Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 3 (OGL)

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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 3 (OGL)
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Test your courage against the most infamous foes of myth and legend! Bestiary 3 presents hundreds of monsters for use in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Within this book you’ll find demiliches and demodands, grave knights and goblin snakes, norns and nephilim, imperial dragons and unfettered eidolons, and so much more! Yet not every creature needs to be an enemy, as winged garudas, crafty tanukis, and leonine lammasus all wait to join your party and answer the call of glory.

The Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 3 is the third indispensable volume of monsters for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and serves as a companion to the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook and Pathfinder RPG Bestiary. This imaginative tabletop game builds upon more than 10 years of system development and an Open Playtest featuring more than 50,000 gamers to create a cutting-edge RPG experience that brings the all-time bestselling set of fantasy rules into the new millennium.

The Pathfinder RPG Bestiary 3 includes:

  • More than 300 different monsters
  • Classic terrors from myth and literature, from the frumious bandersnatch and the righteous valkyrie to the cunning dybbuk and elusive kappa
  • Hordes of new creatures you can construct, grow, or summon to aid your party in its adventures
  • New player-friendly races to let you adventure as canny ratfolk, genie-blooded sulis, and more
  • New familiars, animal companions, and other allies
  • Challenges for any adventure and every level of play
  • Some of the strangest and most beloved creatures from fantasy roleplaying history and the Pathfinder campaign setting
  • Hosts of new templates and variants
  • Appendices to aid in monster navigation, including lists by Challenge Rating, monster type, and habitat
  • Expanded universal monster rules to simplify special attacks, defenses, and qualities
  • ... and much, much more!

ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-378-1

Errata
Last Updated - 11/10/2014

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Hero Lab Online
Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
Archives of Nethys

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A Major Contribution to the Game

5/5

The third bestiary of monsters for Pathfinder is chock-full of cool stuff. A few major themes for the book can be extracted: creatures from myth and literature (like sasquatches and valkyries), creatures with an Asian theme perfect for adventuring in Tian-Xia (such as kami and jiang-shi vampires), and the just plain really weird (like yithians and zoogs). As always with reviews of books like this, there's no way I can go through the hundreds of monsters individually, but I can say the writing and artwork is top-notch. Some particular things to note:

* The book has five new playable races: catfolk, ratfolk, suli, vanara, and vishkanya. There's always a demand for anthromorphic races like catfolk, and ratfolk later become prominent (under the name ysoki) in Starfinder. Suli don't do much for me and vishkanya are a race I've never seen played. But I do have to shout out to the monkey-like vanara, since a vanaran PC features prominently in my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign!

* Several of the attempts from Misfit Monsters Redeemed to make goofy old monsters cool again are reprinted here, such as adherers and wolves-in-sheep's-clothing.

* Man, vulnudaemons are creepy.

* Love the artwork for animal lords--very Black Panther.

*The book introduces several new categories (sub-types) of monster: asuras (very cool concept I've never seen used), behemoths (creatures of divine vengeance on entire nations or worlds; a neat story idea), clockworks (a classic), demodands (titanspawn who hate the gods), divs (corrupted genies who strive for the ruin of all things made by mortals), imperial dragons (wingless, serpent-like dragons of Asian legend), kami (fixed-location nature spirits), kytons (creepy devils from the Plane of Shadows!), leshy (plant-like sentients), linnorms (cruel wingless dragons with a death curse), oni (evil spirits given form--the opposite of kami), rakshasa (drawn from Indian myth), sphinxes (with an interesting write-up), and thriaes (female bee-like seers). There's a real contribution to the richness of the game here, as all of these categories can then serve as the basis for rules-coherent variants introduced in later books.

All in all, Bestiary 3 is an excellent book and a smart purchase for a GM.


Another great addition to the Bestiary products

5/5

Reading through Bestiary 1 and 2, I was hoping that there will be even more eastern themed monsters. This Bestiary delivers just what I wanted! A must buy! Also, Flumph!!!


Best of the Bestiary

5/5

Bestiary 3 review is up on my blog.

