Why A GM Can Never Have Too Many Bestiaries

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

[Christopher Helton]

Ouch

 

[Doctor Futurity]

See, I'd just use a Ghost template with at most some slight customization. More to the point, all you've defended is the idea of a Bodak, and not the salient feature of one which is the death gaze. By the time a party can deal with the death gaze, a Bodak is uninteresting. But before the party can deal with the death gaze, the Bodak is uninteresting because of that.

It's all in the implementation. I have found bodak much more threatening and disturbing to run than plain old ghosts. Sometimes it's not about what's most convenient to run, but about what's unknown...in the case of my games, the players hadn't met bodaks, while they had met ghosts. Also, even if you have savvy players with a resistance to death gazes, a bodak used in a manner threatening to nearby innocents, or which is predatory on NPCs that the PCs seek to protect can be more unnerving.

Yes, I agree that you could use a ghost just fine, or invent something entirely, but for myself, reading about a creature such as the bodak prompts me to think of ways to use it, to expand on it, to make it something for my campaign. Sometimes....well, sometimes you're just sick and tired of plain old ghosts and bodaks with their hypnotic, death-dealing gaze is all you need to feel a bit of inspiration.

This is interesting because unlike the Bodak, where the flavor is fine but the mechanical implementation is not, the problem with the Adherer was also the gimmick is interesting but the flavor isn't. So sure, if you give them some better flavor and better backstory, it definitely improves the monster.

I don't honestly know why anyone would use a monster without thinking about it a bit, first. Adherers seemed odd to me...weird and interesting, maybe reminicent of those people-digesting aliens from Beast Master (the movie), and then the Pathfinder Bestiary entry on them made the whole thing "click" at just weird and cool they were as alien monsters.

I've never had the opportunity to run a plane-hopping game. One world usually absorbs and exhausts more time than I ever have to use. Still in the context of plane-hopping, I'd probably use one.

I wonder if the need for monsters is directly proportional to the time one has to run games. I've averaged 1-2 games a week, every week, since 1989. Sometimes 3 or more times a week in my earlier years. That adds up....and the need for inspiration and resources to keep myself interested is high. Having a lot of monsters that provide springboards for inspiration is extremely important; and running planar adventures is just one more element of the need to supply interesting content for both player and GM.

It's a sort of ghost with only minor variations. I'm struggling to think when I'd use one in place of some sort of undead creature, and the only situations I can think of involve rewriting the creature slightly and/or plane hopping.

At some point you can call them all ghosts and be done with it, but then you have a campaign full of ghosts, and a need to make them all a little different. Why reinvent the wheel when D&D has done so countless times? For some, the differences are inconsequential. But from a story perspective I see worlds of difference between ghosts and astral voyagers. One is the spirit of a dead man haunting the living, usually constrained to a haunt in the mortal realm. The other is the screaming, agnonized emotional baggage of still living people ripped from their nightmares, relentlessly hunting down prey in the astral plane. Those sound insanely different to me.

EDIT: I am actually not trying to convince you that your approach to monsters is wrong. Rather, i am trying to convince you that other people's approach to --and need for-- monsters can be very different. I will specifically shun fantasy games that don't offer up at least a decent array of monstrous entities, precisely because I find this a significant and important part of the experience for me as GM. By contrast, a game (which I like) that takes a more universal approach to monster design is Fantasy AGE, which provides templates for "types" of monsters....where even a troll and ogre is a variant on the same stat block. This might be a better approach for someone like you. But for me, all I can think of is how badly Fantasy AGE needs its own Monster Manual.

I mean....I'm still annoyed that Runequest 6 ranks orcs and goblins in the same stat block. WTF....mechanical similarity absolutely does not equal descriptive/fluff/story/plot/thematic similarity in my book.

 

[WackyAnne]

Of course, the people who make cookbooks have long since recognised this, and now their books tend to be more about selling a lifestyle than actually being about using them to cook. I'm not sure how true that is of bestiaries.

