John Cooper
Explorer
A MAGICAL SOCIETY: BEAST BUILDER
By Joseph Browning
Expeditious Retreat Press product number XRP1004
224-page hardcover, $35.00
The kind folks at Expeditious Retreat Press (hi, Suzi!) sent me a review copy of A Magical Society: Beast Builder along with their new book, A Magical Society: Silk Road, saying they thought it was something that would be right up my alley. Given that the book is 224 pages of solid advice on D&D monster creation (with an emphasis on accurate stat blocks), they were absolutely right.
So, let me start my review by saying this up front: A Magical Society: Beast Builder is the absolute best product I've seen on the subject that I've ever seen. I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody's tackled the subject to this extent before; as can be noticed simply by reviewing the monster stat blocks in recent products from any of a number of publishers, this is an area that many people desperately need some help with. Well, author Joseph Browning is here with all the help you should ever need.
The cover artwork for A Magical Society: Beast Builder is a painting of an unnamed monster by Kenshiro Suzuki. The beast is humanoid in build (although I'd probably assign it the monstrous humanoid creature type), with a long tail, two horns on its head, a bushy mane, and animalistic facial features; it's depicted leaping out directly at the viewer while surrounded by a cloud of reddish smoke or energy (come to think of it, the effect is very reminiscent of Nightcrawler's teleportation effect - BAMF! - in the pages of the X-Men comic book). As the rest of the background is pitch black, the creature stands out very well. All in all, it's a very well-done piece.
The interior artwork, similarly, lives up to the high quality shown on the book's cover. Together, artists Rick Hershey, Ash Johnson, Mates Laurentiu, Michael LoPresti, and Jason Walton provide a total of 50 black-and-white illustrations throughout the book. I have to say, taken as a whole, this is some of the best artwork I've seen in an RPG book. It's not always easy to tell who did what, but I really liked Mates' work (he always signs his stuff with a legible signature): he's got excellent shading, good body proportions, and some really intricate texturing. (Check out his snail-creature on page 57, or his bestial monstrous humanoid on page 40, or his "D&D version of the Predator" on page 82.) Whoever signs his names with a string of runes is also very talented; I particularly enjoyed his horned simian on page 98 (great fur texturing), his lizardman (I still prefer that terminology over "lizardfolk") on page 152 (cool skin mottling, and great armor), and his minotaur on page 165 (I like the overall posture, and he did a great job on the little details, like the scar bisecting his right eye). The "simplest" (in terms of detail) pieces are those done by "the guy who signs his work with a circle around a small 'j'" (either Jason Walton or Ash Jackson, I'd imagine), but even these are well-done. In fact, "j-circle" does the majority of creatures that are recognizable as D&D creatures (his troll on page 70 is a very nice "retro" version, and would look very much in place in an AD&D 1st or 2nd edition book); many of the other artists let their imaginations run free and just come up with all sorts of unidentified monsters - and in a book like A Magical Society: Beast Builder, I'd imagine a lot of readers might be sorely tempted to come up with D&D stats for the creatures depicted within. Go for it!
A Magical Society: Beast Builder is laid out as follows:
Of course, there were a few problems with A Magical Society: Beast Builder as well. At the top of this list would have to come the proofreading and editing; this book suffers from all of the same problems that A Magical Society: Silk Road had. Errors like misspelled words, poor punctuation usage (particularly when it comes to apostrophes!), words missing from sentences and other sentences with extraneous words, improper verb tenses, and ignoring typical d20 conventions like capitalizing skill names and italicizing spell names top this list, but there were others, like one paragraph on page 54 being in a different font size than the rest of the book, and two different tables each appearing twice in the book (Table 3.2 on page 60 is identical to Table 3.10 on page 68, and Table 3.3 on page 61 is identical to Table 4.1 on page 85). Also, there were a few entries on the Random(ish) Monster Generator tables that were wrong; the "111" entry on the d1000 table was listed as "11" for one thing, and Table III.10 has a die roll of 84 being attributed to both a sting (79-84) and a tail attack (84); I assume the sting entry should have been "79-83."
