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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 8798520" data-attributes="member: 6680772">So how is the Monster Data presented? First, the monsters are organized by the categories mentioned before: Barbaros, Fauna, Flora, Undead, Magical Creatures, Magitec, Mythic Beasts, Demons and Humans, and within those categories listed in order of Level, then alphabetically (technically, Japanese syllabary order). Following this main section are stats for Familiars, which uses the same data format.Each monster is presented in a stat block format very similar to D&D 4e. It starts with a banner with the monster's level and name. Next comes a box with background stats: Intelligence - None, Animal, Low, Human, High, or On Orders. Senses - Five Senses, Magic (sees amount and movement of mana), or Machine (uses sensors and cameras). Reaction - The monster's initial reaction to PCs: Friendly, Neutral, Hostile, Depending on Hunger, and Depending on Orders. Impurity - 1-5. Language - Any languages the monster may speak. Habitat - Where the monster is typically found. Knowledge Check/Weakness - The target numbers for knowledge checks by the PCs, explained earlier. Weakness - The bonus to to-hit or damage if the Sage's knowledge check beats the Weakness target number.  Initiative - The number the PCs need to beat with an initiative check to go first in combat. Always a fixed value. Speed - Expressed in m/10 seconds (1 round). This becomes important when the Advanced Combat rules are used. Finally, Life and Spiritual Resistances, both bonus and fixed value (bonus + 7).Then comes a box for the basic data. This has as many rows as the monster has parts. Each row lists the Attack Method (weapon, teeth, etc.), To-hit bonus (and fixed value), Damage dice (all monsters do 2d6+X damage), Evasion bonus (and fixed value), Protection (damage reduction value, in this book 1-5), HP, and MP.Then comes a box for Special Abilities which notes any special attacks, special combat abilities, and so on that any part may have. Then comes a box for Spoils. This is a table with 2-4 cells, listing the treasure or items the party can take from the defeated monster, and a die result to indicate when those are available. So a typical listing might be Automatic: rusted weapons 2-9: Nothing 10 or more: spectacles bag (30 G).Below that is Commentary. This is descriptive text about what the monster looks like, what it normally does. Most monster stat blocks take up half a page, so if you come to a full page stat block, you know the monster's going to be a big deal.Going over them by category we have:Barbaros: Twenty monsters from levels 1 to 6. Some are D&D stand-bys: kobolds, goblins, gremlins, (lesser) ogres, and trolls. In addition they have various bolgs, which appear to fill the rolls of the hobgoblin and bugbear. Kobolds maintain the Basic D&D image of being dog-like humanoids, rather than the reptilian humanoids of WotC-era. By which I mean, they are literally anthropomorphic dogs. There are also many kinds of Hoods. Hoods are a kind of goblinoid that wear hoods, and have some particular weapon. So there are Arrow Hoods, Dagger Hoods, Saber Hoods, and Shield Hoods. There are two particular boss monsters: Diablos and Drakes. Drakes are like half-dragons; they have a human form and a large draconic form. In human form they have horns and leathery wings, but otherwise look like beautiful humans. They are born with magic swords, and losing this sword means becoming an outcast (i.e., showing up in a supplement for monster PCs!) They are the lieutenants and captains of the Barbaros hordes. Diablos are new to 2.5, since Alfleim has demons. Diablos are half-demon Barbaros, with both a human form and a demonic form.Fauna: Eight monsters from levels 1 to 5. wolf, giant gadfly, giant lizard, purple ant (1 meter long!), grey lynx, pack leader (leveled up Wolf), dinos (pronounced dee-nohs rather than "dai-nohs", basically fantasy velociraptors), and sand worm.Flora: Three kinds of man-eating plantlife.Undead: A pretty typical crew here: skeleton, revenant, ghost, zombie, and phantom. Interestingly, the strength of revenants and ghosts depends on who they were in their previous lives, since they retain the Skill Packages and abilities they had in life. (Fun fact about SW zombies: if you dry out their eyeballs and grind them down, it makes an effective medicine. But nobody wants to take it...) Some Sword World additions are dried corpses (like zombies, but their skin is dried and leathery, rather than rotting and squishy) and dullahans. The dullahan is quite interesting! I was not aware of it before, but this originally Irish bogey is the basis for the Headless Horseman. Now, as near as I can find, the headless horseman has not had great purchase in western RPGs. In D&D, the only instance I can find is a brief appearance as a Darklord of the roads of Ravenloft during 2e. But, a dullahan did appear in Final Fantasy III (original, not the version released in the US for the SNES). There, the dullahan was actually a woman. But she was described as a kubi-nashi (headless) kishi (horseman, mounted warrior). However! It so happens that the word kishi is also used to mean "knight." So even though the original Irish dullahan is not a knight, and certainly not armored, dullahan began being depicted in JRPGs as headless armored knights. And Sword World went all-in on that! In Sword World, dullahan are great headless armored warriors with chariots drawn by headless horses. That's so metal.Magical Creatures: Six of these. The ones most familiar to us are the gargoyle and the homunculus. There is also the ghast and the ghast knight. These are strange shadowy creatures with the shape of a human child, but with really thin limbs relative to their body. Here we also find cheapstones (fist sized stones that mindlessly roll around and bump into you) and SW's answer to the mimic, the door imitator. The door imitator looks just like a door, but when it detects an intruder trying to open it, it slams into them really hard.Magitech: Four of these, from levels 2-5. You have the drun, kid-sized robots with swinging hammers for arms. The zerlay, humanoid-shaped robots with cannons on their back that shoot light energy (get it?). Bulldrun, which are larger drun that can launch their hammers at targets and then retract them. And shazerlay, large versions of the zerlay. Mythic Beasts: Four of these, levels 3-7. Deela (a kind of cute harpy), hell hound, thunderbird, and griffon.Demons: Three of these, levels 3-5. The elbirea are child-sized shrimp-like creatures with mana-obstructing poison. One is not typically a problem, but in groups... Otherbeasts is something of a catch-all for a wide variety of Abyssal beasties of low intelligence. The ones in the book go out on all fours (and the illustration of them in the box set I have is distinctly dog/hyena-like), but they can take other forms as well. Finally, the nazrak is a 5-meter tall, one-eyed, two-tentacled octopus-type of creature.Finally, we have Humankind: Only two of these, the 2nd-level scoundrel foot soldiers (basically brigands), and the 5th-level highly-skilled mercenary. Despite the colorful names, the book notes that these can basically be used as templates for any kind of fighter or soldier.Reading these monsters, one thing I missed was some kind of Size stat. Some of them had clear measurements for height or length, or at least a note about scale. But some monsters are apparently meant to be big, but it's not clear how big.And that concludes Rulebook I! But it's not the end of the Let's Read! In the next installment, I'll give a very general overview of the contents in Rulebooks II and III, and in the final installment I'll introduce the box sets they have developed, because these are truly mind-blowing.</blockquote>

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