Pathfinder BESTIARY 5 Is Coming!

The fifth hardcover monster book for the Pathfinder RPG is set to hit shelves in next month. 300 new monsters, a bunch of player races, psychic critters, templates, and more. The new races include caligni dark folk, deep one hybrids, plant-bodied ghorans, and simian orang-pendaks. Paizo are holding an elimination contest to reveal previews of a bunch of monsters.

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The elimination contest involves simply voting for the critter you want to see via a series of poll questions.

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[Jiggawatts]

Monsters are one of the few things you can rarely have enough of.

 

[DaveMage]

Monsters are one of the few things you can rarely have enough of.

Yeah - the more the better because I like monsters my *very experienced* players have never seen before.

 

[EthanSental]

So these cool monsters weren't cool enough for the first 4 books but are now? After about 3, the stuff that comes out in 4 & 5 are 90% junk I never use or used in th case of the 3.0/3.5 beastaries from WoTC. Even if I still played PF, I'd skip this book.

DaveMage bring ups a good point, player knowledge of these would be non existent but how many will we actually use that fit a campaign setting?

 

[PurpleDragonKnight]

Awesome. I don't play Pathfinder, but always love me a monster book to flip through and steal from, and convert, etc Oh, and the PF Bestiaries are VG. In fact, I need to get more of them

You gotta get a hold of their recent "Occult Bestiary". It's pure genius.

Edit: I heard some of the 'occult' stuff they couldn't fit into the "Occult Bestiary" went into Bestiary 5... so I can't wait for that one, based on what I've seen so far (I don't allow my players to pick classes from the Occult Adventures book, but I just can't pass on those monsters... it's no longer just about damage: e.g. monsters that hit you and if you fail a save you lose complete memory of the round that just went by... it's far out stuff, and I'm gonna have a blast DMing these things... )

 

[Barachiel]

Absolutely true - if you think of every monster in every book as coexisting in a setting. But if you took a fistful of monsters from each book and hung your campaign's story on them (with or without designing a whole new setting), you might paradoxically get more bang for your buck.

Not that I'm here to defend Pathfinder's content model - as it happens I think that 5e's slow rollout of content is perfect.

Perfect? In terms of game mechanics, I agree. Let that be a slow crawl.

In terms of campaign material, not perfect. In fact, completely underwhelming. Worse than 4E (at least they had Dragon Magazine to add campaign material). I prefer the 2nd Edition speed of campaign material release (and size).

 

[Barachiel]

Does every Pathfinder Bestiary have 300 monsters? If so, that means that they've come out with 1,500 monsters for Pathfinder (and I'm sure there are other monsters in products besides the Bestiaries. That's a crazy large amount of monsters.

Much more than that if you count the Adventure Path and Campaign Setting monsters, also. (few of these make it into the Bestiaries but not all of them).

 

[Marshall Gatten]

That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.

So these cool monsters weren't cool enough for the first 4 books but are now?

You'd have a valid point if they started with a huge pile of monsters and picked the best to go into a book, and then pick the best of the remaining to put i a second book, and so on. But that's not the way the real world works.

According to your logic, there's no point in reading anything but an author's first novel because they'd clearly write their best stuff first. No need to see a director's second film.

I'd be very surprised if more than one or two of these monsters were conceived of and written up in a form ready for publishing when the first couple Bestiaries came out. Authors come up with new ideas. That's how writing works.

 

[EthanSental]

we've known that the first monster manual/bestiary left things on the cutting room floor due to space then obviously some weren't cool enough for the first book.... And it continues on. So for book 2, we have the monsters that didn't make it in book 1, plus new creatures. So some don't make the cut again, get pushed to book 3 to go with new creations. This is what I'm referring to.

In paizos case, we get monsters in the adventure paths, and I haven't really looked but how many monsters in the later beastiaries were first printed in the APs? I understand consolidating these if this is the case. Maybe after playing PF for 5+ years and getting burned out after the crappy mythic rules in the Wrath soured me on books "I think" aren't worth my time but even as I mentioned, even the WoTC monster manuals in 3/3.5 edition past the 3rd manual stunk and I didn't find them useful enough to warrant purchase - others may think otherwise and make the purchase. No worries just not worth it to me.

 

[Jhaelen]

Considering there's a five-digit number of monsters that have been designed for D&D in previous editions, 1500 monsters doesn't strike me as 'too many'.
Especially, since I tend to populate my campaign settings using only a subset of monsters, i.e. I pick 200 or 300 that I like and that fit in best, and the rest simply doesn't exist.

 

[ExoKnight]

I love monster books for any D&D edition. I thought the first four PF Bestiaries were well done and I have no doubt B5 will be top quality.