I also have to question the reason some of the material in this book appears here. It's one thing to remind the monster-designer that there are feats in the Monster Manual as well as in the Player's Handbook, but it's another thing entirely to reprint them in A Magical Society: Beast Builder. Likewise, I'm not sure what was gained by reprinting all of the SA/SQs possessed by the templates in the SRD in the "Templates" chapter, when so many of them just said "As listed in Chapter 7: Special Abilities and Conditions" - wouldn't it have made more sense to put all of the template SA/SQs in Chapter 7 so they're all together? For that matter, an argument could be made against the inclusion of the 86 pages devoted to reprinting the SA/SQs and conditions, but personally I didn't mind the SA/SQ breakdowns, and I enjoyed the fact that many of them were "genericized" (if that's even a word) to be HD-dependant, so you could use a Special Attack from, say, a 15-HD creature in your newly-designed 3-HD creature without it being horrendously overpowered.
Finally, there were a couple of places where Joseph outsmarted himself. In describing a beholder without using the non-SRD term "beholder," for instance, he refers to "famous 10-eyed monsters" - but the beholder actually has 11 eyes, the ten on its eyestalks and the huge, central eye on its body! Also, I'm not sure why he lists succubi as "spawners" (in describing the various roles monsters can play, spawners being creatures like vampires, shadows, and wraiths that turn PCs into their own type of creature), as there's nothing in the rules suggesting that victims level drained by a succubus' kiss become succubi themselves. Also, it was very nice to see an example stepping the reader through all the math calculations involved in determining a given creature's average damage, but that's just about the worst place to have a math error, and yep, sure enough, Joseph's got 25% of 6.5 being 1.3. (Fortunately, he's stated earlier that the calculation will be 20%, and a simple running through the multiplication shows that 20% is accurate, but that "25%" printed on page 70 is not going to make the example any easier for the math challenged.)
My last gripe: the short chapter on "bits and pieces" - low-level magic items that can be crafted using parts of a slain creature's body - was a nice little inclusion, but it was rather brief, and some of the values seemed really, really off to me. The worst case: according to the information on pages 114-115, the average hill giant's body can be harvested of 200 doses of "hill giant jerky" (which provides the consumer with a +4 racial bonus to Strength for a week, at the cost of -2 penalties to both Intelligence and Charisma and alignment ramifications). Each dose of hill giant jerky is valued at 300 gp. Doing the simple math (200 × 300), we learn that every hill giant's corpse is worth 60,000 gp! Does that strike anybody else as being a bit "off," or is it just me?
In any case, despite its oddities, A Magical Society: Beast Builder is still a good book overall, and it's definitely an excellent resource for those looking to hone their monster-creation skills. The "random(ish)" generator in the back is of somewhat questionable utility (with so many SA/SQs, there isn't likely to be much in the way of sense as to any generated creature's magical powers), but it might be fun just for the heck of it, and Joseph even admits that it's there just as a sort of "idea provoker," to jump-start the imagination when you're feeling particularly uninspired. Taken as a whole, A Magical Society: Beast Builder is a fine addition to the "Magical Society" line of books, and I'm going to give it a fairly high "4 (Good)." I highly recommend it to those desiring to create not only accurate stat blocks (and God bless you, by the way, those of you interested in such things! - I wish there were many more of you), but also interesting and plausible creatures in a given fantasy campaign. I've yet to see a better discussion on monster building.
By Joseph Browning
Expeditious Retreat Press product number XRP1004
224-page hardcover, $35.00
The kind folks at Expeditious Retreat Press (hi, Suzi!) sent me a review copy of A Magical Society: Beast Builder along with their new book, A Magical Society: Silk Road, saying they thought it was something that would be right up my alley. Given that the book is 224 pages of solid advice on D&D monster creation (with an emphasis on accurate stat blocks), they were absolutely right.
So, let me start my review by saying this up front: A Magical Society: Beast Builder is the absolute best product I've seen on the subject that I've ever seen. I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody's tackled the subject to this extent before; as can be noticed simply by reviewing the monster stat blocks in recent products from any of a number of publishers, this is an area that many people desperately need some help with. Well, author Joseph Browning is here with all the help you should ever need.
The cover artwork for A Magical Society: Beast Builder is a painting of an unnamed monster by Kenshiro Suzuki. The beast is humanoid in build (although I'd probably assign it the monstrous humanoid creature type), with a long tail, two horns on its head, a bushy mane, and animalistic facial features; it's depicted leaping out directly at the viewer while surrounded by a cloud of reddish smoke or energy (come to think of it, the effect is very reminiscent of Nightcrawler's teleportation effect - BAMF! - in the pages of the X-Men comic book). As the rest of the background is pitch black, the creature stands out very well. All in all, it's a very well-done piece.