Thanks for this - its unexpectedness truly made me laugh out loud. Not a common occurrence, I assure you

 

[Celebrim]

It's all in the implementation. I have found bodak much more threatening and disturbing to run than plain old ghosts.

That's entirely a matter of atmospherics. When players/PCs encounter a monster, the players/PCs don't necessarily know what they are facing. A skilled DM doesn't introduce a monster by saying, "You see a ghost (as described on page ## of the MM)" or "You see a bodak." The DM introduces the monster by describing it. How you describe and the circumstances of the encounter determine the player/PCs emotional response. Even a goblin can be scary, disturbing, horrific, or threatening if you play it right.

Sometimes it's not about what's most convenient to run, but about what's unknown...in the case of my games, the players hadn't met bodaks, while they had met ghosts.

Again, meeting a new undead, how do players know what they are meeting? Is it a manifested malevolent ghost, a spectre, a wraith, a bodak, or something else? There are so many different sorts of undead with so many similarities that its almost impossible for someone to tell what something is until it manifests some more unique power. And in meeting a ghost in particular, there is just know way of knowing what you are facing. Not only do ghosts retain powers that they had in life, so that the ghost of a beserker and the ghost of an ice sorceress are going to be very different things, but the ghost template itself provides for an enormous amount of very easy customization by mixing and matching its malevolent powers.

In the case of a ghost in the Bodak role, giving the ghost 'corrupting gaze', 'horrific appearance', and 'draining touch' gives a monster that kills in the same sort of manner a Bodak does but with a couple of notable improvements from a mechanical perspective. First, the majority of the monsters threat doesn't come from its gaze attack, but rather the threat level of the monster can be tuned to the level of the party so that its not a cake walk just because you can resist the gaze attack. And secondly, the main attacks aren't an all or nothing affair, but rather following the D&D paradigm they do progressive attrition of party resources. They are still frightening or debilitating but what they are that the death gaze isn't is interactive. Those powers create interplay, so that the players feel like they are engaging with the situation. By contrast, the death gaze is all or nothing. Either it is threatening, in which case players die to sheer bad luck, or else the party is prepared for the death gaze in which case the monster and its remaining abilities are likely to make this a cake walk encounter.

Also, even if you have savvy players with a resistance to death gazes, a bodak used in a manner threatening to nearby innocents, or which is predatory on NPCs that the PCs seek to protect can be more unnerving.

Again, first, there is nothing about that situation that you can't do with a ghost. A ghost with 'corrupting gaze' is plenty capable of blasting out of existence innocents in a predatory fashion. But unlike the situation with the Bodak, it's not an all or nothing affair. PC's can witness NPCs being threatened while still having time to respond to the problem. Some NPCs may well die before anything can be done, but other NPCs will remain in perpetual jeopardy unless rescued. This makes for a better encounter. And likewise, the PCs themselves will remain in more perpetual jeapary compared to the situation with the Bodak, as easy solutions like Death Ward won't be available to render the encounter trivial.

Yes, I agree that you could use a ghost just fine, or invent something entirely, but for myself, reading about a creature such as the bodak prompts me to think of ways to use it, to expand on it, to make it something for my campaign. Sometimes....well, sometimes you're just sick and tired of plain old ghosts and bodaks with their hypnotic, death-dealing gaze is all you need to feel a bit of inspiration.

But ghosts can have hypnotic death-dealing gaze. And it is a trivial matter to customize the ghost - literally a matter of seconds - to make it have a unique flavor. For example, in my current campaign, one of the PCs - in an effort to flush out or kill an enemy - burned down his house. Instead of killing the villain though, they burned alive a servant girl that lived in the house. That character now haunts the party as a vengeful ghost, and the ghost has a power inspired by the 'corrupting gaze' entry - 'burning gaze'. Instead of doing 2d10 damage + 1d4 charisma damage, her gaze does 3d10 fire damage + 1d4 charisma damage. She burns alive whomever she looks at.

