I love bestiaries. But most of them are filled with generic Orcs, Draogns and assorted generic shit. Show me cool bestiaries. Bonus points for posting PDFs.
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I love bestiaries. But most of them are filled with generic Orcs, Draogns and assorted generic shit.
Nogames thread
Try Fire on the Velvet Horizon and Veins of the Earth. Same sort of deal with more creative creatures.
Yep, and they're always the best threads.
What?
Fire on the velvet horizon and veins of the earth are completely unusable, but they are still the best bestiaries ever made.
Nogames post
But he's actually discussing games this time.
Random Esoteric Creature Generator
Good for making weird chimeras and odd beasts.
Thank you, I need this for my next game.
No problem.
does anyone have the Fossil Vampires? They're so cool
>RNA bounced around centreless cells like tape decks in the 80s
I've heard the hypothesis that before even prokaryotes existed there was a sort of open source life of genes being passed around freely, I think it's a fascinating subject, but I also think it's really anachronistic and don't want to hear about it while I'm roleplaying a swords and sorcery adventurer.
>real bestiary
>"Oh, shit, it's a dragon!"
>players shit their pants
>because everyone knows what a dragon is
>bestiary of "original" monsters
>"Oh, shit, it's a… gz'fnarfnoodler? Which one is that again, the knockoff Lovecraftian horror, the K-Mart cryptid, or the pile o' nonsense mashed together to justify the one gimmicky mechanic the author could think up?"
>Because those are the only three options
>Over and over again, filling the whole book
>relying on meta-gaming for encounters instead of showing what the creature is by what it does
You're not going to make it.
I'll bet you're the sort of coy, precious DM who thinks he needs to hide monster ACs and HP totals from the players.
>needs to hide monster ACs and HP totals from the players
I don't run D&D, so AC isn't a fricking thing in my games and I tell them if they injure it and approximately how injured whatever they're fighting is.
And I'll bet your the homosexual that reads an AP/scenario/module before playing it and seethes when the GM changes something.
I'm no-games, but even I know that you're wrong.
>he doesn't describe regular monsters with bizarre adjectives until they are completely unrecognizable
that is clearly just an average yōkai
No it's a foot idiot
Wrong. It's a fut.
You sound boring.
The 80s died some time ago
They hated him because he told the truth.
they hated him because he spoke the truth
They told him to cope and seethe because he is a boring samegay
If this is a real issue you have, tell the colossal homosexuals you play with to stop reading the DM books and change to a different system they don't know yet.
>he gives the name of a fricking monster like it's some commonly known animal
>instead of just giving a brief description or image of whatever is and asking the players what they want to do about this thing that just showed up
You and those like you are the reason this hobby is shit and needs to be scoured clean.
The absolute state of D&D players
The terror comes from not knowing what it is. Do you not have rumors of things the players need to figure out the details of in your games? This has been a thing since forever.
I want to agree with you anon, but in general if players don't recognise a monster they'll do their default strategy, i.e. roll for initiative and assume they can beat it. A recognisable threat that is too strong for them is more likely to make them react differently than something they don't recognise.
Of course, most of the time if you're running a game with monsters then you're players will just want to roll dice and kill monsters.
>Veins of the Earth
This book is so fricking good, I use so much from it.
What if. there were veins of the sky
There's a trove for this.
What's it called?
There's some pretty interesting stuff in the d&d 3e fiend folio
There's also a creature in it called the living holocaust imagine a company as big as wizards trying to get away with that today, although funnily enough the part of the book they apologize for is the aztec dog thing which is apparently offensive to leftists for some reason, it's also got rules for grafting monster parts and parasites to your body
Oh right I forgot you can do PDFs on /tg/
not that it's hard to pirate 3e books they gave up and you can just search the name of the book on google and get it the first few results
>that cover
What about it? the slit in the mountain?
If you mean that it shows a place instead of a monster not so much the 3e one but I believe the previous edition fiend folios were heavily demon focused so that would be why the hell image instead of a monster
Oh wait I see the nipple ring
I did not see the nipple or giant vegana, I meant how turn of the millennium it looks.
I want to frick the mountain anon
Thanks, this was one of my favourites back in the day.
you're one of my favorites
I wonder if rollers graft counts as a combat wheelchair.
I feel like there's potential for an interesting rape revenge film with the cerebral hood
Monster Manual V for DnD 3.5 was top tier.
Honestly, I didn't care for that one. It gets a lot of love, but I found it felt like one of those utterly random fantasy bestiaries that would jump from "giant squirrel" to "lightning orc" with nothing jumping out as particularly clever or inspiring. I think there was an ancient order of doctors that was okay, but basically felt like rethemed Hellraiser Cenobites.
My fave bestiaries would be:
Malleus Monstorum for Call of Cthulhu (I've got the '06 edition, haven't seen the new one), mainly for having so many entries from so many sources (Triffids and Lifeforce vamps are in there!), and then throwing out "historical artifacts" as art rather than monster pictures.
The forgotten Alpha Omega RPG had an absolutely gorgeous bestiary as well. Hands down one of the best looking bestiaries for an RPG ever published.
