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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 3 (OGL)

4.90/5 (based on 15 ratings)
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

Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Rulebook Subscription.

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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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I noticed in the beginning of the book that it mentions The Advanced Player's Guide is needed to use some parts of Bestiary 3. Why is The Advanced Player's Guide needed?
Liberty's Edge
Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber; Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

There are a few spell-like abilities that use spells from the APG, and some of them have Class level from the APG or abilities like the classes from the APG.

Few other things are mentioned from the APG. Doing a quick search of the PDF, it comes up quite a bit.
Dragnmoon wrote:

There are a few spell-like abilities that use spells from the APG, and some of them have Class level from the APG or abilities like the classes from the APG.

Few other things are mentioned from the APG. Doing a quick search of the PDF, it comes up quite a bit.

Thank you for letting me know! Looks like there is another book to add to my list :).

This product now has a Lite pdf download option available. Learn more about it here!

Sorry for the necro, but where are the Clockwork Creature's winding and swift reactions special qualities described? I imagine swift reactions give the bonus feats, but winding is a mystery aside from the Clockwork Soldier.

Is winding a non-soldier clockwork creature good for one day per HD it has?

Thank you.
Paizo Employee Developer

Check page 304 of Bestiary 3. All of the information about the specific abilities of creatures of the clockwork subtype are listed there.

As a general rule, a fully wound clockwork can remain active for 1 day per Hit Die.

Doh! Thanks.

No specific rules on how long winding them up takes?

I like the idea that winding takes 1 round per HD of the clockwork creature (so one day of activity per round of winding) and it provokes an AoO. Any better suggestions?
Paizo Employee Developer

I've always considered it to be something that would be done out of combat, so I'm not sure what exact, official rules would accompany that action. I'm going to refrain from giving a direct answer and leave that up to the design team, but what you propose certainly makes sense and seems fine to me.

Something I somehow never noticed before (and maybe its because I'm just looking at the PRD right now while I'm at work and not reading the actual physical book which is on my floor at home), but I don't quite understand what form the various breath weapons of the Imperial Dragons takes.

I'm gathering it's something like this:

Forest Dragon (piercing?): Given their affinity to the Earth/Forest, I guess it's spitting out some kind of earthen shrapnel breath?

Sea Dragon: It mentions "instead of a cone of super-heated steam" in the Torrent ability, so I'm guessing that is the default (which, interestingly, probably makes their elemental affinity Fire in terms of sorcerous bloodlines).

Sky Dragon: Some kind of electricity cone, which is different from the line breath of the chromatic and metallic dragons. Perhaps some kind of electrically charged cloud?

Sovereign Dragon: Sonic cone. Fairly straightforward, and kind of unique, which is cool (especially for a sorcerer.)

Underworld Dragon: Line of fire. Again, fairly straightforward, unless it's meant to be some kind of lava blast or something.

Anyone else have any ideas (particularly as regards the Forest Dragon)?
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Crucidaemon = Jocasta ripoff???
Liberty's Edge

Not sure if this has come up already but ... anyone else notice this in the Graveknight entry?

Under Ability Scores it says: "As an undead creature, a graveknight has no Constitution score."

This makes perfect sense and is consistent with the undead rules.

And then the sample graveknight given in the entry has a Con score of 10?
Paizo Glitterati Robot

The PDF for Bestiary 3 has been updated to reflect the second printing. The errata document is available for download in the product description above or the Pathfinder RPG Resources page.
Silver Crusade
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I can not haz download errata :(
Paizo Glitterati Robot

D'oh! Cursed robot fingers! You should be able to grab it now :)

7.5 pages of errata? Whoa.
Grand Lodge
a2fan wrote:
7.5 pages of errata? Whoa.

That is minor compared to most WotC products.

What is the page count for Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 3 (OGL)
Paizo Employee Developer
mdoverl wrote:
What is the page count for Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Bestiary 3 (OGL)

320

Scarab Sages

So yesterday when I was putting my Unchained in my shelf, I noticed that the spine image for Bestiary 3 was different than all the other RPG books. Everything else has the yellow-brown PATHFINDER ROLEPLAYING GAME logo at the top. Bestiary 3 has yellow-brown PATHFINDER and red ROLEPLAYING GAME (same font color configuration as the front of the books).

Thats from a 1st printing. Don't know if you've caught it since then already, but figured I'd bring it up just incase.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

The entry for sphinx misspells "griffons" as "griffins."
Grand Lodge
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Can someone explain to be how the aghash div is a CR 4 when it has at-will bestow curse and spectral hand, as well as a gaze attack? According to the Bestiary chart for building your own monsters, the div, given its DR, hp, AC, and abilities should be at least a CR 5. That DC 18 is very scary for your average party.
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