Spells

Your creature might have magical abilities that are best represented by spells. If you're making a highly spellcastingthemed creature, give it prepared or spontaneous spells. For a creature that has spells due to its magical nature, especially if that magic isn't its core focus, consider giving it some innate spells instead. How many spells you should give a creature depends on how you expect it to spend its actions in combat. If it's primarily going to be making Strikes, it might not have any spells, or it might just have a few to help it move around better or protect against certain types of magic. When choosing spells, lean hard into the creature's theme. While many PCs choose spells to cover a wide variety of situations, creatures are more evocative the more focused they are. Consider selecting about three-quarters of the spells based on relevance to the theme and the remainder for other things. However, make sure the spells aren't all the same—selecting instant virus for most of a creature's spell slots doesn't make for a compelling disease-themed creature in the way a diverse selection of disease spells would. When choosing spells, some won't be very useful if cast at an extremely low rank compared to the creature's level. Most notably, damaging spells drop off in usefulness for a creature that's expected to last only a single fight. A damaging spell 2 ranks below the highest rank a creature of that level can cast is still potentially useful, but beyond that, don't bother. Spells that have the incapacitation trait should be in the highest spell slot if you want the creature to potentially get their full effect against PCs.