My two favorite types of supplements for fantasy games are books of magic and bestiaries. Settings and adventures don’t really get me going, but I will get books of spells and monster manuals until the cows come home. Now that I am preparing for to start a new fantasy campaign (at least it will be a campaign by my standards, probably 2-3 months of play time) I am going through some of my newer bestiaries, looking for things to hit the players characters with during the game.
The group is still on the fence as to whether we’re going to play Swords and Wizardry (which is our group’s standard for fantasy games) or Lamentations of the Flame Princess as our ruleset, but the two are close enough that prep can begin and we fill in the game later.
One of my favorite bestiaries right now if Rafael Chandler’s Lusus Naturae. Created for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and funded through Kickstarter. What makes this bestiary so good is that it is the product of the singular vision of a writer, interpreted by one artist. This is one of the things that sets Lusus Naturae apart from the other books I’m going to talk about. Fitting in with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess aesthetic, this bestiary opens up a gateway into a heavy metal inspired world that is brutal and surreal, and not for the weak of heart. It is also very much not safe for work.
If you aren’t interested in games written for adults, by adults, then Lusus Naturae probably isn’t going to be for you.
One of the benefits for me, as a GM, with this book is the fact that I know that the players in our group haven’t read it. Never discount the power of “clean” monsters in a fantasy game. Between Chandler’s crisp writing and Gennifer Bone’s evocative art, they have created a unique book that brings across both creator’s aesthetics in a manner that is reminiscent of Clive Barker or William S. Burroughs. “Unique” is something that gets bandied about, but in the “design by committee” approach of most game design studios it isn’t something that gets seen as often as it used to in tabletop role-playing games. The days of the vision of creators like Dave Hargrave’s Arduin and Greg Stafford’s Glorantha in Runequest seem to be in the past, except for a few bright lights that pop up here and there.
An interesting mechanical bit that I plan on stealing from Lusus Naturae and using myself is the idea of the “killing blow.” This is a neat idea that transcends XP awards for killing monsters. The idea is that whoever deals the killing blow (whether through magic or a physical attack) receives a special boon. This might be an ongoing character ability, or it might be a onetime bonus to one of the next rolls made. Not every creature in the book has this, but the idea is a great one.
Also, because of the OSR approach of an implied setting rather than an overt one, it makes it easy to fit the creatures from Lusus Naturae into any ongoing campaign.
Wizard-Spawned Insanities by Johnstone Metzger and Nathan Jones is another unique monster manual, this one for the Dungeon World role-playing game. Like with Lusus Naturae, it has the benefit of unfamiliarity with the players in our group. For my purposes, it has the disadvantage of conversion from a system that isn’t similar to the rules that we will be using. It does create a couple of other steps for me as a GM, but so will the Pathfinder bestiary below.
One thing that I like about Wizard-Spawned Insanities is that each monster comes with a mini-adventure or two. These are like more fleshed out versions of the lair encounters from the Swords & Wizardry books, not enough for a campaign but enough to fill in a night or two in an ongoing story. This book also uses the idea of an implied setting, which makes it easy to slot these into the world that your group is creating, and a barebones conversion of a creature shouldn’t be too hard: just use the hit points and damage of attacks as is, and go on with your game. A detailed conversion will take a little longer, but if a creature is something that you just want to drop into a game the quick and easy will do the job.
Just like it says on the package, the creatures in the book are all the byproduct of wizardry in some way or another, either created directly by magic-users or they came about because they got in the way of magical effects. I like high magical worlds, which means that the idea behind Wizard-Spawned Insanities is something that will fit into the kinds of games that I am interested in running. There is a lot of weirdness to be found in the book, as well, which is another plus for me.
A lot of gamers look only at their system of choice, but there are a lot of interesting things that can be found when you widen your field of vision a bit. You might even find your next favorite game. For me, the utility of a game book isn’t dependent upon the system that it uses. After more than 30 years of playing and running RPGs, if I can’t convert from one game to another I need to give it up.
Since I don’t play Pathfinder, the Pathfinder Bestiary 5 wouldn’t have normally been on my radar, but flipping through the pages I found the weird fantasy elements that I like. While not as original as Lusus Naturae or Wizard-Spawned Insanities, there’s still some juice between these covers. The benefit to a “new school” book being used in an old school game is that the ideas, the frame of reference are different enough that the players won’t expect it, and the creatures aren’t as likely to be a reskin of monsters that the players have already encountered.
