Questions about monster book

[blackshirt5]

OK, I had a question, and I figured this'd be the place to ask it. Lemme give you a bit of background though:

As some people on here know, I plan on publishing a monster book sometime in the hopefully near future, probably on my own. I want this to be the first book for an OGL world I want to publish, followed by a players guide and a DM's guide. I want this to be a standalone world, although you can integrate other things into it and export a lot of my material without too much trouble; but as I said, I don't want people to have to have a lot of other books, so by necessity my books will be large. It's also not a normal world(the monsters especially, some of them are very different from standard D&D).

So the question is: Would you have a problem with a monster book that has what some would call reprints of monsters already in other books? They'll have different backgrounds, additional information(such as a bit on culture and what parts of the monster could be used in magic item construction), and possibly different stats, as well as brand new art(I hope to have almost everything illustrated), but some of them will be sort of the same monsters(i.e., I can't really do a brand new take on animals, vermin, or dire animals, but I'd include those anyway since they're a part of my setting). Would you object to that?

 

[Mark]

As long as there is additional information and that's why you need to add in the previous stuff (to show the differences), it sounds like the best way to go.

 

[Olive]

If you're reusing animals from the core rules, I wouldn't reprint them. You can easily just include notes on locations, habitats etc. under a heading, but the whole stat block seems unnecessary.

Unless of course you atucally mean OGL. Is that what you mean? Like a stand alone thing like UA? If thats what you mean then you should reprint everything. But if it's jsut D20, and requires the core books then don't reprint any more than you have to.

 

[blackshirt5]

Well, for example, the Centaurs of my world are going to be different; more wild, less caring of the humans; there's going to be a large section devoted to fiends, a lot of constructs(many and varied, not just "Golem, golem, golem, golem, guardian"), etc.

I'd like to get other people's opinions on this though. I'm not sure how much extra material I could put in for animals and vermin, but I'd still lke to include them just for completeness' sake.

 

[blackshirt5]

Olive-I'm talking about OGL, not D20. Like Arcana Unearthed. My stated plan is that I want people to be able to pick up my setting, have my own books(a monster book, a player's guide, and a DM's guide/setting book), and not need anything else to play except dice and their imagination. Although if all goes well I can already think of a few more books(although much smaller; "Guide to the Unseelie Courts", "Realms of Hell", etc.) that I'd like to publish for the setting.

 

[blackshirt5]

another question: What kinds of monsters would you, the public like to see in a monster book? If you give me specifics, I can drop teasers, take the suggestions if I wasn't already working on them(and I'll thank you in the credits of the book), and possibly give a preview if I'm done with the monster(and I have it on my computer; right now I do most of my work by hand in a notebook).