Merfolk - Dungeons on Automatic Bestiary

Humanoid (Aquatic) · 1 hex · SM +0 Merfolk (Monsters on Automatic; answers SRD 3.5, SRD 5.1)

People from the waist up and something with a tail below, living on reefs and in drowned places, and perfectly willing to talk to a ship that behaves. Merfolk breathe air and water equally well, so negotiations happen at the rail rather than underwater. On land they can drag themselves about, and they hate it.

Attributes

ST11

DX11

IQ10

HT11

HP11

Will10

Per11

FP11

Basic Speed5.5

Basic Move5

Dodge8

DR0

Melee attacks

Usage	Level	Damage	Reach
TridentTrident (12): 1d+2 impaling, Reach 1,2. Held two-handed and driven upward, which is the direction merfolk fight from.	12	1d+2 impaling	1,2
Thrown SpearThrown Spear (12): 1d impaling, Reach Ranged, 15. Thrown through water at short range, where a bow would be useless.	12	1d impaling	Ranged, 15

Traits (5)

Acute Vision 2
Appearance (Attractive)
Doesn't Breathe (Oxygen Absorption) (Oxygen Absorption)
No Legs (Aquatic)
Pressure Support 1

Skills (4)

12Spear
12Thrown Weapon
12Stealth
12Survival

Notes

Racial cost: 73 points of traits plus 14 points of skills.
Body weight: 200 lb.
Movement: ground Move 5; water Move 5 (primary).

Encounter rating

CER15

Offense13

Protection2

Threat tierminor

Appearing6

Wandering3

GCS v5 downloads

Where this one came from

Source record: Merfolk [Monsters on Automatic, SRD coverage: humanoid folk and their sub-races]
Source system: doa_fixture / doa_authored
Released under: cc_by_4_0
Conversion: 0.1.0-srd-independent-build
Review status: approved
Credit: Monster statistics, ratings and description prose by Monsters on Automatic; AI-generated first draft, project-reviewed, released under CC BY 4.0.
Description: Written by Dungeons on Automatic, released under cc_by_4_0

Independently authored GURPS build. The SRD supplies the creature identity this record answers to and nothing else: no SRD statistics, wording or presentation is reproduced, and no third-party GURPS conversion was used as an input.
Answers the SRD heading(s): Merfolk (SRD 5.1); Merfolk (SRD 3.5).
Racial template: 73 points across 9 traits, plus 4 racial skill(s) worth 14 points.
Every trait is drawn from the project's controlled GURPS vocabulary in scripts/srd/trait-library.mjs, which carries the page reference and published cost for each entry.
sourceSystem is recorded as doa_fixture because that is the package contract's value for project-authored material; the SRD headings this record answers are in provenance.coversSourceIdentities.
Ratings are recomputed through the consumer CER path on every build, so a mechanics change cannot leave a stale rating behind.
Typical Stats, damage and ratings are derived from the racial template rather than authored beside it, so the sheet and the stat block cannot disagree.
GCS ancestry draft: gcs/merfolk.gct
The published Move is the primary medium's cruising Move; sprint figures are stated in the movement note and not folded into it.
Treasure and grappling are not authored for this record and ship as explicit nulls, which reads as known absent rather than forgotten; `lair` carries a short habitat note instead, because where a creature dens is an encounter fact rather than a loot one.
Body mass is the figure the build was scaled from and the one fact that makes it checkable; see the gurps-animal-sanity-check skill for the bands.
About 7 feet nose to tail-tip, which reads on the SM 0 row.
ST 11: a swimmer's build, strong through the back and shoulders and no use at all for carrying anything up a beach.
Breathing is built as Doesn't Breathe with the published Oxygen Absorption limitation rather than as Gills. Gills would say a merfolk suffocates in air, and the whole encounter value of the creature is that it does not.
No Legs (Aquatic) prices at zero, as it does for a fish. The ground Move the movement note reports is the builder's floor, not a walk: out of water a merfolk hauls itself along at a fraction of it and should be run that way.

Copyright 2026 Monsters on Automatic. GURPS-compatible monster statistics, ratings and prose authored for this package as an AI-generated first draft under project review. No SRD text, and no third-party GURPS conversion, is reproduced. Portrait and tokens are AI-generated original art. Sources and credits.