Monster characters

• have extremely good innate resistances
  
• can equip cursed gear without being cursed
  
• come with high level spells known
  
• can inflict status effects with their basic attacks
  
• don't need forging on their gear to regenerate HP

But

• only some of the pros actually apply to any one specific monster
  
• you can't spend gold to boost their levels up at the start
  
• you can't choose their extra skills
  
• they are almost all fighters to begin with
  
• if you class change them they will lose all of the pros except the ability to equip cursed items

The process for turning a monster into a character is as follows:

• Cast the summoner spell contract on the desired monster until a contract is successfully made.
  
• Summon the monster.
  
• Have a summoner use the spirit pact skill from the camp screen. It does not necessarily have to be the actual owner of the monster.

At this point, the contract with the monster will be broken and it will become a player character. If there is space it will appear in the party, and otherwise you can pick it up at the tavern.

Using spirit pact spends 1 SP, which you can restore by resting in the suite or royal suite at the inn.

Unfortunately, not everything that a monster had is inherited when you turn it into a character.

The character will keep:

• Appearance
  
• Gender
  
• Alignment, if any
  
• Class, sometimes
  
• Status recovery rate
  
• HP regeneration rate
  
• Spell resistance
  
• Elemental attack and defense attributes
  
• Chance to inflict and resist status effects
  
• Mage, cleric and alchemist spells known

The character will lose:

• Level
  
• HP
  
• Race
  
• Str, int, piety, vit, agi, luck
  
• Ability to use breath weapon
  
• Skills
  
• Monster-specific spells such as nap and lullaby

All in all, the monster will be level 1 with 8 hp and the basic stat spread for its race. Obviously human enemies such as barbarians and fighters will be roughly 10 year old humans, and other monsters will be members of the "devilish" race with ages between 0 and 3.

The character will also have a randomly assigned extra skill and belong to a class determined by what monster it was. This almost always means it will be a fighter.

I already mentioned it, but class changing a monster makes them lose all their inherited stats. They will end up with 15% resistance to all types of magic, 15% resistance to all kinds of status effects and a 30% recovery rate.

Monsters under the age of 5 will lose stats when they level up, similar to characters that are over their race's maximum age. To make your monsters older, let the training master kill them and resurrect them a couple of times. Being revived from death adds one year to your age and being revived from ash adds two.

I don't know! Here are some I've been using:

Golem, from Dezaporlia Tunnel. It has 50% resistance to all elements and magic, 70% resistance to level drain and 100% resistance to behead and petrify and 50% resistance to every other status effect except sleep. This thing never dies.

Red Cap, from the upper floors of Yap Gotz. It comes as a ninja and has an innate +20% chance to behead that stacks with the ninja's boosted beheading rate.

The Mermaid from quest 7 in Guatella Grotto. She regenerates 18 hp per turn and is healed by ice damage, which is great for when you go to the ice cave. She also learns level 2 and 3 alchemist spells and level 6 mage spells.

Something important to keep in mind when looking for monsters to get is summon resistance. When you use the contract spell, the game will generate three random numbers between 1 and 100 and compare them all to the monster's summon resistance (you can see this by having the Dice of Fate in your inventory). If any one of these numbers is lower than the monster's resistance, the spell fails. This means the chances of successfully making contracts with monsters based on their summon resistance are:

30% = 34% chance of success
50% = 12.5% chance of success
60% = 6.4% chance of success
80% = 0.8% chance of success
90% = 0.01% chance of success

I don't know if any stats affect the numbers generated, but I haven't been able to affect summon resistance with the alchemist spell that lowers resistance or the extra skill that nullifies it.