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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crothian" data-source="post: 2202865" data-attributes="member: 232">Beast BuilderIt sometimes seems odd that with all the monster books out there has never been a good source for creating one’s own monsters.  Sure there are a lot of great monsters but every now and again I just can not find one that fits exactly what I need.  Most of them time I will find something as close as I can and maybe alter it.  But it just never seems as right as when creating them from scratch.  But doing that can be time consuming and it can also be easy to forget stuff.  And that brings us to spring.  It seems that spring not only brings in the nice weather, picnic lunches, and lots of pollen; but it brings along with it the new Magical Society book from Expeditious Retreat.  This is the third year in a row we have gotten a book in the springtime and this marks the third book in the series.      Magical Society Beast Builder is the new and anticipated book by Expeditious Retreat.  They have the other two books in the series; Magical Medieval Society Western Europe, and Ecology and Culture.  Both of those are top notch books well research and well put together.  Beast Builder is out as a PDF right now but will be in print ins a few months or so.  The two hundred nad twenty five page book is filled with information.  It has a three page table of contents and some very nice book marks.  I hope the print version also gets an index as there is none here.  The art is good but there is not a lot of it there.  The book is black and white with some nice borders so it will not be that big a deal to print out.      The book is filled with a lot of information and might to some have too much information in it.  For me though too much is better then too little.  I might not need to know what the food supply of the creature the player characters are just supposed to kill is, but other times with a druid and range er in the party knowing about the local food webs and how it all works can create some very interesting and different sorts of adventures.  There are little adventures ideas in here with how to use monsters and creatures in different ways.  Many are not overly obvious and require one to think outside the box.  It is not every book that presents a way to send the player characters into an environment to fix a food web that is out of whack for the local druids.      The first couple chapters deal with some good if sometimes not that useful monster information.  This book is constructed to give you full information on all aspects of the creatures and in Dungeons and Dragons that is not always needed.  The book starts with a nice introduction and goes into creature concepts and function.  This is a nice section for people who might not know exactly what they want to create.  Next it goes into the food chains and the food webs.  It has some great information for what the monster will eat and how it interacts with its environment.  It has some great information on magical eco systems and magical metabolisms.  Fantastic creatures can be difficult to fit into nature but this book does a good job of saying how it can happen.  I like the bit on what the creature eats and what eats the creature.  What the creature does in terms of defense, reproduction, digestive, and many other traits are looked into as well.  This will really allow for a creature to be created in a way that makes it almost alive.  These details help make the environment more real and to have the beasts react in a way that might seem a little more realistic.  The book has good sentimental information so one can determine where the beast place for the creature to live, roam, and hunt is.  It covers tundra, grasslands, forests, desert and scrublands, rivers and lakes, swamps and marshes, coastline oceans and islands, underground environments, and mountains.  The only area I think is missing is creatures that live only in the air and never come near the ground.  I think that would be an interesting environment if a difficult one to describe.  How the creature interacts with other creatures is next and it is followed up by evolution and intelligence.  This is a great chapter filled with ideas and details that make it easy to create a creature even if one has little idea where to begin.      The next chapter should really be known as the John Cooper Chapter; it is all about the stat blocks.  For those that may not know John Cooper is on of the reviewers here and is well known for deconstructing stat blocks in books and checking them to make sure they are all correctly done.  There is a lot of information here but the two most important pieces I find are under the Challenge Rating and Level Adjustment.  The best way to figure both of these out is to play test them.  Creatures need to be play tested to see how they actually stand up to different levels of opponents.  It seems at times that monsters do not get to be play tested enough.  This whole section is really good and should really allow people who may feel uncomfortable creating the stat blocks for new creatures the confidence and knowledge they need to do so.      The book moves on to types and subtypes next.  Everything is listed here and given skill points, feats, hit dice and all the other fun information that gets tied to the creature types.  Then it goes into special abilities and conditions.  This is a complete list of every special ability and condition that exists in the system reference document and in Monster Geographica Underground.  And in all instances except for the extremely common ones like low light vision, each monster that uses the ability is listed.  This is a fabulous resource for finding monsters.  I want someone who can detect Gems.  So, looking that up I find only the Gold Dragon can do that.  I was actually expecting a few more then that for some reason, but gold dragons will work.  Next, I look under sneak attack and see that there area few creatures this time:  Babau and Derro from the SRD and Cave Hermit, Gutslug, Leytru, Silid, and Slithe from Monster Geographica Underground.      The book has a great appendix checklist that helps one check over his own work . There is an appendix with some d20 mechanics in it, but my favorite appendix is the random monster generator.  This is the perfect way to just start getting the creative juices flowing and come up with something that no one has ever seen before.  Just rolling and combining everything might not be the best thing so a person may need to alter some of the rolls to something that makes a little more sense to them.      This is a pretty darn useful book.  I think it would be interesting to see someone create a PDF of monsters using this as their resource.  The book has everything one needs to create a monster or fifty.   This book is really something that anyone who want to create some new and different monsters for their campaign really needs.</blockquote>

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