The Manasaputras in particular caught my eye. I’ve had an interest in Indian (Asian Indian) philosophy and religion for a long time. The ideas inherent in the religion and myth cycles, much like with the Norse or Greek mythologies, are gameable. The idea of gods and heroes who possess great power, but are still mortal in many ways maps across to gaming really well. These concepts also play well against what players look for their characters to do during a campaign. Also, Taxidermic Creatures? If that isn’t weird fantasy, then I don’t know what is.
You also find a lot of non-traditionally fantasy creatures, like grey aliens, that you may not have thought of previously, but now a fantasy game inspired by The Mothman Prophecies is trying to escape from my head. Sometimes, I feel sorry for the strange ideas that I inflict upon the players in our group. I know that I am preaching to the choir on getting Pathfinder books to a Pathfinder audience, but there is more resistance to the usability of “modern” games in old school communities. There might be almost as much resistance to Pathfinder as there would be to Dungeon World material.
Yes, jettisoning much of the mechanics from Pathfinder, in order to use these creatures in an old school campaign does take a lot more work. My approach is to take the concepts that you like about creatures, and then reconceptualize them in the new rules (and this works whether you are trying to convert to an earlier edition, or an unrelated system like Fate). If you try to reverse engineer the monster mechanics you will often end up with a lot more work than you need, and an overly complicated monster write-up.
Having a wide variety of tools in your toolbox as a Game Master is nothing but helpful. You can put forward richer worlds to develop with the rest of the group, and you don’t have to worry as much about running out of ideas…or more importantly, sometimes, running out of ideas that the players are not already familiar with. Even if you are only using materials from other games as a springboard for your own original creatures, everyone in the game comes out ahead.
Kobold Press has done their Midgard Bestiary for 13th Age. Midgard is a cool world. I like that it developed out of actual play, rather than out of the can world building exercises. The elements of a game world that develops out of play are typically there because they arose to answer a specific question about a setting, or to fulfill an actual in-game need during play. One of the things that I like about 13th Age is the fact that there aren’t a lot of mechanics to the creatures, and this quality makes it easy to pull things out of a 13th Age write-up and reinterpret it into a new game.
Midgard also has a number of unique creatures that, because they developed out of long term play through a number of D&Dalike systems, they are sometimes variants on creatures that fans of D&D will have a basic familiarity with. However, they are also enough differences, and enough new creatures as well, to make for a lot of new and interesting material for a GM.
Basically, the tl;dr of this piece is that you can’t have too many bestiaries on hand as a fantasy GM, even if your group doesn’t play all of the games involved. Having more colors in your palette means that you can pain a wider variety of happy little trees.
The group is still on the fence as to whether we’re going to play Swords and Wizardry (which is our group’s standard for fantasy games) or Lamentations of the Flame Princess as our ruleset, but the two are close enough that prep can begin and we fill in the game later.
One of my favorite bestiaries right now if Rafael Chandler’s Lusus Naturae. Created for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and funded through Kickstarter. What makes this bestiary so good is that it is the product of the singular vision of a writer, interpreted by one artist. This is one of the things that sets Lusus Naturae apart from the other books I’m going to talk about. Fitting in with the Lamentations of the Flame Princess aesthetic, this bestiary opens up a gateway into a heavy metal inspired world that is brutal and surreal, and not for the weak of heart. It is also very much not safe for work.
If you aren’t interested in games written for adults, by adults, then Lusus Naturae probably isn’t going to be for you.
One of the benefits for me, as a GM, with this book is the fact that I know that the players in our group haven’t read it. Never discount the power of “clean” monsters in a fantasy game. Between Chandler’s crisp writing and Gennifer Bone’s evocative art, they have created a unique book that brings across both creator’s aesthetics in a manner that is reminiscent of Clive Barker or William S. Burroughs. “Unique” is something that gets bandied about, but in the “design by committee” approach of most game design studios it isn’t something that gets seen as often as it used to in tabletop role-playing games. The days of the vision of creators like Dave Hargrave’s Arduin and Greg Stafford’s Glorantha in Runequest seem to be in the past, except for a few bright lights that pop up here and there.
An interesting mechanical bit that I plan on stealing from Lusus Naturae and using myself is the idea of the “killing blow.” This is a neat idea that transcends XP awards for killing monsters. The idea is that whoever deals the killing blow (whether through magic or a physical attack) receives a special boon. This might be an ongoing character ability, or it might be a onetime bonus to one of the next rolls made. Not every creature in the book has this, but the idea is a great one.
Also, because of the OSR approach of an implied setting rather than an overt one, it makes it easy to fit the creatures from Lusus Naturae into any ongoing campaign.
