PCs aren’t the only ones who can carry the stain of corruption on their souls. However, the corruption rules were designed with PCs in mind, so they include numerous choices and progress over time. For a creature that appears in a single encounter, it makes more sense to grant it a simple package of abilities that captures the feel of the corruption. This allows you to create all sorts of custom monsters on the fly, inspired by the themes of the corruptions. Looking for a mount for a ghoul NPC? Add the ghoulish creature simple template to a horse (or other mount of your choice), and you’re good to go!

Corruption simple templates function the same way as other simple templates. All simple templates have two categories of changes. The quick rules present a faster way to modify a creature’s abilities without actually changing the creature’s ability scores and propagating those changes.

The rebuild rules list the exact changes to make to the base creature’s abilities, including ability scores, if you have the capacity to completely rebuild it. These two methods result in creatures with similar abilities (though the quick rules will be missing some of the more obscure interactions of increasing an ability score). Some of these simple templates (lich creature, lycanthropic creature, and vampiric creature) are simplified versions of lengthier templates. A hellbound creature has the weakness of a devilbound creature, and a hive creature has the hive subtype.

Abilities from these longer templates or the hive subtype are denoted with an asterisk (*). The simple template indicates any differences to the original template’s abilities.