Alzrius
The EN World kitten
We take it for granted that most monsters in our Pathfinder game will be somewhat intimidating. All too often, however, this is a high as the fear factor gets for a creature. A great red wyrm makes players nervous for the amount of damage it can do to their characters, but nobody looks at the picture and feels a shudder go down their spine, or fights one and then says later “man that dragon was creepy!” In other words, most creatures are intimidating, but not frightening.
That’s something Alluria Publishing aims to rectify with their new Pathfinder monster book, Creepy Creatures: Bestiary of the Bizarre. So let’s take a look at this folio of fright and see what terrors lurk therein.
The book is 115 pages long, containing an impressive one hundred monsters exactly. Bookmarks are present (having been quickly added after the initial release lacked them), and do an excellent job of linking to various sections as well as each individual monster. Every creature has full color artwork, which is absolutely essential for a monster book, and Alluria did a great job finding talented artists to depict their menacing menagerie. Further, all of the pages are set on a slightly off-white background that turns more tanned towards the edges of the page, like parchment. There’s an alternating border in the lower corner that contains the page numbers as well. Unfortunately, no printer-friendly version is to be found here, but that’s a relatively small oversight, all things considered.
Now, what about the monsters themselves? Of course, it’s beyond the scope of this review to cover all of them in detail, but I’ll try to give some concrete overviews.
The monsters range from CRs 1-20, with the majority being in the upper single-digits. As mentioned previously, there are one hundred such monsters here, and the majority concentrate on being fairly gruesome, freakish, or downright creepy creatures. For example, centipede folk are giant centipedes with a human face on the underside of their insectine head. The giant virus is exactly what it sounds like, a germ raised to macroscopic levels, which makes it more alien than most aberrations, as well as a potent spreader of disease. And the eye parasite is like a tiny beholder, save that it’ll dissolve your eyes, lair inside your head, and interchange which of its two tinier eyeballs rest in your sockets while it controls your body’s movements…all while you’re still alive.
Needless to say, a lot of these creatures will (presuming the unspoken but still acknowledged effort on the part of the GM) likely freak your players out pretty well. There are some nasty freaks in here.
Of course, that’s not to say the entire book was a homerun either. There were several monsters that really felt like one-trick ponies to me. The hammertrunk elephant uses its trunk as a bludgeoning tool. Okay, I can live with that. Two variant kinds of gryphons, each one of which changes up what sort of cat and bird make up its component parts? I like the visual, but there’s really nothing that makes them different from a standard gryphon with different flavor text. Monsters like these didn’t seem to pull their metaphorical weight.
I can live with a few duds though, especially since most of the creatures are at least adequate, and usually better than adequate, in their presentation. What I didn’t care for was that I kept finding small errors cropping up. The bone druid, for example, has its spell levels listed from least to greatest, instead of greatest to least. The suncat has the Angel subtype, but none of the mechanical benefits that subtype grants. It’s little things like that that dimmed the book’s luster for me, especially since they could have been easily caught and corrected if the editor had gone back a few more times with a critical eye. Here’s hoping the book will get an errata-based update soon.
The book has a few appendices after all of the monsters have been presented, as well. It briefly summarizes the Remarkable Races that were the subject of Alluria Publishing’s previous works, since several of those get referenced in various monster write-ups. There’s also a set of tables indexing the monsters by CR, type, role, environment, etc. Unfortunately, while I was hoping for some information about what creatures would make good familiars, special mounts, or animal companions for PCs, such information was nowhere to be found (though a few creatures do discuss training them using Handle Animal).
In closing, let me say that if my notations on where the book could have done better are making you hesitate to buy this volume, then I’m doing you a disservice. This bestiary hits far more than it misses, and vast majority of the creatures are inspiring for how they can be used to vex your players. If you want to inject some unsettling species into your Pathfinder game, I heartily recommend giving Creepy Creatures a chance. You won’t regret it, though your players most certainly will.
That’s something Alluria Publishing aims to rectify with their new Pathfinder monster book, Creepy Creatures: Bestiary of the Bizarre. So let’s take a look at this folio of fright and see what terrors lurk therein.
The book is 115 pages long, containing an impressive one hundred monsters exactly. Bookmarks are present (having been quickly added after the initial release lacked them), and do an excellent job of linking to various sections as well as each individual monster. Every creature has full color artwork, which is absolutely essential for a monster book, and Alluria did a great job finding talented artists to depict their menacing menagerie. Further, all of the pages are set on a slightly off-white background that turns more tanned towards the edges of the page, like parchment. There’s an alternating border in the lower corner that contains the page numbers as well. Unfortunately, no printer-friendly version is to be found here, but that’s a relatively small oversight, all things considered.
Now, what about the monsters themselves? Of course, it’s beyond the scope of this review to cover all of them in detail, but I’ll try to give some concrete overviews.
The monsters range from CRs 1-20, with the majority being in the upper single-digits. As mentioned previously, there are one hundred such monsters here, and the majority concentrate on being fairly gruesome, freakish, or downright creepy creatures. For example, centipede folk are giant centipedes with a human face on the underside of their insectine head. The giant virus is exactly what it sounds like, a germ raised to macroscopic levels, which makes it more alien than most aberrations, as well as a potent spreader of disease. And the eye parasite is like a tiny beholder, save that it’ll dissolve your eyes, lair inside your head, and interchange which of its two tinier eyeballs rest in your sockets while it controls your body’s movements…all while you’re still alive.
Needless to say, a lot of these creatures will (presuming the unspoken but still acknowledged effort on the part of the GM) likely freak your players out pretty well. There are some nasty freaks in here.
Of course, that’s not to say the entire book was a homerun either. There were several monsters that really felt like one-trick ponies to me. The hammertrunk elephant uses its trunk as a bludgeoning tool. Okay, I can live with that. Two variant kinds of gryphons, each one of which changes up what sort of cat and bird make up its component parts? I like the visual, but there’s really nothing that makes them different from a standard gryphon with different flavor text. Monsters like these didn’t seem to pull their metaphorical weight.
I can live with a few duds though, especially since most of the creatures are at least adequate, and usually better than adequate, in their presentation. What I didn’t care for was that I kept finding small errors cropping up. The bone druid, for example, has its spell levels listed from least to greatest, instead of greatest to least. The suncat has the Angel subtype, but none of the mechanical benefits that subtype grants. It’s little things like that that dimmed the book’s luster for me, especially since they could have been easily caught and corrected if the editor had gone back a few more times with a critical eye. Here’s hoping the book will get an errata-based update soon.
The book has a few appendices after all of the monsters have been presented, as well. It briefly summarizes the Remarkable Races that were the subject of Alluria Publishing’s previous works, since several of those get referenced in various monster write-ups. There’s also a set of tables indexing the monsters by CR, type, role, environment, etc. Unfortunately, while I was hoping for some information about what creatures would make good familiars, special mounts, or animal companions for PCs, such information was nowhere to be found (though a few creatures do discuss training them using Handle Animal).
In closing, let me say that if my notations on where the book could have done better are making you hesitate to buy this volume, then I’m doing you a disservice. This bestiary hits far more than it misses, and vast majority of the creatures are inspiring for how they can be used to vex your players. If you want to inject some unsettling species into your Pathfinder game, I heartily recommend giving Creepy Creatures a chance. You won’t regret it, though your players most certainly will.
