Neuroglyph
First Post
One of the great things about my job as reviewer for EN World is a constant exposure to new RPG systems and supplements. And over the past year, there has been increasing notice of a new fantasy role-playing game system, called AGE for Adventure Gaming Engine, developed for the Dragon Age RPG, 
adapted, of course, from the hugely popular video game series. An ENnie nominee for the Best Game and Product of the Year in 2010, the AGE system is developing a strong following among fantasy role-players looking for an alternative to the “edition wars”, offering a darker role-playing experience than offered in other systems.
Not surprisingly, the makers of Kobold Quarterly, known as the “Switzerland of the Edition Wars”, have opted to take on developing articles and products for the AGE system, alongside D&D 4E and Pathfinder. This past summer, Open Design gathered a collection of monsters and NPCs published over the past five years for its Midgard world setting, and retooled them for use with the AGE system. The result is a “monster manual” of 50 creatures, ranging from iconic fantasy to the bizarre, ready for use by AGE game masters in developing their adventures – the Midgard Bestiary!
Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1)
Production Quality
The production quality of the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) is very good, with a layout that has each creature on its own page, complete with stat block, flavor text, description, and an illustration. The writing is solid, with the flavor text being a descriptive narrative of what the entity looks like, followed by more detailed description about its origins, habitat, and battle tactics.
The Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) has both a table of contents and PDF bookmarks, which makes navigation through the supplement easier to handle, and the monsters are listed in alphabetical order as well throughout the book. The author claims that the monsters presented offer challenges for many levels of play, including for characters over 10th level.
Disappointingly, the book does not offer any sort of index or appendices which ranks the monsters by their threat level or by some other measure to allow a game master to know how dangerous it is to a party of adventurers. While monsters in any game system, including AGE, are scalable to meet different levels of heroes, an appendix of relative threat is almost essential for any monster manual in order for it to be really useful for a GM. In this case, without a guide, each monster has to be read thoroughly, and assessed by each game master as to whether their heroes are up to the challenge of defeating it.
The illustrations in the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) are very nicely rendered, and range from black-and-white sketches to full-color illustrations. Adding an illustration to each monster entry insures that the game master can truly appreciate a creature’s appearance, and certainly helps to inspire how it is used in an adventure.
The Monsters
The Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) contains a wide range of monsters, from beasts (bone crab) and aberrations (cavelight moss), to undead (putrid haunt) and humanoids (merrow). Among them are iconic fantasy monsters, such as a cave dragon and gypsosphinx, as well as a very creepy eye golem, and a gilded devil from the Hells.
Gamers familiar with the Midgard Campaign Setting know that clockwork monsters fill a significant role in that world’s long history, and the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) has several of these magical-mechanical creatures re-envisioned for the AGE system, including the clockwork hound, clockwork myrmidon, fellforged, steam golem, weaving spider, and Zobeck Legionnaire.
There are also a number of entries of creatures which are unique to the Midgard setting, representing creatures and NPCs from the various lands of the world. Of course, these monsters could easily be adapted to other campaign settings with a simple “re-skinning” of name and nature. Examples of these creatures include the Arbonesse Exile, Bemmean Wizard, Free Canton Seigebreaker, Imperial Ghoul, and the Neimheim Enchanter. I suspect many AGE game masters will likely find their inclusion quite useful in adventure design, regardless of what setting they are using.
Some of my favorite creatures from the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) were actually variations on classic D&D monsters. One such was the Derro Fetal Savant, an psychically powered and deranged infant of this hybrid race, that is carried like a battle standard into combat to attack the derro’s enemies. The goblin shark is a nasty aquatic predator, which has a were-form as a goblin for sorties against land-lubbers. And no Open Design bestiary would be complete without a reference to kobolds, with the kobold slyblade making an appearance as underworld goons on the streets of Zobeck.
For the most part, monsters have been given a nice array of powers to use during an encounter, and in the case of a few creatures, a Mana pool with an list of spells to use as part of its arsenal. Nearly all the creatures have one or two (or sometimes more) Stunt Powers to use, with the SP cost listed as part of the power description. While I liked many of the Stunt Powers, and thought many were well-designed to make battling the creature a unique experience, I found that having the SP cost mixed into the power description to be a bit disorganized, and a more uniform method of describing powers and stunts would definitely help make the game master’s job a lot easier when running a variety of monsters.
Overall Score: 3.75 out of 5.0
Conclusions
Open Design’s Midgard Bestiary Volume 1 is a pretty nifty supplement for the AGE system, and offers game masters a broad array of new monsters and creatures to add to their Dragon Age role-playing game. While some of the monsters are designed for the Midgard Campaign setting, and are not necessarily a fit with the DARPG world setting, many of these monsters are readily adaptable, and capable of being “re-skinned” to make them work on almost any medieval fantasy world. With excellent writing by the author describing a host of fascinating creatures, and a PDF is priced very well to make it fit into almost any gamers’ budget, it is easy to recommend this product to any AGE game master looking for new challenges to let loose upon their heroes!
(And by the way, 4E and Pathfinder DMs might find a few worthwhile beasties worth converting over in this supplement as well!)
