Bestiary of the Marches
eleven kinds, what beats them, and what each one means when it turns up
Where this document sits
This document owns
creature kinds, weaknesses, and narrative registers. The Encounter Tables document owns
what appears where, and in what numbers. The Session Generation Instructions own
session structure. Where two documents touch the same creature, each is authoritative only for its own column — take the kind and the weakness from here, the numbers and the terrain from there.
Marked folk sort the world's dangers by kind, because kind predicts what kills them. A villager says "there's a thing in the fen." A hunter asks whether it's carrion-kind or bound, because the answer decides whether to bring fire or salt.
The Eleven Kinds
Beasts
wolves, dire wolves, bears, boars, mountain cats, great elk, owlbears
WeaknessNothing exotic — steel, fire, height, and numbers. They can be driven off, baited away, or fenced out as readily as killed.
RegisterTerritorial, not malicious. A beast contract is usually a symptom: something drove it toward the fields, or something upstream left it nothing else to eat. An owlbear guarding a den is defending, not hunting.
novice: 2d4 wolves · adept: pack + alpha · master: dire cousins, or a beast twisted by proximity to something worse
Carrion-kind
ghouls, fen-drowned, drowned dead, grave hags, rot-things, corpse-eaters
WeaknessFire above all. Running water turns most of them. Consecrated or salted ground holds them off. Removing their food — burying the dead properly — ends an infestation permanently where killing does not.
RegisterThe frontier's residue. A century of retreat left abandoned hamlets, unmarked graves, and battlefields nobody came back for; carrion-kind are what grows there. The most thematically loaded kind in the Marches — where they appear, someone failed to bury someone.
novice: 1d4 ghouls · adept: 2d6 with an alghoul-equivalent leader · master: a grave hag directing a horde
The Bound
wraiths, barrow-wights, revenants, noon-shades, the restless, drowned crews
WeaknessCold iron and salt hold them. Silver bites. But most are only truly ended by resolving what anchors them — a name spoken aloud, a body returned, a debt paid, a crime admitted in public.
RegisterThe haunting is always deserved by someone. A bound thing is a grievance that outlived its holder. Pairs naturally with The Old Failure and The Cheated Bargain — laying one to rest usually means making a village say out loud what it did.
novice: 1 minor shade, avoidable · adept: 1 wight, or 1d4 lesser bound · master: a bound lord with attendants
Fey-kind
nymphs, dryads, small folk, redcaps, hags, courtly fae, spirits of place, pact-guardians
WeaknessCold iron, true names, and the exact terms of a bargain. Most cannot lie outright, cannot cross a threshold uninvited, or cannot refuse a properly offered gift. The specific prohibition varies by individual and is worth learning before the confrontation.
RegisterDangerous, rarely simply evil. Fey act on their own logic consistently — the danger is misunderstanding the rules, not malice. Violence against a spirit of place is usually the worst available option and should be seen to be.
novice: small folk, a single offended spirit · adept: a hag, a redcap band, a dryad with cause · master: a court's envoy, or a guardian bound to an ancient pact
Made-things
animate stone, ward-guardians, sentinels, bound constructs, wardings gone wrong
WeaknessThe binding itself — the locus stone, the maker's mark, the inscribed terms, the thing it was set to guard. Damage rarely stops one; unmaking or satisfying the working always does.
RegisterSomebody made or bound this, which means there is always a responsible party — living, dead, or centuries gone. Ties directly to ancient ruins and the Workings system. A made-thing doing something terrible is usually doing exactly what it was told.
novice: a failing ward, more hazard than foe · adept: a functioning sentinel · master: a working still enforced at full strength
Vermin & Swarms
giant rats, stirges, bats, giant spiders, biting swarms, hive-things
WeaknessFire, smoke, flooding, and finding the nest. Fighting the swarm is losing; destroying the nest is winning.
