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Bestiary 5 - flavour fail
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<blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 6784511" data-attributes="member: 23937"><p>Our hardcover Bestiaries are not the place to go to soak in the flavor text. We DO try to put as much flavor text as we can in there, because flavor text is one of the things that makes monsters interesting and memorable, but since the Bestiaries are world neutral and we don't actually include Golarion proper nouns or world content in them (yet at the same time need to make sure what flavor text we DO put in there works 100% with Golarion), it's often tricky to get flavor text in there at all. For complex monsters, we do try to get them onto two page entries, but the layout is tricky, and sometimes that means not much room at all for flavor text. The dragons are my least favorite example of this—I really REALLY wish we had more room to talk about them there.</p><p></p><p>That all said, the monsters folks are mentioning here ARE picked up from the Adventure Path, and there they do have a lot more flavor text. The crone queen, for example, is a really important monster to the plot of Reign of Winter, and they've got lots more information about them in there.</p><p></p><p>(You could even argue that her abbreviated flavor text helps to preserve potential spoilers for Reign of Winter, although that's more of a side effect rather than a goal.)</p><p></p><p>In the end, the primary goal of a hardcover Bestiary entry is to provide the rules for using the monster, and to also give us stats we can reference in our own adventures with short stat blocks rather than reprinting an entire thing. Due to that, when it comes to copy-fitting text, the flavor text is almost always the first to go when we're trying to fit things on a page. When I'm doing this, I often try all sorts of tricks to earn a few extra lines of room for the flavor text, including picking spells and feats with fewer letters so that they take up less room in the stats, but I've increasingly not been involved in the development of the Bestiaries as my job duties have me doing other things...</p><p></p><p>That said, it's good to hear feedback from folks on both sides of the fence here so that we can continue to work toward making our Bestiaries as excellent as possible.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="James Jacobs, post: 6784511, member: 23937"] Our hardcover Bestiaries are not the place to go to soak in the flavor text. We DO try to put as much flavor text as we can in there, because flavor text is one of the things that makes monsters interesting and memorable, but since the Bestiaries are world neutral and we don't actually include Golarion proper nouns or world content in them (yet at the same time need to make sure what flavor text we DO put in there works 100% with Golarion), it's often tricky to get flavor text in there at all. For complex monsters, we do try to get them onto two page entries, but the layout is tricky, and sometimes that means not much room at all for flavor text. The dragons are my least favorite example of this—I really REALLY wish we had more room to talk about them there. That all said, the monsters folks are mentioning here ARE picked up from the Adventure Path, and there they do have a lot more flavor text. The crone queen, for example, is a really important monster to the plot of Reign of Winter, and they've got lots more information about them in there. (You could even argue that her abbreviated flavor text helps to preserve potential spoilers for Reign of Winter, although that's more of a side effect rather than a goal.) In the end, the primary goal of a hardcover Bestiary entry is to provide the rules for using the monster, and to also give us stats we can reference in our own adventures with short stat blocks rather than reprinting an entire thing. Due to that, when it comes to copy-fitting text, the flavor text is almost always the first to go when we're trying to fit things on a page. When I'm doing this, I often try all sorts of tricks to earn a few extra lines of room for the flavor text, including picking spells and feats with fewer letters so that they take up less room in the stats, but I've increasingly not been involved in the development of the Bestiaries as my job duties have me doing other things... That said, it's good to hear feedback from folks on both sides of the fence here so that we can continue to work toward making our Bestiaries as excellent as possible. [/QUOTE]
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Bestiary 5 - flavour fail
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