To quote the back of the book, “The Bestiary of Krynn is a resource for games set in the world of Dragonlance.” This is a 3.5 book that includes creatures from various older game products as well as recent fiction making it an essential book for Dragonlance GMs looking for appropriate foes for their campaigns.
The first thing that annoys me about the book is the table of contents. It does a good job of breaking up the creatures but doesn’t include the chapters. So looking through the book, I see that it’s broken up as follows; Dragons of Krynn, Races of Krynn, Beasts of Krynn, Magical Creatures of Krynn, Outsiders and Elementals, and Undead of Krynn. Appendix one includes monstrous prestige classes, appendix two new rules for acceptance for monstrous characters, appendix three, wilderness encounters, and the book has two tools at the end, monsters by challenge rating and Ansalon Encounter Areas, which is a full color map of the lands.
The creatures start with name, type, subtype, background, italic description, and game stats. In many cases, when the creature is suitable for player use, character racial traits are listed. In terms of game stats, it looks 3.5 standard. Initiative and armor class show their source of origins, speed includes number of squares while base attack and grapple and included and are separate from full attack options.
In my current campaign, the party is moving through a lake in the Unapproachable East so I’ve been looking for aquatic creatures to throw at them. The first dragon, the Amphi, is a large toad like creature with wings and it’s an evil, vile thing that is prone to attacking any who approach it. Perfect! Each dragon includes a fleshed out example for use. Not all of them are the same age category though. The amphi for example, is a mature one, while the aquatic is young and the fire is very old.
One of the interesting things in the book is the noble draconian. Here evil dragon eggs were put through the draconian ritual in an effort to augment the ranks of draconians lost in the various battles but the balance instead turned these creatures good as those hatched from good eggs are evil. It’s an interesting variant and Engle’s art does them justice. The bad thing is that this is a case where they didn’t include racial information and instead just provide the favored class.
One thing that struck me as interesting, because I’m not a huge Dragonlance knowledge base, is the number of templates. These range from dragonspawn abominations and sea spawn, to dragon vassals. It appears that the various Overlords brought some new genetic science with them. Thankfully we’ve got an example of each creature as well as the template itself.
The races section breaks down many the lesser-known races of the setting. It starts off with the wendles, an eastern breed of centaur. Looking through the information, I note that it doesn’t include a final ECL (effective character level) but instead relies on the reader to add the hit dice to the level adjustment for that total. So remember, a wendle would be three, not two for its hit dice nor one from its level adjustment, but three.
One of my favorite races here, just for looks, is the Disir. These creatures are hatched from eggs, looked over by a queen and according to the illustration at least, has arms that end in long curved blades. Not too powerful but something that would be good to challenge some mid level characters, especially if the characters discover a hive of them.
The beast section is fairly short and includes some more mundane animals because I know that somewhere, a GM is looking for a ranger to fail his survival check and throw an elk at the character with it’s gore attack. The section of magical creatures, once again fills out the ranks with quite a few templates. These include bloodragers, creatures effected by a powerful disease, to proto-creatures, monsters that are the first of their type. This would be perfect for say creating early versions of an owlbear.
Chapter five starts off with the Chaos Wrtech. These are the servants of Chaos. I got to admit that this whole Chaos thing wasn’t one of my favorite parts of the Dragonlance series. Despite that, there are some good creatures here. The daemonlord for example, could be an excellent commander of a powerful demon lord in a GM’s campaign, clocking in at a CR of 15 with various spell like abilities and powerful physical powers.
The undead section is a nice mix of standard creatures like the shadow wight and knight haunt, to templates like the ankholian undead and the wichtlin.
The prestige classes, ambient tempest, branch of Zivilyn, Child of Chemosh, Dragon Ravager, and Scourge of Chaos, allow a GM to further customize his creatures. I’m particularly fond of the Scourge. Don’t get me wrong. These are all five level (or less) PrCs but they add flavor. The Scourge. A fighter based PrC with d10 hit dice, warrior BAB, good Fort and Will Save, also has chaos based abilities. Something I could probably use quite easily for say, Warhammer Chaos servant emulation. It gains the ability to smite law, damage reduction, and eventually becomes an outsider who only dies when he reaches –10 hit points.
The remaining tools are useful, but defiantly not vital to a Dragonlance campaign and probably take up a little too much space for their own good. Especially true for the encounter tables, which do a good job of filling out page after page of encounters. If it was up to me, I’d probably take these tables and put them into the DM Resource pack from the screen and take the section on different monsters from the screen and put it here.
The art in the book is fantastic. It’s all full color and it’s brought to us by well-known names in the business. This includes popular frequent Dragon magazine and special Bastion visual product man Jason Engle, as well as Ron Spencer and the UDON team. Don’t get me wrong. Not every illustration is worthy of wall hanging, but the great far outnumber the okay. The layout is well done with two columns in an easy to read format with the stats shaded in a light tan color. The only thing that detracts from the grace of the page isn’t the golden dragonlance border, but rather the size of that border.
The book is a little costly. It’s not overly costly and I don’t feel you’re being robbed but when looking at another full color book, the Denizens of Avadnu, it’s two-hundred and twenty two four pages for five dollars more. It also doesn’t use the huge borders that the Bestiary of Krynn does. There is also some questionable use in some of the appendix material. For example, while the rules on acceptance are useful, wouldn’t some discussion of how creatures from other books like the Monster Manuals and Fiend Folio be appropriate? There’s also a lack of epic creatures, probably more owing to the setting’s feel than a lack of appropriate creatures.
For GMs of Dragonlance, this is an essential book. GMs of other games will find a lot of well-illustrated creatures here, but they come at a premium cost.