Wizard-Spawned Insanities by Johnstone Metzger and Nathan Jones is another unique monster manual, this one for the Dungeon World role-playing game. Like with Lusus Naturae, it has the benefit of unfamiliarity with the players in our group. For my purposes, it has the disadvantage of conversion from a system that isn’t similar to the rules that we will be using. It does create a couple of other steps for me as a GM, but so will the Pathfinder bestiary below.
One thing that I like about Wizard-Spawned Insanities is that each monster comes with a mini-adventure or two. These are like more fleshed out versions of the lair encounters from the Swords & Wizardry books, not enough for a campaign but enough to fill in a night or two in an ongoing story. This book also uses the idea of an implied setting, which makes it easy to slot these into the world that your group is creating, and a barebones conversion of a creature shouldn’t be too hard: just use the hit points and damage of attacks as is, and go on with your game. A detailed conversion will take a little longer, but if a creature is something that you just want to drop into a game the quick and easy will do the job.
Just like it says on the package, the creatures in the book are all the byproduct of wizardry in some way or another, either created directly by magic-users or they came about because they got in the way of magical effects. I like high magical worlds, which means that the idea behind Wizard-Spawned Insanities is something that will fit into the kinds of games that I am interested in running. There is a lot of weirdness to be found in the book, as well, which is another plus for me.
A lot of gamers look only at their system of choice, but there are a lot of interesting things that can be found when you widen your field of vision a bit. You might even find your next favorite game. For me, the utility of a game book isn’t dependent upon the system that it uses. After more than 30 years of playing and running RPGs, if I can’t convert from one game to another I need to give it up.
Since I don’t play Pathfinder, the Pathfinder Bestiary 5 wouldn’t have normally been on my radar, but flipping through the pages I found the weird fantasy elements that I like. While not as original as Lusus Naturae or Wizard-Spawned Insanities, there’s still some juice between these covers. The benefit to a “new school” book being used in an old school game is that the ideas, the frame of reference are different enough that the players won’t expect it, and the creatures aren’t as likely to be a reskin of monsters that the players have already encountered.
The Manasaputras in particular caught my eye. I’ve had an interest in Indian (Asian Indian) philosophy and religion for a long time. The ideas inherent in the religion and myth cycles, much like with the Norse or Greek mythologies, are gameable. The idea of gods and heroes who possess great power, but are still mortal in many ways maps across to gaming really well. These concepts also play well against what players look for their characters to do during a campaign. Also, Taxidermic Creatures? If that isn’t weird fantasy, then I don’t know what is.
You also find a lot of non-traditionally fantasy creatures, like grey aliens, that you may not have thought of previously, but now a fantasy game inspired by The Mothman Prophecies is trying to escape from my head. Sometimes, I feel sorry for the strange ideas that I inflict upon the players in our group. I know that I am preaching to the choir on getting Pathfinder books to a Pathfinder audience, but there is more resistance to the usability of “modern” games in old school communities. There might be almost as much resistance to Pathfinder as there would be to Dungeon World material.
Yes, jettisoning much of the mechanics from Pathfinder, in order to use these creatures in an old school campaign does take a lot more work. My approach is to take the concepts that you like about creatures, and then reconceptualize them in the new rules (and this works whether you are trying to convert to an earlier edition, or an unrelated system like Fate). If you try to reverse engineer the monster mechanics you will often end up with a lot more work than you need, and an overly complicated monster write-up.
Having a wide variety of tools in your toolbox as a Game Master is nothing but helpful. You can put forward richer worlds to develop with the rest of the group, and you don’t have to worry as much about running out of ideas…or more importantly, sometimes, running out of ideas that the players are not already familiar with. Even if you are only using materials from other games as a springboard for your own original creatures, everyone in the game comes out ahead.
Kobold Press has done their Midgard Bestiary for 13th Age. Midgard is a cool world. I like that it developed out of actual play, rather than out of the can world building exercises. The elements of a game world that develops out of play are typically there because they arose to answer a specific question about a setting, or to fulfill an actual in-game need during play. One of the things that I like about 13th Age is the fact that there aren’t a lot of mechanics to the creatures, and this quality makes it easy to pull things out of a 13th Age write-up and reinterpret it into a new game.
Midgard also has a number of unique creatures that, because they developed out of long term play through a number of D&Dalike systems, they are sometimes variants on creatures that fans of D&D will have a basic familiarity with. However, they are also enough differences, and enough new creatures as well, to make for a lot of new and interesting material for a GM.
Basically, the tl;dr of this piece is that you can’t have too many bestiaries on hand as a fantasy GM, even if your group doesn’t play all of the games involved. Having more colors in your palette means that you can pain a wider variety of happy little trees.