This character started as 'scary bodak', but thanks to the fact that the party contains a (now powerful) shaman, the ghost has been transformed into a somewhat 'tame' weapon. But, as a weapon, she's proven decidedly double-edged, as she is something of a weapon of mass destruction. When unleashed, she tends to blast and disrupt allies as much as enemies, panicking mounts and henchmen, shaking the will of even stalwart party members, and burning everything around her. She's also used in this manner undeniably evil, both because the party has basically enslaved her, and she's a freaky scary necromantic weapon that tends to burn the innocent along with the guilty.

Again, there is nothing that a Bodak inspires that I can't get from the ghost template, and there are lots of things from the ghost template I can't get from the Bodak. And while the flavor of the Bodak isn't bad, and I'd be ok with 'corrupted abysmal ghosts' (or zombies, which are more what Bodaks are) as a concept, the implementation of 'save or die' on a monster that is otherwise not very threatening at all is wholly uninteresting and unproductive IMO.

To that end, I'd be more interested in a book that was 200 unique ghosts and which had a 'random ghost generator' on a CD in the back of it, than 200 chupacabras someone randomed up. For one thing, I suspect that a random chupacabra generator would on average do as good of job creating monsters as most Bestiary authors I've read.

Or I might be interested in 'Stat blocks (both full and condensed) for 300 unique hordlings; we did the math so you didn't have to'. Things like that would again be more interesting to me than most Bestiaries out there. Or, take a look at my Dryad write up. A product that was equivalent to '100 unique dryads' based on that write up, would be more useful to me than 90% of the Bestiaries that have been created for 3.5.

I don't honestly know why anyone would use a monster without thinking about it a bit, first. Adherers seemed odd to me...weird and interesting, maybe reminicent of those people-digesting aliens from Beast Master (the movie), and then the Pathfinder Bestiary entry on them made the whole thing "click" at just weird and cool they were as alien monsters.

Well, with something like an adherer it's not at all obvious how to make them interesting. Coming up with something that gives an adherer some level of mythic resonance and narrative power is not easy. I applaud anyone that does even a half-way good job of it. I'm still not convinced I'd ever use them, but at least with something like the Pathfinder Bestiary backstory I can see why someone would use them without completely reflavoring them ('tar golem', 'tar devil'?).

I wonder if the need for monsters is directly proportional to the time one has to run games. I've averaged 1-2 games a week, every week, since 1989. Sometimes 3 or more times a week in my earlier years. That adds up....and the need for inspiration and resources to keep myself interested is high. Having a lot of monsters that provide springboards for inspiration is extremely important; and running planar adventures is just one more element of the need to supply interesting content for both player and GM.

Your lucky to have the time and life stability to play that often. But I don't think that ideas for monsters would ever be a limiting factor in my ability to create game content. For me, the hard part of DMing is always a good story conception. If a murder mystery, then its constructing the crime in such a way that it leaves sufficient clues to figure out who-done-it without easily dead ending in an unsolvable crime, but not so many that figuring that out is trivial. In any story, it's figuring out the hook that gets PC's involved and which compels players to pursue the hook because they want to, and not merely because the DM dangled a hook. If a campaign, then its having a story with a philosophical arc to it and drama, and hopefully twists along the way.

Monsters, magic items, and traps are to me dime a dozen. I could spam out unique magic items pretty much forever. Monster variants are harder only because they need some sort of stat block, and that means a lot of interacting math.

If I could point to a single big reason that I end up not needing a Bestiary though, is that the one thing I value in a Bestiary - flip to a stat block and use it as is - is denied to me by my own unique rules. Every monster before I can use it as is, requires conversion in order to be 'perfect'. So, I can still use a PRD or SRD monster in a pinch, but it's not how I would have designed the monster if I was doing it myself based on my rules and what I've learned makes for a good monster.

But from a story perspective I see worlds of difference between ghosts and astral voyagers. One is the spirit of a dead man haunting the living, usually constrained to a haunt in the mortal realm. The other is the screaming, agnonized emotional baggage of still living people ripped from their nightmares, relentlessly hunting down prey in the astral plane. Those sound insanely different to me.

