Creature Weekly Volume 1

[Messageboard Golem]

Need new challenges, adversaries and allies? We have you covered. Each entry is illustrated and features variant rules support and genre adjustment information so you can easily fit the creatures into your campaign, whether it is set in the wilds of a medieval empire, the streets of a modern metropolis or the depths of far-flung space.

Volume One features the strange yet seductive erodaemon, the crystalline horror of the deadgem template (both mystical and psionic), the platypus (both common and dire, with rules for platypus familiars), the plane-hopping quan-ko and the cunning therig.

This 16 page PDF provides you not only with an average creature entry length of two pages and multiple template examples. It gives you all the variant rules support you need to take the creatures out of the usual fantasy settings and place them in any d20 game you want. Each entry includes variant rules information for easy genre adaptation: Wounds/Vitality, sanity loss, massive damage threshold, defense bonus variant, armor as damage reduction, 3.0/Modern damage reduction, honor taint and allegiances are all supported alongside the standard 3.5 rules set.

Creature Weekly gives you more menace for your monster and the weekly release schedule ensures you will always have something new to challenge your players.

Don't forget to check out the demo for a look at the erodaemon.

 

[Crothian]

Creature Weekly Vol 1

There have been a lot of creature books this past year. We have had large full colored hard bound books and smaller more focused ones. We have had books that cover creatures of a specific type or a specific environment as well as books that try to get a little bit of everything. I have seen books that cover a specific creature and books that cover a specific world. There have been books of high powered monsters and books with mostly low challenge ratings. This though is the first series of weekly monster books I have seen.

Octavirate Games is a new PDF publishing company. It seems there big works are these weekly monster books. Not that the books are big but they have released five of them at the time I am writing this. The PDF is actually not that big the zip file being a little over a meg and a half and the PDF is still under two megs. The PDF is sixteen pages of color and black and white. The text is actually a little on the small size and they might have wanted to add a few pages by increasing the size of the text a little. The art is a mix of black and white and color. There are green and blue borders as well making this a bit of an ink eater when printed. The layout looks really good except there is one page that is over half white space so it really stands out. They really need a piece of art or something there. The PDF also has no book marks.

Before I get into the creatures there is one great and very useful thing this monster books does that none others have and that is present optional rules. If one is using the wound points vitality rules they are listed for each monster. Insanity lost, massive damage threshold, defensive bonus, armor as damage reduction, honor, allegiances, and taint are all common alternative rules that are included for each creature. This makes the creatures in this book ready to be used by people using different house rules or playing d20 modern or other d20 games that use different rules. It also has alternate genres for each creature. The basic write ups are for traditional fantasy, but in this side bar it says what the creature can be in a modern game, a post apocalyptic game, or a sci fi/space opera game.

The creatures range from very interesting and creative to basically mundane. The first is the Daemon Erodaemon. The appearance is strange. It is a woman except instead of a head on her body she has the upper torso of a woman. Sort of like a centaur except a woman’s body and not a horse’s body.

Next is a Deadgem template. This template turns the creature into a crystalline race that will have either psionic or magical powers.

Then there is the platypus both regular and dire versions. Not much to say here other then of all the animals one could pick I am not sure this is one of them. Still, the write up is fine and nothing wrong with it.

The Quon Ko are a race of outsiders from a demi plane of their own. They are travelers and hunters.

Last is the Therig or robgoblins. They are from an alternate dimension and have 4 eyes are stand about seven feat tall.

The descriptions I gave are rather short as the level of detail these creatures are given is quite complete. The Therig have two digestive tracts for instance. There are few monster books that give such detailed internal descriptions. Each race is given a culture and the creatures seem easy to use and creative. Some of them are a bit on the odd side but that should appeal to many people.