Jester David
Hero
It's really a different monster though, albeit one that shares the name. Bestiary 4 was the one with Carrion Crown reporting monster book.
Pathfinder 1E Bestiary 5 - flavour fail
Nightfall
Sage of the Scarred Lands
It's not a different monster Jester. It's pretty much the same monster reskinned, given better art, and then updated the Lesser Death from a Minor Death.
I know they reused Star Spawn of Cthulhu, but that's the only one that kind of needed to pages to use the creature's picture correctly. They didn't need to with say, Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, which is pretty much lifted from Carrion Hill.
I know they reused Star Spawn of Cthulhu, but that's the only one that kind of needed to pages to use the creature's picture correctly. They didn't need to with say, Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, which is pretty much lifted from Carrion Hill.
James Jacobs
Adventurer
Our hardcover Bestiaries are not the place to go to soak in the flavor text. We DO try to put as much flavor text as we can in there, because flavor text is one of the things that makes monsters interesting and memorable, but since the Bestiaries are world neutral and we don't actually include Golarion proper nouns or world content in them (yet at the same time need to make sure what flavor text we DO put in there works 100% with Golarion), it's often tricky to get flavor text in there at all. For complex monsters, we do try to get them onto two page entries, but the layout is tricky, and sometimes that means not much room at all for flavor text. The dragons are my least favorite example of this—I really REALLY wish we had more room to talk about them there.
That all said, the monsters folks are mentioning here ARE picked up from the Adventure Path, and there they do have a lot more flavor text. The crone queen, for example, is a really important monster to the plot of Reign of Winter, and they've got lots more information about them in there.
(You could even argue that her abbreviated flavor text helps to preserve potential spoilers for Reign of Winter, although that's more of a side effect rather than a goal.)
In the end, the primary goal of a hardcover Bestiary entry is to provide the rules for using the monster, and to also give us stats we can reference in our own adventures with short stat blocks rather than reprinting an entire thing. Due to that, when it comes to copy-fitting text, the flavor text is almost always the first to go when we're trying to fit things on a page. When I'm doing this, I often try all sorts of tricks to earn a few extra lines of room for the flavor text, including picking spells and feats with fewer letters so that they take up less room in the stats, but I've increasingly not been involved in the development of the Bestiaries as my job duties have me doing other things...
That said, it's good to hear feedback from folks on both sides of the fence here so that we can continue to work toward making our Bestiaries as excellent as possible.
That all said, the monsters folks are mentioning here ARE picked up from the Adventure Path, and there they do have a lot more flavor text. The crone queen, for example, is a really important monster to the plot of Reign of Winter, and they've got lots more information about them in there.
(You could even argue that her abbreviated flavor text helps to preserve potential spoilers for Reign of Winter, although that's more of a side effect rather than a goal.)
In the end, the primary goal of a hardcover Bestiary entry is to provide the rules for using the monster, and to also give us stats we can reference in our own adventures with short stat blocks rather than reprinting an entire thing. Due to that, when it comes to copy-fitting text, the flavor text is almost always the first to go when we're trying to fit things on a page. When I'm doing this, I often try all sorts of tricks to earn a few extra lines of room for the flavor text, including picking spells and feats with fewer letters so that they take up less room in the stats, but I've increasingly not been involved in the development of the Bestiaries as my job duties have me doing other things...
That said, it's good to hear feedback from folks on both sides of the fence here so that we can continue to work toward making our Bestiaries as excellent as possible.
James Jacobs
Adventurer
My thing about Bestiaries, they help get my players on the same page, especially those that don't subscribe to the Adventure Paths. Plus, some times the artwork comes out better!
*hands James Jacobs a Winter Solstice Cookie*
COOKIE!
And yeah... turns out that having two chances to illustrate a creature means twice the chances the art will come out better (AKA: we don't order new pictures for monsters whose art came out right the first time).
Jester David
Hero
To be irreverent for a second, this is a little like "Thanks for buying our $45 book. Please buy a $20 book to use that content."
The thing is... I do buy some adventure paths. I buy them for the adventures. The monsters are a nice touch, but I don't buy a 96+ AP for 6-pages of monster content. I buy a monster book for monsters. If the monster book does not contain everything I need to make use of the monsters then that book is incomplete. And if I have the AP, then I don't need it in the Bestiary to begin with! It's great if the AP has more lore but a Bestiary product still has to have a usable amount of lore or the space is wasted.