They don't sound very different to me. One is made of ether; the other is made of astral. But they are both basically hungry ghosts, with the caveat that you can't turn the astral one because 'not undead'. Mechanically they have a lot in common, particularly in earlier editions before 2e formalized the idea of a more customizable ghost (already frequently used by Hickman in his designs) and that really caught on in 3e with the template concept.

I am actually not trying to convince you that your approach to monsters is wrong. Rather, i am trying to convince you that other people's approach to --and need for-- monsters can be very different.

I've already conceded that. What I don't concede is that the existing bestiaries fulfill most peoples needs - both the ones they know about and the ones they don't yet understand - for monsters particularly well.

A valuable bestiary which is worth buying would do all of the following well:

a) Clearly define who needs the bestiary and why they need it.
b) Clearly and correctly identify not only the challenge that a monster represents ('CR') but correctly design monsters of an intended CR to work within the frame work of abilities that a party is likely to have when encountering it.
c) Have each monster have a clear tactical shtick which is interesting and interactive and which is both conducive to fun combat and at least slightly different from other monsters (especially existing monsters) in the same CR range.
d) Create monsters with a clear ecological niche that lets them integrate into the overall world in some interesting way preferably without destroying the average D&D worlds integrity. That is to say, the existence of the monster shouldn't require retconning your cosmology.
e) Have monsters that are built not just from random animal parts, but from tangible and common human fears or which draw from folk lore in interesting ways. Ideally, these monsters ought to often be more than mere combat encounters, but have a folk lore to them. Monsters that straddle ally/enemy lines or which have reason to see you as something other than food at least some of the time are particularly interesting and compelling. The good monsters, even if made up whole cloth, feel in some way familiar, as if they'd always been lurking at the edge of your subconscious. I'd note that HP Lovecraft is particularly good at this, and while his monsters might not have the right feel for every sword and sorcery campaign out there, they are built from his own fears - and often common or universal human fears - the way a good monster ought to be. By contrast, a lot of attempts to make horror bestiaries fail this test, creating monsters that feel more campy and just weird than things that have always been lurking in your nightmares.
f) Detail things about the monster which DMs frequently have to rule on, but which most books neglect.

A good example of a Bestiary I think does everything really well is Beta Bunny's 'Bestairy: Predators'.

a) Who needs this?: Anyone that uses animals in their campaign and wants greater detail, breadth and granularity than the MM gives them. If that's not you, you can skip the product, but that's a fairly broad audience because most campaigns assume the existence of real world animals.
b) What's the challenge?: In most cases low, but real. Realistic animals make good opponents for low level campaigns, but quickly run out of steam against high level parties with reality bending powers.
c) Tactical schtick?: Check. Real world animals have all sorts of different modes of behavior. The author goes out of his way to enhance those different behaviors to make them effective and dangerous.
d) Clear ecological niche?: Check. Indeed, the most obvious and realistic niche's imaginable. Throw templates like elemental, fiendish, celestial, umbral, spirit or skeletal on an animal and you immediately have a monster that works as a concept and which you can place in most dungeons as well without hazard to believability.
e) Clear mythological niche: Check. Animals are hugely important to human mythology, and all players are going to have existing mythic relationships to dogs, bears, snakes, cats, rats, sharks and so forth. And many players will have fears or phobias of these creatures, so you can build even terror around them. Doubling or tripling the HD for a 'dire' monster is a bit more work, and runs into problems of consistent challenge since most animals have problems contending with ranged attacks, flight, etc. but it still can get you mid-level brutes. A valid complaint against the Beta Bunny work is that all the stat blocks are on the realistic side. I wouldn't mind seeing after the cryptid section, a section with true fantasy stats adapting the 'dire' concept to the innovations in the book.
f) Details common issues that most books neglect?: Check. Issues like, "Can I eat it?", and "What's the body worth?" that invariably come up are dealt with in detail.

Now obviously, a Bestiary that is just about animals isn't for everyone. But, if it is for you, there isn't a wasted page in the document. And you can clearly explain to someone in the intended audience why they need the document. If you wanted to sell me on 'Why you need this book', you'd go somewhere like that.