The interior artwork, similarly, lives up to the high quality shown on the book's cover. Together, artists Rick Hershey, Ash Johnson, Mates Laurentiu, Michael LoPresti, and Jason Walton provide a total of 50 black-and-white illustrations throughout the book. I have to say, taken as a whole, this is some of the best artwork I've seen in an RPG book. It's not always easy to tell who did what, but I really liked Mates' work (he always signs his stuff with a legible signature): he's got excellent shading, good body proportions, and some really intricate texturing. (Check out his snail-creature on page 57, or his bestial monstrous humanoid on page 40, or his "D&D version of the Predator" on page 82.) Whoever signs his names with a string of runes is also very talented; I particularly enjoyed his horned simian on page 98 (great fur texturing), his lizardman (I still prefer that terminology over "lizardfolk") on page 152 (cool skin mottling, and great armor), and his minotaur on page 165 (I like the overall posture, and he did a great job on the little details, like the scar bisecting his right eye). The "simplest" (in terms of detail) pieces are those done by "the guy who signs his work with a circle around a small 'j'" (either Jason Walton or Ash Jackson, I'd imagine), but even these are well-done. In fact, "j-circle" does the majority of creatures that are recognizable as D&D creatures (his troll on page 70 is a very nice "retro" version, and would look very much in place in an AD&D 1st or 2nd edition book); many of the other artists let their imaginations run free and just come up with all sorts of unidentified monsters - and in a book like A Magical Society: Beast Builder, I'd imagine a lot of readers might be sorely tempted to come up with D&D stats for the creatures depicted within. Go for it!
A Magical Society: Beast Builder is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: The obligatory 2-page explanation of the breakdown of the book, chapter by chapter and appendix by appendix
- Chapter 1 - Monster Concepts and Functions: An interesting beginning to the whole monster creation process, examining different roles and functions the new beast being designed might have
- Chapter 2 - Monsters and Their Environment: An extrapolation of real-life ecology (with fantasy concepts like creatures who devour pure magical energy directly or indirectly grafted in), examining food chains and food webs, metabolisms, niches, behaviors, reproduction, temperature regulation, culture, and life in differing environments
- Chapter 3 - Monster Statistics: Perhaps not surprisingly, my favorite chapter in the whole book, examining in close detail each line in a creature's stat block, how to fill it in correctly, and things to keep in mind when making changes later on (for example, if you bump up a creature's Dexterity, be sure to go back and recalculate its Initiative modifier, AC, ranged attacks, and any Dexterity-based skills)
- Chapter 4 - Type and Subtype: An examination of the various types and subtypes available in the d20 system, including a breakdown of which special attacks and special qualities are most common in creatures (from the SRD) of that type/subtype (for example, 50% of animals in the SRD have Scent, and 100% of fey in the SRD have Damage Reduction)
- Chapter 5 - Templates: A similar examination of the stat block format used for templates, with an alphabetized list of all SA/SQs from the templates in the SRD
- Chapter 6 - Bits and Pieces: A short (5-page) list of holistic magic items you can create using pieces from a slain creature's body, with details on which races commonly use each item, how much "raw material" you can get from a single monster in question, and the value of the finished product
- Chapter 7 - Special Abilities and Conditions: The biggest chapter in the whole book: 86 pages covering every SA/SQ from monsters in the SRD and Monster Geographica: Underground (Expeditious Retreat Press' first monster compilation), followed by a list of the conditions reprinted from pages 300-301 of the DMG (plus a few others, like charmed, compelled, drowning, starvation and thirst, and suffocating, but oddly missing invisible from the list)
- Appendix I - Monster Editing Checklist: A 3-page checklist to go over after finishing up your creature's stat block, and in my eyes the three most important pages in the entire book
- Appendix II - d20 Mechanic: A 2-page table cross-referencing attacks against AC and save DCs against save bonuses, showing the percentage of success
- Appendix III - Random(ish) Monster Generator: Just for fun, a way to create the bare bones of a new monster concept using random die rolls (including a d1000 roll to determine which of the SA/SQs listed in this book your new monster will have).