I have gone on record as saying the entire Chronicles of Darkness game lines are just bestiaries for Hunter: the Vigil. If you made me narrow it down though, V:tR assorted bloodline books, several of the Night Horrors titles (the ones not npc focused) and anything for Promethean make for good monster idea mining.
Don't Rest Your Head has all sorts of weird shit in it's bestiary and not a single orc or dragon.
The 2003 "Creature Collection" has been pretty good inspiration for a couple of campaigns and some recurring elements I keep using.
>2003
Wait why did I say 2003, I think maybe the revised version is from 2003, I definitely picked up the original book in 2000 or 2001.
Interesting or not, you might cite the bestiary it's from. I can assume Creature Collection since it's the last one mentioned, but even then I don't know if it's revised or not.
No, Creature Collection was good. This is some other thing.
Immortals handbook
So how do you beat this and lets say no 3/3.5e splatbook
You don't. You're explicitly supposed to use the Immortal's Handbook and have a few hundred levels under your belt.
Any infinite damage stack.
Pun-Pun
Omniscifier
Tékumel has some wild shit running around.
https://b-ok.xyz/book/21499925/70a430
Lusus Naturae, if you don't mind the edgy shit.
The whole Pit line of products for Advanced Fighting Fantasy has lots of interesting creatures too.
>Lusus Naturae
Terrible bestiary. The descriptions are formulaic and boring, and the actual design of the monsters is nonsensical.
I'm a really big fan of LexOccultum's Charta Monstrorum, I wrote a few posts about it in a a while ago, so I'll just copy paste that in here.
exOccultum is a game about 18th century Europe, the declining influence of the Church and nobility, occultists, secret societies, and the things that go bump in the night. It's in the same engine as Trudvang Chronicles, so it's pretty solid mechanically but that has little bearing on this topic. The game has this focus on having all myths be largely true, if you've heard a story about a vampire then chances are that vampire existed and acted like that. You've heard two stories about vampires and both were totally different? Both were true, they're different subsets of vampires or maybe not related at all and both just got saddled with the same name.
The Charta's format is really why I think it's such a great bestiary. The whole thing is set up like a medieval bestiarium it's full of stories and conflicting details, sketches and anatomical drawings, and everything that isn't pure mechanics is all in-universe. It's split into three main sections, the first section "The Journal of Clement Birkenbosch" who is a mysterious/incredible/lying/crazy/or perhaps all of those adventuring scholar type. That stuff details his adventures and the folklore and stories he's told as well as some of his own observations and sketches. I've included the entire story on his encounter with a lycanthrope in the first comment and here. It's not a long read but I think it's really well written and is worth the time. Then you get a "Speculation and Field Notes" section that's still in-universe but written in a more academic style by someone at the Royal Society that talks about general characteristics, appearance, common knowledge, and unique examples of their kind if they exist. I'll include the first half of the lycanthrope's one in the next post. Then afterwards it's just pure mechanics, but I'll talk about that more in the next post.
Because of the aforementioned breadth of humanities' myths LO has an emphasis on not sticking to just one kind of vampire or a certain type of werewolf. So all creatures end up being unique. Because of that the Charta gives you a load of variants and rules to plug in. All of the included images are just for lycanthropes but each of the 21 creature types discussed in the book gets this treatment in full. For examples sake I'll talk about how the properites of lycanthropes, ghosts, and church grims.
Each broad type of creature has a common set of properties that basically all members of it's type have. Lycanthropes can turn into an animal, they'll have heightened senses in their human form, are forced to change under the full moon, etc. Ghosts can choose which creatures can see them, they can typically fly, and they probably won't be able to enter holy ground or pass through barriers made of certain materials such as salt or iron and so on. Church grims will be able to sense sin, are both tangible and ethereal at the same time, and provoke intense sorrow in those who have sinned.
Then you have a set of optional properties to help distinguish each creature from another of its type, some lycanthropes might be able to spread its curse, others might be able to compel animals, or their human form might have some sort of tell about their nature. Ghosts might have telekinesis, or command over water, or they could lead you astray. Church grims might change forms, a bell at midnight could summon it, or it could feed on emotion. After this section are variations which are groups of properties to recreate a few specific types of those creatures.
Finally each has some associated Secret-Arts, which are sorceries and alchemies. The Changing Wolf-skin can turn you into a werewolf for a night, but carries the risk of addiction, you could create a Ghost-Cursed israeliteel to reek havoc on a foe, or learn the secrets of summoning a grim to do your bidding.
I loved Warhammer FRP 2nd edition bestiary. The fluffy lore was more interesting than the stats and I wish more books were written in that style, full of rumors, folklore and adventurers' subjective experience.
I recommend 3e DnD for this, not because of the system but because they put out so many more books. They did five Monster Manuals. I'm not even going to look up which one the razorwebbed vampire spiders or the swarms of steelskinned worms that infest and control villagers or the magnificently stupid bloodhulk zombies that are just full of blood so they hit harder but bleed extra harder are, but I remember them despite not really having thought about 3e in years. You'll probably find something in there that appeals to you if you want trad-fantasy that isn't too trad-fantasy.