This is probably my favorite of the Bestiaries so far, the content covers many iconic monsters from editions past, and stuff from the Adventure Paths. With great Asian flair for the Tian Xia world guide that is coming up, as well as many incredible monsters that have never graced the pages of a monster guide but are very welcome.


A great addition!

5/5

Although I'm generally opposed to the concept of core book "sequels," the content in 'Bestiary 3' is top notch. Whereas it took me some time to realize the usefulness of the monsters presented in 'Bestiary 2' (extraplanar/dimensional encounters rarely play a role in my campaigns), I immediately recognized many of the creatures in 'Bestiary 3' as either "iconic" or interesting variations on an established monster class.

As is to be expected, this book is well laid out and the illustrations are (mostly) top notch - Paizo rarely disappoints here! The Pathfinder Campaign Setting is still missing a few iconic monsters (mostly due to WotC's draconic licensing practices), but this volume (and the two which preceded it) gives GMs a huge variety of creatures to populate their encounters.

If I could make any suggestions for future 'Bestiary' volumes, the first would be to expand upon the lore provided - I realize it would likely halve the number of creatures included per book, but a two page spread (even for "simple" creatures like oozes) might help a GM find a place for a given creature within his campaign setting. Also, better illustrating a creature's size (perhaps even graphically) would be useful - general size classifications only go so far, and being able to see a silhouette of a given entry next to a human-sized creature would give both GMs and players a clear understanding of exactly how big a monster is (this was employed beautifully in an old FASA publication for Shadowrun: 'Paranormal Animals of North America' by Nigel Findley). Again, these are just suggestions on ways to improve an otherwise outstanding collection of Bestiaries. Keep up the good work!


Dodging the law of sequels

5/5

An excellent monster book, strong mythological presence (from various cultures). Probably even better than Bestiary 2. And it has the flumph! (this is a good thing, well its worth a page) If you're looking for a monster book for some critters outside of the real core you would well to pick this up.


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Mournblade94 wrote:
Dragon78 wrote:
You mean magical talking colorful ponies.

He means the four ponies of the apocalypse.

They were selling them at GenCon this year. Famine was my favorite, obviously.

http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p11/sadrakal3/Famine.jpg

I tried to buy the original art, but alas it wasn't for sale.


I have been very pleased with James Jacobs and the rest of Paizo with bestiary 1 and 2.

I thought Bestiary 2 was the best monster manual I have ever seen for any game.

I have a preference for monsters from mythology, Wonderland, and Oz. So far it seems the Paizo team is reading my mind.

The Exchange Kobold Press

Yeah, leprechauns are in there. The treasure type is totally wrong, though. Standard? C'mon, no one believes that!

Liberty's Edge

Wolfgang Baur wrote:
Yeah, leprechauns are in there. The treasure type is totally wrong, though. Standard? C'mon, no one believes that!

Leprechauns are good at money laundering. How else would they report that they only have "standard" treasure!!

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

darth_borehd wrote:
I have a preference for monsters from mythology, Wonderland, and Oz. So far it seems the Paizo team is reading my mind.

I can't help you with Oz (though it might have informed a few of the fey subconsciously), but the other two sure deliver in the book. :)


We have the scarecrow and the cowerdly lion would be easy just take a lion and awaken it or use Fey animal template. But as for the tinman well we will just have to wait for a medium size "tin golem" or something similar but with human level int.


Dragon78 wrote:
We have the scarecrow and the cowerdly lion would be easy just take a lion and awaken it or use Fey animal template. But as for the tinman well we will just have to wait for a medium size "tin golem" or something similar but with human level int.

In the Oz novels, the tin man was like a magical cyborg. The witch had enchanted him to attack himself and he had to replace his missing body parts with tin replicas.

What fey animal template? Would awaken make him anthropomorphic at the same time?

Dark Archive

darth_borehd wrote:

What fey animal template? Would awaken make him anthropomorphic at the same time?

Perhaps if you used the anthropomorphic animal spell from UM along with permanence.

Dark Archive

darth_borehd wrote:


In the Oz novels, the tin man was like a magical cyborg. The witch had enchanted him to attack himself and he had to replace his missing body parts with tin replicas.

So use the half-construct subtype from ARG?


David Fryer wrote:
darth_borehd wrote:

What fey animal template? Would awaken make him anthropomorphic at the same time?

Perhaps if you used the anthropomorphic animal spell from UM along with permanence.

It raises their INT to 3 but keeps them as the animal type. You would have to do some shenanigans with Time Stop or the like to get both Awaken and Anthropomorphic.

At least as far I can tell.


David Fryer wrote:
darth_borehd wrote:


In the Oz novels, the tin man was like a magical cyborg. The witch had enchanted him to attack himself and he had to replace his missing body parts with tin replicas.
So use the half-construct subtype from ARG?

ARG?


I'm assuming the ARG reference means the Advanced Race Guide.


The Fey animal template is in the Land of the kings book and it adds a +10 bonus to int among other stats boost(+4dex +2wis, +4cha). It also changes the animals type to Fey, DR/cold iron, SR, and some spell powers, and also a death curse

The Catfolk might make a good Cowardly lion as well.

The Half-construct template would work for the Tinman as well.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
darth_borehd wrote:
David Fryer wrote:
darth_borehd wrote:

What fey animal template? Would awaken make him anthropomorphic at the same time?

Perhaps if you used the anthropomorphic animal spell from UM along with permanence.
It raises their INT to 3 but keeps them as the animal type. You would have to do some shenanigans with Time Stop or the like to get both Awaken and Anthropomorphic.

Step 1) Be born a human with the Eye for Talent trait.

Step 2) Live a modest childhood until you are inevitably thrown into adventure. Grow up with an intrest in Alchemy, more specifically, the Vivesectionist archetype.
Step 3) Battle hordes of darkness and evil, increasing your level to 7th.
Step 4) Upon reaching 7th level, take the Leadership feat and go out to find a lion.
Step 5) Subdue said lion all while avoiding being mauled to death. A good way to do this is by having a wizardly friend cast Pup Shape on said lion. Be mauled ... by cuteness.
Step 6) Perform horrible experiments upon your newly captured lion, granting it a humanoid shape with Anthromorphic Animal. Spend the extra money to make the effect permanent, ensuring that it will forever be a freak among its former friends and family should it wish to abandon you. Don't worry, it won't.
Step 7) Using your Leadership feat, recruit the lion as your cohort. Using your Eye for Talent, grant it a +2 bonus to its Intelligence, increasing its Intelligence to 5.
Step 8) Convince it to take levels in Bard so it can grant you a morale bonus while it sings about how horrifically it would maul you ... if it only had the nerve.
Step 9) ???
Step 10) Lose profits as MGM sues your sorry behind.


James Jacobs wrote:
Calypstar wrote:
I know there won't be as many outsiders in this one probably, but will we have a few more of my favorites? I'm wondering if there will be more angels, archons, proteans and inevitables? Especially the last two, I love the more law and chaos stuff than the good and evil. More giants, too maybe? And fey I'm sure.
There'll be some, but not all. Certainly more giants and fey though.

So glad for more fey! I was hoping for some mid-higher level ones. Here's hoping!


Please tell me James we're gonna have King Kong's species of Gargantuan Ape listed in this Bestiary?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Berselius wrote:
Please tell me James we're gonna have King Kong's species of Gargantuan Ape listed in this Bestiary?

nope; not this time. Maybe later.


Quote:
nope; not this time. Maybe later.

Nutbunnies. Oh well. You roll the dice you takes your chances right? ^_~


King King would probably fit in the same future book as Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Mecha-Godzilla.

:)


Golden-Esque wrote:


Step 10) Lose profits as MGM sues your sorry behind.

All L. Frank Baum Oz books are public domain. Chomp on that, MGM!


I hope there will be more types of Nagas(other then water), Lamia, Rakshasa, and Hags(other then Annis)

I hope for the remaining three types of Sphinxes but if only one new one may it be Andro.


Quote:

King King would probably fit in the same future book as Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Mecha-Godzilla.

:)

Toho's version of King Kong (which stood an impressive 46 meters high) would definitely qualify yes but I was referring to the old black and white movie King Kong actually (which was only Gargantuan sized).


darth_borehd wrote:
Golden-Esque wrote:


Step 10) Lose profits as MGM sues your sorry behind.
All L. Frank Baum Oz books are public domain. Chomp on that, MGM!

Gasp! I guess that makes Step 10) ... PROFIT! Profit! It's profit, guys! PROFIT!

Like we've never seen that meme before *shiftyeyes*

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Golden-Esque wrote:
darth_borehd wrote:
Golden-Esque wrote:


Step 10) Lose profits as MGM sues your sorry behind.
All L. Frank Baum Oz books are public domain. Chomp on that, MGM!

Gasp! I guess that makes Step 10) ... PROFIT! Profit! It's profit, guys! PROFIT!

Like we've never seen that meme before *shiftyeyes*

I'm not sure MGM can afford lawyers these days anyway...


James Jacobs wrote:
Golden-Esque wrote:
darth_borehd wrote:
Golden-Esque wrote:


Step 10) Lose profits as MGM sues your sorry behind.
All L. Frank Baum Oz books are public domain. Chomp on that, MGM!

Gasp! I guess that makes Step 10) ... PROFIT! Profit! It's profit, guys! PROFIT!

Like we've never seen that meme before *shiftyeyes*

I'm not sure MGM can afford lawyers these days anyway...

Extra! Extra! Creative Developer gives the okay to flood game with anthromorphic, singing lions! MGM is powerless to retaliate!


Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber
darth_borehd wrote:
Golden-Esque wrote:


Step 10) Lose profits as MGM sues your sorry behind.

All L. Frank Baum Oz books are public domain. Chomp on that, MGM!

Just make certain you only use things mentioned in the books, not stuff invented for the movies.


Hey, James, are we going to see more Agathions in this bestiary?


Azata could use a boost too I think. That one high CR fire azata doesn't seem at all that threatening when you have some sort of resistance or immunity to fire.


This is way too awesome!

Bandersnatch? Tell me there will be raths, borogoves, toves and jub-jub birds too!

Doesn'T have to be all of them, but that will certainly help me kick off my Alice in Wonderland themed campaign.


I agree Azatas, Proteons, Agathions, and Archons need a boost. I would like some weaker types of Angels as well.

I am happy about the Bandersnatch and would love the Jubjub bird.

Dark Archive

Berselius wrote:
Quote:
nope; not this time. Maybe later.
Nutbunnies.

Please tell me that nutbunnies made it into the book.

Liberty's Edge

David Fryer wrote:
Berselius wrote:
Quote:
nope; not this time. Maybe later.
Nutbunnies.
Please tell me that nutbunnies made it into the book.

Nutbunnie

Special Attacks nut crunch, double nut crunch


Ok found the Nephilim in one of the APs, there interesting.

Doen't remeber the Dybbuks though.

Every time I hear "nutbunnies" I think of the show Freakazoid.

I would like some high CR(14+) Fey, Monstrous humaniods, and Elemtentals.


So the PDF is available on the 21st of December and we're in November now. What's the chance of us getting a table of contents preview on the blog?


We will more than likely have to wait till the end of this month or the begining of december before we get a table of contents. But hopefully I am wrong and we get it sooner.

I wish we got a poster showing all the monsters like they did for the Beastairy 2 but I would settle for a list of all the monsters anyday.

Dark Archive

Okay so I have pre-ordered my copy from Amazon (it was the only way to talk my wife into it) but Amazon says it will not ship until January 21st. I know you guys have no control over when Amazon ships but I sure hope it is sooner than that since I am moving on January 6th and I would hate to have to wait even longer for it.


I can't wait to find out what is in this book, I hope they release a complete list soon, the wait is killing me.

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

2 people marked this as a favorite.
Dragon78 wrote:

I can't wait to find out what is in this book, I hope they release a complete list soon, the wait is killing me.

Pretty soon it'll be what's actually in the book that's killing you.


I wouldn't call a month and about 2 weeks away "pretty soon".


Scanned through the whole board and didn't see this asked, but it may have been and if so, I'm sorry. This is now the third Bestiary, and still no word on one of the Iconic critters from every edition of "The World's Most Famous RPG" (Save for 0th Ed., you know the red box.). Am I the only player with an irrational fondness for the Mind Flayers and their associated ceremorphic nasties. We got the Neothelid in Bestiary 1, and the Neh-Thaggua (Brain-Collector, the 0th Ed. Analogue) in Bestiary 2, but no baseline, ordinary, "I'm gonna Mind Blast you lesser creatures and Eat Your Brains," Mind Flayer.

Contributor

The mind flayer is intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast, which means we can't use it in any of our official material.


Liz Courts wrote:
The mind flayer is intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast, which means we can't use it in any of our official material.

Well that stinks. Oh well, c'est la vie. I always thought it was solely the term 'Illithid' that was actually WoTC IP, since Mind Flayer is an old term for a mental de-programmer (i. e. someone who broke people free from cult brain-washing and that sort of thing), I'd always assumed Gygax used the name as a dig at all the people trying to link D & D with Satanism in it's early days. As I said, Oh well. It's not especially hard to convert from 3.5 to Pathfinder in any case, I am just especially lazy.


Also the Beholder, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, and Githzeri are intellectual properties as well.

Is the Ravid an intellectual property also?

Contributor

Dragon78 wrote:

Also the Beholder, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, and Githzeri are intellectual properties as well.

Is the Ravid an intellectual property also?

It is not, but we haven't converted it to Pathfinder in any of our Bestiaries to date.

Liberty's Edge

I've looked over the thread but can't seem to find an answer to this question.

Does anyone know what the dead knight on the cover is? Could it possibly, somehow, in the name of Lunitari, be a Death Knight?

Paizo Employee Director of Game Development

Zahariel wrote:

I've looked over the thread but can't seem to find an answer to this question.

Does anyone know what the dead knight on the cover is? Could it possibly, somehow, in the name of Lunitari, be a Death Knight?

That, my friend, is a grave knight.


Dragon78 wrote:
Also the Beholder, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, and Githzeri are intellectual properties as well.

While iconic creatures, I can't say that I'm too sorry to lose any of those monsters to Wizards with the exception of the Mind Flayers. Beholders lost their magic for me after some writer tried very hard to justify the beholder's anatomy (I think Mr. Jacobs might have been part of that project, but I don't remember). It's one of those things that should have just been left to, "It's magic!" or "A wizard makes it work!" instead of trying to justify it all out.

Oh well, I just replaced Mind Flayers with Star Spawn of Cthulhu in my game. Works much better thematically for me and my purposes anyway ... >: ).

The Exchange

One should be careful about what is put into the back of a book. I was just looking at the PDF for the recent Pathfinder Adventure Path and there is an advertisement in the back that states the Bestiary 3 is "Available Now!"

I was lied to!

*goes into the corner and cries*

*comes back*

For your Oscar consideration...

In all seriousness, I am looking forward to the Bestiary 3. I love more monsters.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

Dragon78 wrote:

Also the Beholder, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, and Githzeri are intellectual properties as well.

Is the Ravid an intellectual property also?

Yeah; the Ravid's protected by an almost equally powerful force as Intellectual Property law... many of us at Paizo kinda think it's a silly looking and just plain silly monster. Even before Trogdor came along.


I really like the Ravid. It was one the first monsters I used when I first DMed in 3.0.

Now the only creature that I wish was able to be in Pathfinder is the Displacer beast.

I always thought that the Githyanki and Githzeri were among the lamest races ever created for D@D.

I never liked Mindflares.

The Beholder I liked but I don't wish for them to be in Pathfinder.

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