Of course, there were a few problems with A Magical Society: Beast Builder as well. At the top of this list would have to come the proofreading and editing; this book suffers from all of the same problems that A Magical Society: Silk Road had. Errors like misspelled words, poor punctuation usage (particularly when it comes to apostrophes!), words missing from sentences and other sentences with extraneous words, improper verb tenses, and ignoring typical d20 conventions like capitalizing skill names and italicizing spell names top this list, but there were others, like one paragraph on page 54 being in a different font size than the rest of the book, and two different tables each appearing twice in the book (Table 3.2 on page 60 is identical to Table 3.10 on page 68, and Table 3.3 on page 61 is identical to Table 4.1 on page 85). Also, there were a few entries on the Random(ish) Monster Generator tables that were wrong; the "111" entry on the d1000 table was listed as "11" for one thing, and Table III.10 has a die roll of 84 being attributed to both a sting (79-84) and a tail attack (84); I assume the sting entry should have been "79-83."
I also have to question the reason some of the material in this book appears here. It's one thing to remind the monster-designer that there are feats in the Monster Manual as well as in the Player's Handbook, but it's another thing entirely to reprint them in A Magical Society: Beast Builder. Likewise, I'm not sure what was gained by reprinting all of the SA/SQs possessed by the templates in the SRD in the "Templates" chapter, when so many of them just said "As listed in Chapter 7: Special Abilities and Conditions" - wouldn't it have made more sense to put all of the template SA/SQs in Chapter 7 so they're all together? For that matter, an argument could be made against the inclusion of the 86 pages devoted to reprinting the SA/SQs and conditions, but personally I didn't mind the SA/SQ breakdowns, and I enjoyed the fact that many of them were "genericized" (if that's even a word) to be HD-dependant, so you could use a Special Attack from, say, a 15-HD creature in your newly-designed 3-HD creature without it being horrendously overpowered.
Finally, there were a couple of places where Joseph outsmarted himself. In describing a beholder without using the non-SRD term "beholder," for instance, he refers to "famous 10-eyed monsters" - but the beholder actually has 11 eyes, the ten on its eyestalks and the huge, central eye on its body! Also, I'm not sure why he lists succubi as "spawners" (in describing the various roles monsters can play, spawners being creatures like vampires, shadows, and wraiths that turn PCs into their own type of creature), as there's nothing in the rules suggesting that victims level drained by a succubus' kiss become succubi themselves. Also, it was very nice to see an example stepping the reader through all the math calculations involved in determining a given creature's average damage, but that's just about the worst place to have a math error, and yep, sure enough, Joseph's got 25% of 6.5 being 1.3. (Fortunately, he's stated earlier that the calculation will be 20%, and a simple running through the multiplication shows that 20% is accurate, but that "25%" printed on page 70 is not going to make the example any easier for the math challenged.)
My last gripe: the short chapter on "bits and pieces" - low-level magic items that can be crafted using parts of a slain creature's body - was a nice little inclusion, but it was rather brief, and some of the values seemed really, really off to me. The worst case: according to the information on pages 114-115, the average hill giant's body can be harvested of 200 doses of "hill giant jerky" (which provides the consumer with a +4 racial bonus to Strength for a week, at the cost of -2 penalties to both Intelligence and Charisma and alignment ramifications). Each dose of hill giant jerky is valued at 300 gp. Doing the simple math (200 × 300), we learn that every hill giant's corpse is worth 60,000 gp! Does that strike anybody else as being a bit "off," or is it just me?
In any case, despite its oddities, A Magical Society: Beast Builder is still a good book overall, and it's definitely an excellent resource for those looking to hone their monster-creation skills. The "random(ish)" generator in the back is of somewhat questionable utility (with so many SA/SQs, there isn't likely to be much in the way of sense as to any generated creature's magical powers), but it might be fun just for the heck of it, and Joseph even admits that it's there just as a sort of "idea provoker," to jump-start the imagination when you're feeling particularly uninspired. Taken as a whole, A Magical Society: Beast Builder is a fine addition to the "Magical Society" line of books, and I'm going to give it a fairly high "4 (Good)." I highly recommend it to those desiring to create not only accurate stat blocks (and God bless you, by the way, those of you interested in such things! - I wish there were many more of you), but also interesting and plausible creatures in a given fantasy campaign. I've yet to see a better discussion on monster building.
