What This Page Is
Every living thing in this world has a number, and the number is a sentence. When a party walks into a marsh and sees something the size of a house, the story has to know — and the reader has to feel — that this is a different kind of problem than the goblin that bit their ankle. Scale Anchors is the reference that keeps every stat block honest against the rest of the world, so the numbers stay a sentence and never drift into noise.
The machine-enforced rules — the exact keys, the bounds, the shape of a species range versus a named character's single value — live in the stat system spec. This page is the map: the ladder, the rungs, and the invariants that a writer or a worker checks before a new being is written.
The Tier Ladder
HP has no upper bound. It climbs by tier, and each tier is a different story register:
| tier | band | register | who |
|---|---|---|---|
| T0 | 15–90 | an afterthought | vermin, birds, fish — rats, crows, salmon, toads |
| T1 | 75–550 | a nuisance, then a threat | goblins, kobolds, halflings, humans, aarakocra, centaurs |
| T2 | 300–2,200 | a fight you can win | orcs, elves, dwarves, bugbears, gnolls, chimeras, minotaurs, basilisks (3k–5k) |
| T3 | 4,000–25,000 | a siege | golems (4k–8k), elementals (5k–8k), liches (8k–14k), demons (8k–15k) |
| T3.5 | 30k–80k | an army's worth | angels; elite lines true-flight 60k–90k |
| T4 | 250k–400k | a calamity | krakens, leviathans |
| T5 | 1.5M–2.5M | a nation that flies | the elemental dragons |
| T6 | 150k–250k | a hand with no face | demi-gods — the Nameless God |
| T7 | 100k–1M | the old law | the gods, named single values 750k–950k |
| T8 | 3M–10M | the top of the world | prismatic dragons, the strongest beings in the setting |
Named beings take a single value on their tier. The six of The Company sit at 1,000–2,500. Named gods land at 750k–950k. An elemental dragon like Galeforce sits at two million; the ancients who broke the coast climb past five.
The Invariants
These are the non-negotiables. A stat block that breaks one of them is wrong by construction:
- Prismatic dragons are stronger than every god. T8's floor is above T7's ceiling. Nothing outruns a prismatic, and no number may say otherwise.
- No being has 1000 in all its stats. Even the gods fall short of the ceiling in at least one attribute. The ceiling is a wall, not a home.
- Ranges stay narrow. A species band is a small window around a typical value — 100–120, 8,000–14,000, 20–45 — never 10–1000. If a range is wide, it is describing a category, not a creature.
- Mana scales with tier, not with hope. Beasts carry little or none; angels carry thousands; dragons carry hundreds of thousands; the prismatic and the gods carry more. A goblin with dragon-mana is a mistake.
- F.1b creature lines stay on or above their base race. An elite line may exceed the base band; nothing falls below it.
How to Use It
When a new creature or character is written, find its tier first, then pick the number. The tier comes from what the being is to the party — a nuisance, a fight, a siege, a calamity, a god, a top-of-the-world. The number is the second decision, not the first. If a draft lands a kraken in the goblin band, or a god under a kraken, the tier was never chosen.
For the exact keys, bounds, and the species-versus-character shape rules, see the stat system spec — this ladder is the map, and that spec is the survey.