Mundane Beast

“Mundane beast” is an inherited template that can be applied to any aberration, dragon, or magical beast.

A mundane beast uses all the base creature’s statistics and special abilities except as noted here.

Size and Type: The creature’s type changes to animal. They do not gain the augmented subtype. They lose all subtypes except aquatic or swarm. Base creatures with the water subtype gain the aquatic subtype. Recalculate the creature’s Hit Dice, hit points, base attack bonus, saves, and skills. Size is unchanged.

Speed: A mundane beast’s land and swim speeds are unchanged. If the base creature has wings, fly speed is reduced by ½ and manuverability is reduced by one. If the base creature doesn’t have wings, the mundane beast can’t fly. Burrow speed is reduced by ½.

Armor Class: A mundane beast loses any deflection bonus to armor class, and any bonus based on supernatural abilities, spells, or spell-like abilities.

Special Attacks: A mundane beast loses all psionic, supernatural, and spell-like abilities. It loses any extraordinary ability or attack that inflicts ability damage or drain, acid, cold, electricity, fire, force, or sonic damage, disease, fear, level drain, paralysis, petrification, or relies on magical knowledge or alignment to function. It loses any poison attacks unless it is inflicted via a bite or tail stinger; poison damage is reduced by half (rounded down) unless the base creature has a serpentine or verminous appearance. It loses all breath weapons, gaze attacks, and ranged attacks.

Special Qualities: A mundane beast loses all psionic, supernatural, and spell-like abilities. They lose any extraordinary ability that protects from, utilizes, or grants immunity to ability damage or drain, acid, cold, electricity, fire, force, or sonic damage, fear, level drain, paralysis, petrification, or relies on magical knowledge or alignment to function. They lose all planar travel ability, damage reduction, darkvision, energy resistance and immunities, fast healing, incorporeal status, magic resistance, regeneration, resistance or immunity to spells or magical effects, and ability to change forms.

A mundane beast gains low-light vision if the base creature did not have it already.

Abilities: Reduce Intelligence to 2, or if base creature’s Intelligence is already 2 or lower, leave unchanged.

Skills: A mundane beast loses access to Intelligence-based skills. Recalculate skills and skill points using the mundane beast’s new intelligence and type.

Feats: A mundane beast loses any feats related to metamagic; item creation; spells or spell-like abilities; supernatural abilities; attacks, qualities, and movements it no longer possesses; and Intelligence-based skills.

Environment: If the base creature’s environment is uninhabitable or unreachable due to changes in its qualities, change environment to a more suitable one.

Challenge Rating: Change to ½ Hit Dice, +1 if the mundane beast is unusually strong, tough, or quick for its size.

Treasure: None.

Alignment: Always neutral.

Advancement: As base creature. If the base creature advances by character class, change to advancement by Hit Dice. Maximum Hit Dice is usually triple base Hit Dice. Size changes are usually at double base Hit Dice, subject to the following suggested minimums (Small, minimum Hit Dice ½; Medium, minimum Hit Dice 1; Large, minimum Hit Dice 3; Huge, minimum Hit Dice 6; Gargantuan, minimum Hit Dice 12; Colossal, minimum Hit Dice 24).

Level Adjustment: Mundane beasts aren’t suitable as characters, and do not have a level adjustment.

The example creatures use a gibbering mouther and a young red dragon as the base creatures.

Mindless Mundane Beast Variant

Sometimes a mundane beast regresses even further, and loses all but the most basic of abilities – how to hunt food, seek shelter, and reproduce. A mindless mundane beast, in addition to the changes above, has no Intellence score, loses all skills and feats, and is immune to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects).