Kickstarter Update: The Genius Guide to the Talented Bestiary.

As of the date for this post there are only 10 more days left to back up the Talented Bestiary on Kickstarter and I am beyond hyped for this project so here is a post to explain why you should be too.

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.

Advanced Bestiary

Have 5 stars.
Seriously this is just really good for a GM. Its more than a bestiary or a compilation of templates, or an NPC book. Its all three. In fact its more considering that the templates are often very involved. This massive book effectively multiplies the entries in all the bestiaries and NPC codexes saving me a ton of trouble and making for incredible encounters.

You can find this over at Paizo.com here.

Retrospective:

My original review for this was rather short. Others has posted reviews in great detail and I just wanted to add my stars to the mix, but really there isn't all that much to say.

The product is very basic. Its a big fat book full of creature templates. The templates are diverse and create a lot of interesting abilities and plot hooks. Each template has an example creature that is either an NPC or monster that has the template. So the entire book is one part bestiary and one part 'pimp my monster' but has some weird NPCs in there.

To understand how good this is, think about how many monsters you have. We have five bestiaries, an NPC Codex and a Monster Codex. Each of those creatures when they have a template applied is pretty much a new monster given that these templates are far reaching and add some bit of flavor. So the amount of creatures you have at your disposal multiplies with each template. With, what I'm guessing is 200 templates, some of which have multiple 'modes' you can seriously  never have the same creature twice for a really long time. Gone are the days when your players can predict how a creature works completely, even if it's the same monster they've seen dozens of times. Monsters that they've fought at level one can show up more often with newer and more diverse abilities. My usual method of advancing monsters has been applying class levels but with this many templates I can do quite a bit very simply. I could even design entire campaigns around some of the templates because they do more than add a few plusses but can add a new dynamic or a new kind of enemy. Besides that the book is effectively a new bestiary given the amount of sample monsters.

This book reduces a lot of work for any GM and has been one of the most useful books I have to make encounters more interesting or buff up a monster that wasn't too interesting to fight. It is pretty much an automatic five stars simply by how often it  gets used.