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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanuslux" data-source="post: 2010216" data-attributes="member: 937">Savage Species is a book aimed at people who want to bring monstrous PCs into their game.  I happen to fit nicely into its target audience, so I awaited this book with much anticipation, hope, and fear.  Appearances - Savage Species is a decent looking hardback book weighing in around 224 pages.  There's not much art and it's pretty much run of the mill compared to the other WotC hardbacks.  Which means it's better than most d20 products in terms of technical quality, but uninspired and generally boring.Contents -     Chapter 1 - Character Creation: These four pages start things off about as bland as possible with a glossary of terms and a overview of the step-by-step process of creating a monstrous character.  Short and I suppose necessary.    Chapter 2 - Monster Characters: This 16 page chapter gives the basic rules for making a monstrous character.  There's a bunch of handy tables for the Hit Dice, Level Adjustments, Starting ECLs, and Skill Points for many of the monsters from the Monster Manual. Okay...not terribly useful since there's much better tables with this information and more in the appendix.  Fortunately, the real point of this chapter is to give a good idea of how to come up with level adjustments for races that aren't already statted up neat and tidy for you in this book.  While it's somewhat annoying that they didn't bother putting the level adjustment factors onto a table, the chapter does what it's supposed to do.    Chapter 3 - Monster Classes: Monster classes are basically a race broken down into a class, thus allowing such things as a 1st level wimp (well, compared to others of his race) of a minotaur.  I can't help but wonder if there used to be something actually useful in this chapter that would warrant a chapter but then editing reduced it the these 4 pages.  However, there is no method for creating new monster classes.  It's mostly a bit of explaination of how to use the monster classes in the appendix.        Chapter 4 - Feats: Here are 12 pages of feats.  Some, like Bonus Breath, Deadly Poison, and Pervasive Gaze are specific to monsters.  Others, like Cumbrous Reflexes, Involuntary Rage, and Pain Mastery could be taken by the basic races.  Overall, the feats here seem balanced and many are actually interesting and useful.  It's one of the better chapters of the book.    Chapter 5 - Equipment: These 18 pages of "monster equipment" are another high point of the book.  There's not much special about the mundane monster weapons, but the table for scaling weapons to monsters of variable proportion is nice.  The Special and Superior item are decent enough, with a few gems like aboleth mucus and spore flasks.  What I really loved about this chapter was the new magic items.  As a DM, there is a definate appeal to magic items than are more useful to my NPCs than the PCs.  How much use is a good party going to get out of Elf Breaker (+4 morningstar in the hands of a goblinoid that is in combat with an elf or a group which includes an elf) or an Ice Scythe (which is only really powerful in the hands of a creature of the cold subtype)?  Some of the magic items seem mainly to be ways for inhuman creatures to overcome certain problems of interacting with a PC party such as gazeblind goggles (which blocks the wearers gaze attacks) and gloves of man (presto...tentacle monster now has fully functional hands).      Chapter 6 - Spells: This chapter is only 14 pages long.  For some reason, I had expected more in the way of monstrous spells, but I can't say I'm too disappointed.  The spells here range from the 1st level Low-Light Vision (which is exactly what it sounds like) to the 9th level Incarnate Construct (turns a construct into a living creature).  It's a pretty good mix of spells and every core-class caster gets a decent selection except for the Paladin, who just gets the boring Major Resistance.    Chapter 7 - Prestige Classes: At 28-pages, the biggest chapter so far, we are presented with 10 prestige classes aimed at monsters.  Nearly every d20 product has prestige classes in it, which is fine since I think they're one of the coolest aspects of the system, and these are somewhat special.  We're given Emancipated Spawn, Illithid Savant, Master of Flies, Scaled Horror, the Siren, the Slaad Brooder, Survivor, the Sybil, Waverider, and Yaun-ti Cultist.  I can see using almost all of these at least once for NPCs and I don't see anything that stands out that would prevent me from allowing them to a PC except that I wouldn't allow many of the creatures which they'd need to be to take certain ones.  Sorry group, no Yuan-Ti Cultist PCs in my game.      Chapter 8 - Campaigns: This chapter really needed more than four pages.  Ideally, it is supposed to help you integrate monstrous characters into your game.  In execution, it doesn't have more than a couple of paragraphs worth of useful advice.  Of course, I've been using monstrous characters quite well since the previous edition, so I didn't really need this chapter at all.  However, to someone who hasn't already put years of thought to the ramifications of such PCs, this isn't going to be much help.    Chapter 9 - Advancing A Monster: Another short chapter, this one only 6 pages.  This one didn't need more space though.  It gives practical explainations on how gaining levels affects a monstrous character and gives over two pages of overview on how specific feats are valuable.  Nothing earth shaking, but at least it does its duty.    Chapter 10 - Templates: In 34 pages, this chapter presents 18 new templates. The templates include Feral Creature, Gelatinous Creatures, Ghost Brute, Incarnate Construct, Insectile Creature, Monstrous Beast, Multiheaded Creature, Mummified Creature, Reptilian Creature, Spectral Creature, Spectral Creature, Symbiotic Creature (Will someone please write a story which explains believably why a bugbear and a stirge would voluntarily merge together to become a "bugsucker"?  Could they have picked a better example creature to illustrate just how ridiculous this template is?), Tauric Creature, Umbral Creature, Wight, Winged Creature (Was there really a need for a template just to stick wings on something?), Wraith, Yuan-ti and Yuan-ti tainted ones.  This is a very mixed bag, but overall I think the good outweighs the bad.      Chapter 11 - Becoming A Monster: These 8 pages are about how to handle your players whining about wanting to turn their current normal characters into monsters so they can get some use out of this book without starting a new character.  It describes various ways to become a monster.  It's a decent chapter and does what it intends to do.          Appendix I - Sample Monster Classes: At 54-pages, this is the largest section of the book.  It contains 53 sample Monster classes taken from creatures out of the Monster Manual.  Monster classes vary wildly in their number of levels, ranging from the 4-level Grig to 20-level classes like the Astral Deva or the Ghaele. Most of the classes seem exceptionally potent when compared to equivalent levels in a PC class, but nothing terribly game breaking that I've been able to catch.  I can't think of many creatures from the Monster Manual that they didn't use that they should have.  A lot of the ones they did use I can't see much use for, but maybe someone else will.  I just know that ultimately, I'll probably get a lot of use out of this section.    Appendix II - Compiled Tables: This is four pages of tables compiling the minimum necessary stats to make most of the critters in the Monster manual playable, including ECL, Level adjustment, Stat adjustment, and so on.  A handy little quick reference.      Appendix III - New Creatures: Eight pages of new critters.  Here we have the anthromorphic animal template (why wasn't this in Chapter 10), the half-ogre written up as a playable race, and Monster Manual style entries for the Desmodu (originally from one of the Adventure Path modules, I think), the Loxo, and the Thri-Kreen.  Decent bonus material.    In Conclusion: I found a lot to like about this book and some reasons to feel disappointed.  It definately goes a long way to help facilitate playing monsters from the Monster Manual, and does give some not great but decent information of how to use creatures from other sources.  There's not much at all in the way of developing characterization for monsters or hints on how to role-play them.  I'm happy with my purchase, and would recommend it to those who need help with the statistical end of intigrating monsters into their selection of player selectable races.</blockquote>

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