Monster books I use a lot are Monster Manual I and Tome of Horrors, and to be sure even those contain a decent amount of badly designed monsters. But there are whole 3.X bestiaries where I'd never use a page of them, and which fail on every level for me. I don't want to use it because the monster is uninteresting, and often is a minor variation on an existing monster (hippo headed humanoid, turtle humanoid, baboon headed humanoid, etc.) with a generic stat block. I wouldn't enjoy using it because the monster isn't fun in play because it doesn't do anything that is unique either in terms of powers or synergies or niches. The CR's or the monsters are all over the place and high CR monsters are often created with Achilles heels that make them hard to employ against experienced parties (lack of actions, lack of resistances, lack of ability to deal with ranged attacks, over reliance on a single smashing attack that tends to result in non-interactive glass cannons, etc.). The monsters mostly fit neatly in the chupacabra category, right down to being chimerical combinations of real animals. The monsters lack mythic resonance and don't play on any strong fears or draw from a folk lore tradition, and often as not if they do have some sort of folk lore are so grounded in the specifics of a particular campaign that they aren't very useful outside of it (a ghostly gunslinger has lots of mythic resonance, but has no use in a campaign world where guns aren't part of its myth). And the details you'd want are either missing, or lavish in some areas while wholly neglectful of others, increasing the cost of the book while decreasing its overall utility (5 pages per monster entry is acceptable, if and only if every single monster is made of design gold and begs to be repeatedly used).

 

[Zhaleskra]

As someone who used to be all "new shiny" and who was once convinced by an employee to buy a bestiary I originally did not intend to buy, I'm going to disagree. I was also one of those people who carried every single book related to the setting, even those that might not even see use.

The basis of my disagreement is that many bestiaries may have many great ideas for creatures, but out of the number of pages you give, I'm only going to use a handful. With PDFs this isn't as much of a problem, but I don't like getting a 100 something page book and using only 5 things from it.

 

[EthanSental]

There's a couple of reasons why I can't take your post seriously. First off, it is purposefully, and willfully, ignorant of anything that has happened in the last 30 years, also it pretty much ignores the creative output of all of the people that I wrote about. As a critic, if I said something like that, you shouldn't have taken it seriously either, because it isn't actually contributing anything.

Saying something like this in a home game? That's one thing. But saying it as part of a public discourse? That's just silly.

Also, saying there's no use in the Fiend Folio? That's just writing off one of the most creative things that has come out of the history of gaming. I used it exclusively, for at least a decade, before I ever bought a Monster Manual.

The Monster Manual has been repeated ad nauseum, and the material in it wasn't all that original to begin with. Mostly retreads of Tolkien and a number of other fictional sources.

So, yes, I don't take responses like that seriously, as a gamer or as a critic.

Chris - your comment is a big turn off quite frankly, like you can't take criticism. For that, reading you column going forward has hit the back burner and not something I was apt to do now, won't be done in the future. Take it with a grain of salt when someone doesn't agree with you paid posts...not every will agree and had their own reason, accept it but don't down play their opinions....makes you look like bad dude.

 

[Christopher Helton]

Chris - your comment is a big turn off quite frankly, like you can't take criticism. For that, reading you column going forward has hit the back burner and not something I was apt to do now, won't be done in the future. Take it with a grain of salt when someone doesn't agree with you paid posts...not every will agree and had their own reason, accept it but don't down play their opinions....makes you look like bad dude.

And yet, I have not attacked a single person. Opinions are not some golden ideal, if people cannot handle having their opinions scrutinized then perhaps the internet is not the place for them.

Keep in mind that I have been doing this since 2003. I am a known quantity, particularly to the owner of this site. I was hired on here despite having written some very negative things about the handling of last year's ENnies, and the whole Mass Effect fiasco. Why? Because I am not just some internet rando, I am someone who has spent my time building the reputation of my name (and all of the aspects that come with it).