The Iron Heroes Bestiary

[Crothian]

Great heroes need great foes! The Iron Heroes Bestiary contains more than 30 new monsters designed for use in Monte Cook Presents: Iron Heroes. They fill a variety of roles, from intelligent, thinking foes to brutal, mindless beasts that spread misery and destruction. What they have in common is a mixture of martial and arcane power to challenge the player characters.

This book also includes basic advice on using monsters in Iron Heroes, such as new feats and mathematical methods that help you judge whether a creature offers the proper threat to the party, and new feats designed to work with monster abilities.

The Iron Heroes Bestiary also presents several new villain classes, an innovative concept introduced in Mastering Iron Heroes. Villain classes are a useful tool for generating challenging NPC villains or opponents for the PCs with a minimum of work. And don't miss the comprehensive monster table, featuring all published Malhavoc Press monsters!

 

[amethal]

Iron Heroes Bestiary

Introduction
Monte Cook Presents: The Iron Heroes Bestiary is the third supplement for Malhavoc’s Iron Heroes line. The other two are Iron Heroes and Mastering Iron Heroes. This is a review of the pdf version which (for those who care about such things) I paid for myself. . Iron Heroes uses the d20 system.

I love monster books, and I am a big fan of Iron Heroes, so this was never going to be a negative review. Hopefully I will be able to provide enough information for you to make up your own minds. Please note that I haven’t checked any stat blocks, and I haven’t play tested it.

Presentation
The pdf is 98 pages long, although this includes the front cover, the credits page, two pages of advertisements and the back cover. In common with the other two Iron Heroes products, the text on the back cover of my version was corrupted. I don’t know if this is a common occurrence, or whether I have just been unlucky. The OGL takes up a further half a page.

As is common with the other two Iron Heroes products, the book marking is first rate, being sufficient but not excessive.

The artwork is black and white, except for the cover which is in colour. The style of the artwork in the Iron Heroes line does not appeal to me. It seems too much like a cartoon for my taste, although obviously opinions vary.

The layout is clean and crisp, with plenty of white space. I like it, and I find it makes for an easy to read document. Some people might consider it somewhat sparse.

Contents
The first chapter provides useful advice for the GM in using monsters in Iron Heroes. It highlights the key differences between Iron Heroes and The Other Game ™.

For example, the heroes have a base save bonus on all saves equal to their level, so if a monster has a low save DC for its special attack then it is unlikely to affect the party. However, the absence of magic means a failed saving throw can be catastrophic, so “save or die” effects should be saved for the climax of the adventure.

There is also a handy reminder that some effects have been toned down in Iron Heroes; the example given is that petrification eventually wears off on its own.

Chapter 2 introduces 3 new villain classes (to complement the 3 in Mastering Iron Heroes). These are the Champion, the Demonic Minion and the Demonic Knight. For those unfamiliar with villain classes, these are NPC-only classes designed to give the PCs a challenging encounter whilst minimising the bookkeeping required from the poor old GM. Having more of them is therefore a good thing.

The Champion is a mighty tribal warrior, who stands head and shoulders above his peers. It is such a useful archetype that ideally it should have been included in Mastering Iron Heroes, but better late than never.

The Demonic Minion is a sidekick of the BBEG, and skulks about the place scouting for its master and bullying the commoners.

The Demonic Knight is the ominous presence in black armour, a master of combat and completely without mercy.

At last, in Chapter 3 we arrive at the monsters. There are only 30 of them, but the chapter is over 60 pages long. Every monster has an illustration, and plenty of background detail. These backgrounds give us more glimpses of the Swordlands setting which was briefly touched upon in Iron Heroes.

For example, the elemental Trondar were originally summoned to the world to be slaves of the Masters, and they are celebrating their freedom by terraforming the world to make it more to their liking.

My only quibble is that each monster doesn’t start on a new page. It would have made the section easier to follow on the screen, although obviously adding slightly to printing costs.

The challenge ratings range from ½ to 20, and plenty of thought has gone into making these “Iron Heroes monsters”.

Thus, the Cliff Ogre has the ability to start avalanches, giving it its own personal Acton Zone. The Blade Tyrant gains tokens each round which it can use to bolster its allies (this is a very simple token pool to operate, so doesn’t significantly burden the GM). The huge Shellback normally has a massive +30 natural armour bonus, but PCs willing to take a few risks can attempt to climb on its back or tumble between its legs in order to target its vulnerable areas.

Many of the monsters come with built in plot hooks. The psionically gifted Hundoon take a very dim view of the killing of their royals. The Grey Troll gets more intelligent as it eats – only to revert to bestial savagery when it gets hungry again. Four examples are given of cults who are in the habit of attempting to summon an Incarnation (a CR 20 monster which is typically bad news for everyone).

The appendix gives guidelines for monster conversion. It also (apparently) lists all the current monsters in the Malhavoc “stable” by CR, and references them to the source in which they appear, which I thought was a nice touch. However, it takes up 3 ½ pages, so if you are not interested it makes the pdf that much shorter.

Conclusion
This is an excellent product for any Iron Heroes game.

At first I was wary of recommending it for other d20 games as there are only 30 monsters.

