Powerful Monsters

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Bestiary 6 is slithering out into the world, but even though the book is out there, I've still got a few more things to chat about the contents. Going forward, we'll continue to sow off some art from the book but these posts will be more "behind the scenes" than "monster previews."

Which brings us to today's theme—powerful monsters. For some time now I've wanted us to produce a Bestiary whose challenges skew higher than traditional. While it's true that more games are run at lower level, and thus there's a need for a lot of low and mid tier monsters, we've published a lot of those already in prior Bestiaries. One of the problems facing GMs and adventure writers of high-level content is a lack of monsters to fill the role of threat. As a result, high-level adventures tend to have lots of creatures with class levels, templates, advanced Hit Dice, or sometimes two or even three of these categories in play.

With Bestiary 6, I wanted to give us all more toys to play with for adventures that take place above 10th level, be they powerful creatures to fight again and again or unique foes to serve as a long quest's final boss or as the theme for an entire campaign. I also wanted to populate some niches of monsters that have long been denied higher CR representation—usually, the high CR monsters are outsiders or dragons or giants. In preparing for Bestiary 6, I realized that we'd done a shockingly few number of monstrous humanoids and plants above CR 10, for example, so those two categories were ones I immediately looked to address. I spoke about oozes a few weeks back with the blights, of course, but when you get your copy of Bestiary 6, I think you'll be delighted by the number of new options of monsters to throw at your players, particularly powerful monsters that aren't overly huge and can fit into areas as small as the player characters themselves!

Three of my favorite high CR additions to the game include the kaiju (including the most powerful one of them all—Lord Varklops), the apocalypse horse (which came about as a natural result of the decision to include the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and then realizing these high CR demigods needed something more significant than an advanced nightmare to ride around on), and the ouroboros (a monster I've wanted to get into an RPG for well over a decade). Ranging from CR 21 (the ouroboros) to CR 25 (the apocalypse horses) to CR 30 (Lord Varklops), these three make a perfect cross-section of the variety of powerful foes in Bestiary 6!

Illustrations by Joshua Wright, Ben Wootten, and Nikolai Ostertag

James Jacobs
Creative Director