RegisterAttrition, not menace. Vermin cost torches, rations, and hit points rather than lives. Excellent for making a delve expensive without threatening a wipe. The problem is always the hive, never the individual.
novice: 2d6, avoidable with care · adept: 3d6 plus a brood-mother · master: an established warren, several chambers deep
Ogre-kin
trolls, ettins, hill giants, cyclopes, stone-eaters
WeaknessFire against regenerators. Sunlight for some. But most ogre-kin are slow, literal-minded, and genuinely negotiable — a toll, a meal, or a clearly stated bargain works where a fight would cost the party dearly.
RegisterOften the comedy-adjacent kind, and the most likely to be a misunderstanding. A bridge-troll with a grievance about unpaid tolls is a contract; so is a hill giant that simply doesn't understand it's been eating someone's livestock. Some villages have paid the same troll for generations.
novice: 1 as an obstacle to route around, not fight · adept: 1 engaged directly · master: 2–3, or a giant of real size
The Cursed
werewolves, the marked, the bargained-away, changed children, transformed penitents
WeaknessSilver. But the curse itself always has a specific undoing — a rite, a restitution, a name, an object returned, a wrong confessed — and it is always harder, costlier, and less rewarded than the killing.
RegisterTragedy, and there is almost always a family that knows. Use sparingly; this kind tires fastest if every contract turns out to be a cursed person. When used, the choice between silver and the rite should be the session's hard choice.
novice: one cursed individual, contained or intermittent · adept: fully manifest, hunting · master: a cursed bloodline or a curse spreading beyond one person
Bloodkin
nightfeeders, barrow-drinkers, the pale, and rarer things that pass for people
WeaknessSunlight, invitation-thresholds, running water, and silver to varying degrees by individual. The older and more intelligent, the fewer prohibitions apply and the more precisely they must be learned.
RegisterRare in the Marches — magic is scarce and so are these. Range from mindless feeder up to fully sapient and socially embedded, and the embedded ones are never contract material so much as a situation. When one appears it should be an event, not a monster of the week.
novice: do not use, except as sign or rumor · adept: a lesser feeder · master: an intelligent one with local standing
Wyrm-kin
basilisks, cockatrices, forktails, lesser drakes, fen-serpents
WeaknessGrounding a flyer decides the fight. Mirrors and averted eyes for gaze-killers. Thick hide means the soft places — eye, throat, wing-joint — matter more than raw damage.
RegisterApex predators, straightforwardly dangerous, no hidden depths required. The natural choice when the complication belongs entirely to the human layer and the creature just needs to be genuinely frightening.
novice: sign and aftermath only, or a hatchling · adept: 1 adult · master: 1 great specimen, or a mated pair with a nest
Warbands
goblins, hobgoblin companies, orc bands, bandits, deserters, rival marked crews, a lord's men
WeaknessMorale, supply, and leadership. They rout, negotiate, take hostages, hold grudges, and can be turned against each other. Rarely the hardest fight; frequently the hardest problem.
RegisterNot a monster kind at all — and the actual antagonist more often than any of the ten above. Warbands have reasons, and their reasons are usually the session's complication rather than an obstacle to it. Reaction rolls and morale always apply.
HobgoblinsNever write these as generic raiders. They are the Empire's remnant — standards, ranks, drill, and properly ditched camps maintained by companies of forty starving soldiers and their families. Superb at war, incapable of feeding themselves, which is why they raid and why raiding never fixes anything. See the Setting Overview.
novice: 2d4 with a leader · adept: doubled, screened, with a real commander · master: a company with objectives beyond this village
Using Kind at the Table
| When | What kind gives you |
|---|
| A villager describes something vaguely | The party's job is to work out the kind. Kind is the thing worth investigating for — it's what turns three physical clues into a plan. |
| A party prepares before a hunt | Kind determines what preparation is worth anything: fire and burial for carrion-kind, iron and a name for the bound, terms and a threshold for fey-kind. |
| A generated contract needs a weakness | Take it from the kind's entry rather than inventing one, so weaknesses stay consistent between sessions and players can learn the world's rules. |
| You're improvising a straight monster job | Roll the zone table in the Encounter Tables document, read its kind here, and you have tactics and register in one glance. |
Folk names vary by village and are usually wrong. A "fen-devil" might be carrion-kind in one valley and a bound thing two days' ride away. Getting the kind right is the work.