However, they are such good monsters (and the Iron Heroes specific rules are fully explained, so for example it’s easy enough to use the Cliff Ogre’s crumbling avalanche ability even if you don’t have the faintest idea what a “Nonreusable Action Zone” is) that I'm confident it would be an asset to any d20 fantasy game.

 

[Wik]

Great Monster Book

A few months ago, I found myself on an IRON HEROES kick. After picking up the main book, my head was filled with scenes of general combat carnage. Naturally, the first chance I got, I picked up the other Iron Heroes supplement at mway gaming store, which happened to be the bestiary.

Skimming through it on the busride home, I was mostly unimpressed. To be honest, the bestiary seemed a complete crock to me. However, this had nothing to do with the monsters themselves, but with a misconception I had with the Iron Heroes setting. Namely, that Iron Heroes is not a low-magic setting, but a setting in which magic does not infuse every PC's actions.

For some reason, I had figured IH was a low-magic game... once I realized that it was not, I gave the bestiary a second read, and I was thrilled by what I discovered.

The bestiary is a perfect example of just what Iron Heroes is - a vehicle for excellent, cinematic battle scenes.

Almost every monster in this book has been written with a scene in mind, from the great Shellback (with an AC of 36, PCs will have to take advantage of various weak areas of the creature, including climbing upon its back or running underneath and dodging the critter's feet, if they want to hit), to the flesh flayer (A creature with chain attacks that drag and throw the PCs about). There are monsters like the Grey Troll, an incredibly-tough brute that is more or less a mindless savage; except for startling moments of clarity in between meals in which the PCs can grill it for information.

The book also takes advantage of the Action Zone rules presented in Mastering Iron Heroes, with several monsters (like the already-mentioned shellback) being accompanied with Action Zone write-ups. My personal favourite is the Cliff Ogre, a CR 4 giant that can trigger stone avalanches upon the PCs. These write-ups are also very easy to use; I used the Cliff Ogres against my players and fully utilized their action zone ability, even though I had no access to Mastering Iron Heroes.

Many of the monster action zones remind me of "Boss Fights" in various video games, a trick or secret that comes up when fighting this creature. While I can imagine they would get old after a while (everytime you fight a shellback, you'll be running underneath it or targeting chinks in it's shell in the same manner; fun the first time, but boring by the tenth). In fact, many of these monsters seem like they would only be enjoyable as occasional foes; I can see re-using a single creature as a campaign's major villain, but I cannot really imagine the PCs fighting Glitterwings or Gossamer Wyrms moe than once or twice in their entire career.

The book is geared for Iron Heroes play, although I cannot see anything wrong with using it in a typical D&D setting. Adjusting a monster's CR in a D&D game may be a smart idea, however. Since many monsters rely on action zones (which tend to focus around skill use; something Iron Heroes PCs have in abundance), typical D&D character might run into difficulty when trying to function in an action zone. I don't know for sure how well these monsters would work in typical D&D, but I have a feeling they'd be safe.

The book also presents Villain Classes - more or less templates that can be applied to quick-make an NPC. The book offers three - The Champion, Demonic Minion, and Demon Knight. Of these, the Demonic Minion is my favourite, since it allows DMs to put their fiendish imaginations to use. Since each template is written with a broad range of abilities, each class could be used to represent numerous creatures - the Demonic Minion could be an imp, a half-man/half-raven, or an oozing abomination. I really enjoyed the feel of these classes; they more or less say "Here are the rules and abilities for this class, and a few ideas on what it might look like - however, there's a lot more it could be". Unfortunately, I never got to run the Demonic Minion. I did include a Champion NPC in my Iron Heroes game, although it was very quickly destroyed by concentrated Archer/Arcanist fire. These classes are great for the GM who needs a villain quickly; I was able to create my 3rd level champion in less than five minutes.

My biggest problems with the book are it's size and with a few rules issues.

The book is rather small, being only 94 pages long and having only 33 monsters. I paid roughly 25$ cdn for this book; by comparison, Necromancer Games' Mesopotamia (an adventure book), had 28 monsters, and the price was only slightly higher. A small issue, I suppose, and not really the fault of the publisher. . .

More importantly, the book rarely uses the Iron Heroes feats rules. I found it puzzling that a book of Iron Heroes monsters more or less settled on using feats taken from the Player's Handbook. While I suppose this would make the book easier for non Iron Heroes GMs to use, I felt a little bit cheated that the monsters were not using the feats to their best advantage. There are a few monter feats in the book that follow the IH feat format, and I found those quite interesting, although it seems as if they were not used by many of the monsters in the book. There are exceptions to this; The bizarre Kuhl'ani uses many Iron Heroes mastery feats, for example. However, it seems like many of the monsters' feat choices were spent on mastery 1 (mechanically similar to their PHB equivalent) feats like power attack, or skill focus and toughness. I would have been much happier if the monsters used IH feats exclusively, and a page was provided near the end allowing for a conversion to standard D&D rules (in fact, this would have been excellent in any case).

In all, the book is GREAT for Iron Heroes GMs, and I'd highly recommend it (almost to the point of saying it is a necessity) for anyone interested in the setting. It is also an excellent bestiary/monster book for GMs who are hoping to include some cinematic monsters into their regular games.