This has always been an issue and the Bestiaries have always walked a fine line between lore and everything else, but this one was worse. The absences particularly noteworthy. Some of that is the increased number of monsters with one-line descriptions (even omitting golems and dragons there are more in B5), some of it is the monsters that can't rely on 40 years of game history to carry the monster.
When Bestiary 1 gives a red dragon a sentence it's not a big deal as a player might have a half-dozen books to extrapolate and years of lore. When a book gives us a dream and nightmare dragon, we need more to go on since there's nothing filling in that gap.
Lore makes monsters usable. Paizo's iconic monster is the goblin. Which is pretty plain and boring in terms of stats. "Run of the mill and generic" would be a nice description of the goblin's abilities. But the lore and story and personality are what make me want to use them in every game.
James Jacobs
Adventurer
AKA: Help James get his paycheck? I'm okay with that! ;-)
For what it's worth, I do agree that the flavor text in Bestiary 5 took a pretty strong hit, and it's something I'll be doing what I can to make sure isn't a problem in the future. No promises, but yeah... there are ALWAYS ways to shorten the rules to make more room for flavor text, and in a lot of cases, even a few extra lines of flavor text, or having that flavor text be particularly well-written, can make a lot of difference. I do feel like Bestiary 5 skewed a bit too hard on the "rules are in charge and flavor text is extra" side of things, but I'm going to try to use my influence to swing that in the other direction as best I can going forward, for what that's worth. But yeah, basically you're seeing the difference in Bestiary 5's flavor text between my own design goals/philosophies and the design team's, I guess, which is to make sure the monster's rules are served. Which isn't by any means the WRONG choice. It's just a different one than I would have made in most cases, is all.
That all said... the fact that our goblins have become so iconic isn't because of the flavor text in the Bestiary—it's because of how they were presented in our first AP adventure, "Burnt Offerings," and beyond that on other products like "Classic Monsters Revisited" and "Goblins of Golarion," which only further suggests that folks eager to learn more about our flavor text DO need to spend more money. If we do our jobs right, the spending of money is something folks do because they want to, not because they feel they have to, of course...
Jester David
Hero
There's probably lots of room for a Dragons of Golarion book giving each of the 15 dragons a 4 pages of extra flavour.
While I don't disagree with James/Paizo making money, if they produce products gamers don't value, they won't make much money, will they? I suspect that is why James is following this thread - what people like, and what they don't like, is incredibly valuable intel from a marketing perspective.
As monsters become more complex, maybe the "two page limit" needs to be sacrificed, rather than just presenting a stat block. In addition to, perhaps even more than, flavour text, I like to see tactical information for the monster. So many, especially those with a wide array of abilities, are far less powerful than they should be if the GM does not grasp the synergies of their abilities. Unfortunately, the more abilities (and the more complex they are), the less space is left for tactics, flavour text, etc. AND the more relevant that tactical information is.
Especially where flavour text, etc. is cut for space reasons (ie the work to create it has already been done), maybe it could be made available online in some form. It's a value adder and, while I would not likely want to pay a writer to prepare add-ons for the book (costs for no extra revenue), if the work is already done it seems a shame to toss it - and if it persuades a few more people to buy the book, it may be revenues greater than the incremental cost of putting it online.
As monsters become more complex, maybe the "two page limit" needs to be sacrificed, rather than just presenting a stat block. In addition to, perhaps even more than, flavour text, I like to see tactical information for the monster. So many, especially those with a wide array of abilities, are far less powerful than they should be if the GM does not grasp the synergies of their abilities. Unfortunately, the more abilities (and the more complex they are), the less space is left for tactics, flavour text, etc. AND the more relevant that tactical information is.
Especially where flavour text, etc. is cut for space reasons (ie the work to create it has already been done), maybe it could be made available online in some form. It's a value adder and, while I would not likely want to pay a writer to prepare add-ons for the book (costs for no extra revenue), if the work is already done it seems a shame to toss it - and if it persuades a few more people to buy the book, it may be revenues greater than the incremental cost of putting it online.
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