Penumbra: Fantasy Bestiary (OGL) (based on
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Atlas Games
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"He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process."
—Friedrich Nietzsche
A wizard in the process of developing magically sentient "alchemice" enters his lab one morning to find the cage doors opened, the locks apparently picked by the small bits of wire left lying on the workbench. A large number of potions are missing, and the cat is sealed into a half-full bottle of formaldehyde. His life becomes a nightmare.
Packs of reptilian bonethieves lurk in the depths of primal rain forests, magically absorbing the bones of living prey to stimulate the growth of their own protective bony horns and plating.
A candle golem is spontaneously created when the wax from mundane candles used in a wizard's library is gathered, melted down, and reused one too many times. The loose arcane energy absorbed by the wax gives this tiny being a free will and an erratic response to magic.
A party of adventurers, bloody and without magic following an epic battle with a dragon, is driven away from the site of their victory by dracoticks vacating the corpse of their dragon host. Suffused with the dragon's blood and camouflaged to look like its scales, the dracoticks unleash potent breath weapons that make for a dangerous treasure hunt.
More than 220 creatures like these are described in the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary, which is the most impressive collection of original OGL System monsters to date. The entries that fill this weighty volume's 352 pages go beyond the atmospheric description, evocative illustration, and solid stats for which Penumbra is known, providing adventure seeds designed to inspire GMs and players alike, and extras like new gods, new spells, and new magic items. For those looking for more meat in their monsters, and more creativity in their creatures, comes the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary.
The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary is brimming with illustrations by an assortment of talented artists.
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It is sad that many of my most often used d20 books just make a prominent appearance now - in the late days of 3.5e. On the other hand this is your great opportunity to now purchase some really good (but expensive) 3.5 books to use in your upcoming PF RPG campaign and still enjoy for many years to come (for a fragment of the original price!).
This book is a hefty tome of monsters: On 366 (!) perfectly bound hard cover pages more than 200 monsters and templates are presented. Apart from my print out version of Necromancer Games' "Tome of Horror revised" this is the only monster book reaching this page count.
The layout is black and white only, but very neat to look at. The illustrations are inspiring, only the fonts used in the side columns might be a bit hard to read for some eyes.
The monster quality ranges from the wildly exotic and rarely used, over "mundane" variations on existing creatures (e.g. War Dragon, Millwork and various Jewel Golems) to some really interesting new concepts like dream creatures ("dreamkind" who enter a PC's dream and cause quite some havoc there). Nice for variation in campaigns is that many monsters come in "monster families" like above mentioned jewel golems, the dream kind, but also the terra-cotta army or the elemental atoms. My favourites as in most alternative monster books are those monsters whose concept and name already inspire an adventure (e.g. dark advocate, cellar dweller).
The book doesn't rely on evocative names for creating adventure names, though. Each monster description contains adventure seeds.
Additionally Fantasy Bestiary has one feature that clearly sets it apart from other monster books. The introduction of "concept icons".
[-> for space reasons continued further below in the product discussion section.]
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