The Talented Bestiary has some brand power to it's name for sure. First of all Owen Stephens is at the helm, a person who has not only written a ton of great third party material but is a Paizo employee as well with a lot of fantastic recent material coming from him. Rogue Genius Games has continuously produced third party books that are exceptionally innovative and groundbreaking making for new play experiences and opening up options that are both cool and balanced. This includes the 'Talented' series of books which breaks down classes into a series of talents and edges so that you can produce the class that you want rather than be shackled by concepts hard coded into the class' framework. All of these form a pedigree of excellence from the creators but my excitement for the Talented Bestiary goes a bit further than simple faith can get me.
The Talented Bestiary promises to dice what makes up a monster into point-based chunks so that presumably you can just compile a list of them together to form your monster. Not only would this make monster creation fast and easy but modular as well. I am often a GM that makes a lot of home brew campaigns which requires custom creatures but I have various obstacles in the way of that. The most frequent is the time it takes to build a creature versus the amount of time it takes to kill it. I love the concept of easy monster creation at every CR just for the fact that I don't have to spend an hour making something that will last three rounds at the most. The ease of making a monster quickly is beyond desirable for any GM. Not only that but from a homebrew perspective, this also means that you can easily create variant monsters so that you can sun similar themes across levels or creatures that do strange things where normally to do that you have to stack up templates or start pumping in class levels which becomes complicated in it's own right if it even works.
Past that, its a flipping bestiary too, meaning you have all kinds of crazy variant critters as an example for what you can do. This is to the tune of about 230 creatures that are variants of the Bestiary's monsters. For the $25 it takes to get the pdf I know plenty of people that would shell out just for that part alone. This is a massive book since you're already getting a simplified monster creation system.
I want to make this fight a space ship in my current campaign.
And lets not forget that there are stretch goals that are already active that you can get your hands on. Soon after launch they unlocked options for player characters (!) then moved on to templates for GM and PC use, and then PC classes. So lets get this straight as far as what you're getting. You have a new bestiary, which is always a good thing. You get a system of monster generation that is fast, easy, and grants the most creature customization power this side of the Advanced Bestiary. You get tools and so that as a PC you can BE THE BEAST. Now I've seen the concept of monster race classes across DriveThruRPG but I was always put off by them basically being spread out in small releases that may or may not encompass the monsters that I really want to deal with, but this is all in one fat release and supported by a monster creation system that can produce the likes of a spellcasting ooze or baby tarrasque.
Or a tsundere spider...
I'm not making a special post to promote this product so it can be successful. Its already gotten almost triple it's asking budget. I'm making this post as a favor to you, the consumer. I'm not just excited about this, but I also think that you will be MISSING OUT on something great. An amazing product that expands what you can do as a GM and player for at the minimum of $25 is a steal.
You can check out the Talented Bestiary Kickstarter here.
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