Is This The World Record For Most Official RPG Monsters?

Paizo's fifth major monster book for the Pathfinder RPG just hit store shelves. It contains 300 new monsters, and you can grab is as a hardcover for $44.99; is this a record for the number of official monsters in a supported RPG? "Creatures strange beyond imagining and more terrifying than any nightmare lurk in the dark corners of the world and the weird realms beyond. Within this book, you'll find hundreds of monsters for use in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Face off against devils and dragons, deep ones and brain moles, robots and gremlins, and myriad other menaces! Yet not every creature needs to be an enemy, as whimsical liminal sprites, helpful moon dogs, and regal seilenoi all stand ready to aid you on your quests—if you prove yourself worthy."

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UPDATE: Apparently 2E holds the record still by some margin.

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I don't know how many Pathfinder monsters there are. If we include official ones only, five Bestiaries at 300 apiece comes to about 1,500 critters. Does that win Paizo the prize for most official monsters? What if we include critters from supplements and adventure paths? Is there a tabletop roleplaying game which beats Pathfinder at this point? At 7 years of age it's certainly miles ahead of its parent, D&D 3.5. Or am I way off-base and overlooking something obvious which dwarfs even Pathfinder's mighty library?

Bestiary 5 is now available for comments and ratings.

 

[Oznogon]

Archives of Nethys (can't post link), which is an almost (but not entirely) complete compendium of first-party Pathfinder content, tracks 2,275 monsters. It doesn't include Bestiary 5 and the last two Adventure Path releases, which would put it around 2,600. This figure would include the 3.5E content published under the Pathfinder banner before the Pathfinder rules came out, but it also happens to dedupe reprinted creatures.

 

[Echohawk]

That's a useful Pathfinder index Oznogon, thanks.

Just because I know this topic is going to come up again, and I'm going to want to point back to this thread, here's a summary of the estimates of total monsters per edition:

• AD&D 2nd Edition: 4353 (source: Echohawk's manual count)
• 3.X Edition: 4291 (source: Echohawk's manual count)
• Pathfinder: 2275 (source: Archives of Nethys)
• 4th Edition: 5315 (source: D&D Compendium)
• 5th Edition: 567 (source: Stelio's Bestiary)

 

[Echohawk]

My apologies for resurrecting this thread after eleven years, but I thought it might be interesting to take a look at these numbers again a decade later:

• AD&D 2nd Edition: 4353 (source: Echohawk's manual count)
• 3.X Edition: 4291 (source: Echohawk's manual count)
• Pathfinder 1.0: 3108 (source: Archives of Nethys)
• 4th Edition: 5315 (source: D&D Compendium)
• Pathfinder 2.0: 3683 (source Archives of Nethys Remastered)
• 5th Edition: 5667 (source: D&D Beyond)

On the surface, this creates the impression that 5th Edition now has more monsters than any other edition of D&D or Pathfinder. That's true, but only with a couple of caveats.

First, that D&D Beyond count includes monsters from all of the partnered content. Those monsters are technically being published by WotC (at least on DDB), but without them the total drops to 3458, behind most of the other editions. Archives of Nethys only lists Paizo-published creatures, so this isn't necessarily a fair comparison.

Second, D&D Beyond includes "Legacy" monsters, some of which are repeats. If we eliminate everything tagged as "Legacy content", we end up with 5236 (or 3027 without partner content) which puts 5e back into second place, just behind 4e.

I'll bookmark this thread and try to remember to come back to it in a few more years, I'm curious to see at what point 5e will unambiguously have more monsters than any other edition.

 

[Parmandur]

My apologies for resurrecting this thread after eleven years, but I thought it might be interesting to take a look at these numbers again a decade later:

• AD&D 2nd Edition: 4353 (source: Echohawk's manual count)
• 3.X Edition: 4291 (source: Echohawk's manual count)
• Pathfinder 1.0: 3108 (source: Archives of Nethys)
• 4th Edition: 5315 (source: D&D Compendium)
• Pathfinder 2.0: 3683 (source Archives of Nethys Remastered)
• 5th Edition: 5667 (source: D&D Beyond)

On the surface, this creates the impression that 5th Edition now has more monsters than any other edition of D&D or Pathfinder. That's true, but only with a couple of caveats.

First, that D&D Beyond count includes monsters from all of the partnered content. Those monsters are technically being published by WotC (at least on DDB), but without them the total drops to 3458, behind most of the other additions. Archives of Nethys only lists Paizo-published creatures, so this isn't necessarily a fair comparison.

Second, D&D Beyond includes "Legacy" monsters, some of which are repeats. If we eliminate everything tagged as "Legacy content", we end up with 5236 (or 3027 without partner content) which puts 5e back into second place, just behind 4e.

I'll bookmark this thread and try to remember to come back to it in a few more years, I'm curious to see at what point 5e will unambiguously have more monsters than any other edition.

Thing is, the existence of partnered content on WotC own platform does radically change the comparison. Different world from TSR in the 90s.

 

[Elodan]

Thing is, the existence of partnered content on WotC own platform does radically change the comparison. Different world from TSR in the 90s.

Do you count 3rd party content for 3E or Pathfinder then? I suspect that would bump those numbers up significantly.

 

[Parmandur]

Do you count 3rd party content for 3E or Pathfinder then? I suspect that would bump those numbers up significantly.

Is Paizo selling that content in a publication...? Did WotC sell third party content in Dragon or Dungeon magazine...?

My point isn't exactly that it should or should not count, but that the situation is so different as to make the comparison inexaxt, apples to oranges.

But at this point, if we include third party content for Paizo we would also have to include non-partnered 5E third party content...and then I would expect 5E would blow every edition out of the water handily.

 

[Incenjucar]

That's rather funny considering how long 5E has been around.

 

[Tigris]

Me! Me! Pick me!

<-- a considerable amount of time passes here -->

There seem to be 4353 distinct monsters for which an AD&D 2nd Edition statistics block was published in an official source. That includes variations (e.g., "Aarokocra, Athasian") and unique creatures (e.g., "Dendar, the Night Serpent") as separate monsters, as long as they had their own stat block. Duplicate entries for the same creature were not counted.

The five Bestiaries claim to cover ±1550 critters between them. Unless there are more than 2800 additional Pathfinder monsters hiding in other products, Pathfinder still has some catching up to do.

Dungeon and dragons has 5300+ monsters in official material published. If 2e only had 4353 then 4e would beat it.

4e had not that many monster books but many monsters in the magazines etc.


Argh just saw that this was already mentioned and that its an old thread..


Edit: @Echohawk just remembered the Gamma World 7E monsters are officially fully compatible with 4e this adds some more monsters to 4e.