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Author’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the PDF from which the review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
adapted, of course, from the hugely popular video game series. An ENnie nominee for the Best Game and Product of the Year in 2010, the AGE system is developing a strong following among fantasy role-players looking for an alternative to the “edition wars”, offering a darker role-playing experience than offered in other systems.Not surprisingly, the makers of Kobold Quarterly, known as the “Switzerland of the Edition Wars”, have opted to take on developing articles and products for the AGE system, alongside D&D 4E and Pathfinder. This past summer, Open Design gathered a collection of monsters and NPCs published over the past five years for its Midgard world setting, and retooled them for use with the AGE system. The result is a “monster manual” of 50 creatures, ranging from iconic fantasy to the bizarre, ready for use by AGE game masters in developing their adventures – the Midgard Bestiary!
Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1)
- Design: Joshua Jarman
- Cover Illustratorsr: Aaron Miller
- Interior Illustrators: Jesse Butler, Darren Calvert, Rick Hershey, James Keegan, Pat Loboyko, Chris McFann, Jeff McFarland, Mark Smylie, Hugo Solis, Allison Theus and Cory Trego-Erdner
- Publisher: Open Design
- Year: 2011
- Media: PDF (58 pages)
- Retail Price: $4.99 from RPGNow.com
Production Quality
The production quality of the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) is very good, with a layout that has each creature on its own page, complete with stat block, flavor text, description, and an illustration. The writing is solid, with the flavor text being a descriptive narrative of what the entity looks like, followed by more detailed description about its origins, habitat, and battle tactics.
The Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) has both a table of contents and PDF bookmarks, which makes navigation through the supplement easier to handle, and the monsters are listed in alphabetical order as well throughout the book. The author claims that the monsters presented offer challenges for many levels of play, including for characters over 10th level.
Disappointingly, the book does not offer any sort of index or appendices which ranks the monsters by their threat level or by some other measure to allow a game master to know how dangerous it is to a party of adventurers. While monsters in any game system, including AGE, are scalable to meet different levels of heroes, an appendix of relative threat is almost essential for any monster manual in order for it to be really useful for a GM. In this case, without a guide, each monster has to be read thoroughly, and assessed by each game master as to whether their heroes are up to the challenge of defeating it.
The illustrations in the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) are very nicely rendered, and range from black-and-white sketches to full-color illustrations. Adding an illustration to each monster entry insures that the game master can truly appreciate a creature’s appearance, and certainly helps to inspire how it is used in an adventure.
The Monsters
The Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) contains a wide range of monsters, from beasts (bone crab) and aberrations (cavelight moss), to undead (putrid haunt) and humanoids (merrow). Among them are iconic fantasy monsters, such as a cave dragon and gypsosphinx, as well as a very creepy eye golem, and a gilded devil from the Hells.
Gamers familiar with the Midgard Campaign Setting know that clockwork monsters fill a significant role in that world’s long history, and the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) has several of these magical-mechanical creatures re-envisioned for the AGE system, including the clockwork hound, clockwork myrmidon, fellforged, steam golem, weaving spider, and Zobeck Legionnaire.
There are also a number of entries of creatures which are unique to the Midgard setting, representing creatures and NPCs from the various lands of the world. Of course, these monsters could easily be adapted to other campaign settings with a simple “re-skinning” of name and nature. Examples of these creatures include the Arbonesse Exile, Bemmean Wizard, Free Canton Seigebreaker, Imperial Ghoul, and the Neimheim Enchanter. I suspect many AGE game masters will likely find their inclusion quite useful in adventure design, regardless of what setting they are using.
Some of my favorite creatures from the Midgard Bestiary (Volume 1) were actually variations on classic D&D monsters. One such was the Derro Fetal Savant, an psychically powered and deranged infant of this hybrid race, that is carried like a battle standard into combat to attack the derro’s enemies. The goblin shark is a nasty aquatic predator, which has a were-form as a goblin for sorties against land-lubbers. And no Open Design bestiary would be complete without a reference to kobolds, with the kobold slyblade making an appearance as underworld goons on the streets of Zobeck.
For the most part, monsters have been given a nice array of powers to use during an encounter, and in the case of a few creatures, a Mana pool with an list of spells to use as part of its arsenal. Nearly all the creatures have one or two (or sometimes more) Stunt Powers to use, with the SP cost listed as part of the power description. While I liked many of the Stunt Powers, and thought many were well-designed to make battling the creature a unique experience, I found that having the SP cost mixed into the power description to be a bit disorganized, and a more uniform method of describing powers and stunts would definitely help make the game master’s job a lot easier when running a variety of monsters.
Overall Score: 3.75 out of 5.0
Conclusions
Open Design’s Midgard Bestiary Volume 1 is a pretty nifty supplement for the AGE system, and offers game masters a broad array of new monsters and creatures to add to their Dragon Age role-playing game. While some of the monsters are designed for the Midgard Campaign setting, and are not necessarily a fit with the DARPG world setting, many of these monsters are readily adaptable, and capable of being “re-skinned” to make them work on almost any medieval fantasy world. With excellent writing by the author describing a host of fascinating creatures, and a PDF is priced very well to make it fit into almost any gamers’ budget, it is easy to recommend this product to any AGE game master looking for new challenges to let loose upon their heroes!
(And by the way, 4E and Pathfinder DMs might find a few worthwhile beasties worth converting over in this supplement as well!)
So until next review… I wish you Happy Gaming!
Author’s Note: This Reviewer received a complimentary copy of the PDF from which the review was written.
Grade Card (Ratings 1 to 5)
- Presentation: 3.25
- - Design: 3.0
- - Illustrations: 3.5
- Content: 3.5
- - Crunch: 3.0
- - Fluff: 4.0
- Value: 4.5
