I recently picked up Quasar Knight Enterprises'
Playable Monsters Vol. 1: Fantasy Iconics & Mythology (affiliate link) for PF1, and it's good...but it could have been better.
To quickly recap, this is a book that takes a dozen or so monsters and presents them as PC races, removing all racial Hit Dice and toning down special powers so that they're all roughly as powerful as your typical elf, dwarf, etc.
What I liked about this book was its design philosophy. Author Ray Chapel's foreword shows that he's keenly aware of the issues surrounding playing a monster whose stats should make it stronger than a 1st-level PC. In that regard, he starts off by eschewing the idea of "monster classes" that allow a monster PC to eventually mimic their race's typical presentation, pointing out how if you wanted to play, say, a fire giant pyromancer, a "fire giant class" (which would have no inherent spellcasting ability) wouldn't be very helpful.
Likewise, Chapel is also aware that having depowered monsters (making them playable as 1st-level PCs) requires an in-game explanation also. Here, he smartly outlines the ideas of making these monsters be mutations, sub-races, or otherwise differentiating them from the standard monsters. More than that, he bakes this idea in to several of the creatures presented here. Doppelgangers, for instance, aren't a race that breeds true, but rather a race which transforms members of other races into new doppelgangers. Nagas (in addition to being humanoids from the waist-up and snakes from the waist-down, rather than snakes with human heads) are beings descended from the heavenly planes, making them Native Outsiders rather than aberrations. Things like this are replete throughout the book.
All of which is welcome, but which doesn't make up for my main gripe with the book, which is with the relatively scant mechanical presentation.
Now, to be absolutely clear, the racial mechanics are fine; no issues there. But there's a
lot of design space that's never touched upon. For instance, there are no favored class listings for any of the races here. Nor are their height/weight, aging, or starting age tables. None of these races have any new APG-style race traits, and while the giants and the dark folk do have sub-races, there are no other presentations of alternate racial abilities. There aren't even
Advanced Race Guide-style point listings for the various abilities that each race had (I have a lot of complaints with that book's system, but more information is better than less), despite the ARG coming out roughly two years before this product.
Now, the book
does have a few extra bits tucked away at the end, those being a couple of feats (most of which are race-specific, though there's not quite one feat per new race), a new spell, and two new pieces of mundane equipment (though I'll admit I really liked the breather pouch, which is a water-breather's version of scuba gear). But it all feels like an afterthought.
Overall, I liked what was here, but it honestly seemed like the designer just looked at the Core Rulebook's chapter on PC races for guidance on presenting new material, rather than the whole of what PF1 offered. It's a shame, because there's a lot of fun options here, and more could have been done with them.
