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Could we see the Lovecraft monsters from Wake of the Watcher?
That would seal the deal for me.
There will be some Lovecraft monsters in Bestiary 3, but not any from Wake of the Watcher. As with the monsters from Serpent's Skull, that book's still too soon to reprint any monsters from there in a hardcover Bestairy.
I believe there are 4 actual Lovecraft monsters in Bestiary 3, but I'm not 100% sure. And no, I'm not gonna list them. Maybe in a few months. MAYBE.

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As a short, somewhat cynical, sidenote, I recommend that people take the list of what is going to be in the book with a grain of salt, based on recent experience. It seems that a list stating what is going to be in the book is more meant to be a list of "here's what we think is going to be in the book, some of it will be, some most likely won't, and some will be partly in and partly out, depending on how our editing goes."
Just sayin.
Nope. We finalized the list of monsters in the book several months ago. Design finished on most of them a month ago. They're deep into development already. Art has been ordered a few months ago. We've seen sketches for a lot of them already. Editing won't really impact at all, since we order monsters by the page, and we know how many pages the book is. Between Bestiary 1 and 2, I'm pretty sure that there's only 1 monster that got cut from a book at the last minute, and that was the vampiric mist from the first book.
We're pretty much 100% solid about the book's contents, and that list is equally accurate (it's just FAR from being a COMPLETE list).

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jreyst wrote:Yeah, I seem to remember being promised a bunch of new templates in Bestiary 2 and being supremely underwhelmed.As a short, somewhat cynical, sidenote, I recommend that people take the list of what is going to be in the book with a grain of salt, based on recent experience. It seems that a list stating what is going to be in the book is more meant to be a list of "here's what we think is going to be in the book, some of it will be, some most likely won't, and some will be partly in and partly out, depending on how our editing goes."
Just sayin.
I'd certainly like to see a source cited there about promising templates.
Because template bloat is not really part of the Pathfinder monster design philosophy.

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"...Expanded universal monster rules to simplify special attacks, defenses, and qualities..."
Is this in order to support new simpler monster formats like those delivered in the game master book of the basic box?
Nope.
It just means "we used Universal Monster Rules in Bestiary 1 and 2, and expanded them slightly in Bestiary 2, and so we'll be doing the same in Bestiary 3—slightly expanding if necessary but still using the same Universal Monster Rule list."
This book will provide monsters for use in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook game, not the Beginner Box game.

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Bestiary 3 wrote:Within this collection of creatures you’ll find grave knights and savage cyclopes, kappa and colossal kaiju ...The down side of them having kaiju in here is that they don't have rules for creatures larger than Colossal, and the fact that they specifically are stating "colossal kaiju" probably means that this is probably similar a redo of the old 3.5e Titanic template.
I say this because I find it unlikely that they'll do a stealth add of rules for creatures larger than Colossal in Bestiary 3.
Unless, of course, they're in Ultimate Combat and they just haven't told us that tidbit yet.
While it's true that we can't really do something that's actually Godzilla sized, alas... we can still do things that are great red wyrm or tarrasque sized. And calling something like that a kaiju is perfectly acceptable.
And there actually WAS a kaiju template in 3.5—I wrote it for Dragon magazine. Good times.

Steelfiredragon |
Steelfiredragon wrote:Well, I guess you just saved yourself 40 bucks! Huzzah!I refuse to buy this if it has anything ressembling Cthulu or his minions in it.
I dislike lovecraft's work
nothing wrong with horror mind you....
well no
you peaked my intrest with the previous post of yours saying that alot of creatures from international myths...so now atleast I'll make a bigger point to look at it.
I STILL HATE Lovecraft's work.
my favorite creature of all time though is an aberration... the mimic...

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Generic Villain wrote:As this is clearly the "Asian" Bestiary, I'm guessing imperial dragons are "Asian"/lung dragons.It's actually the "International" bestiary. We'll have a lot of monsters from Inuit lore, Norwegian lore, Arabian lore, Asian lore, Russian lore, etc. (Not much from Africa, since we did a lot of that stuff in Serpent's Skull and that AP was too recent—its monsters missed the "cut off" for inclusion in this one, but if we do Bestiary 4 next year... there ya go.)
First: Thank you, James, for confirming "more oni". You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Second: Russian and Norwegian folklore!? Awesome! Kikimora and Vodyanoy, then? I'm having trouble thinking of a Norwegian critter you guys haven't done yet...

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But is the Kaiju in the Beastairy III a template?
Since the monsters from the bonus beastairy are in this book will they use the old artwork or new?
Inuit, Russian, Asian, Norwegion, Arabian sounds cool but what about South American, Australian, or Hawaian?
Ask me again about the kaiju in Bestiary 3 being a template in about 3 months. :)
They'll use the old artwork if the old artwork is good. If the old artwork is not good, we'll get new artwork.
There's a few of those, yes.
Also? Deja vu.

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James Jacobs wrote:Well, I guess you just saved yourself 40 bucks! Huzzah!well no
you peaked my intrest with the previous post of yours saying that alot of creatures from international myths...so now atleast I'll make a bigger point to look at it.
I STILL HATE Lovecraft's work.my favorite creature of all time though is an aberration... the mimic...
Well... Lovecraft's my favorite author, so you'll likely never be fully able to escape his influence on anything Golarion related as long as I'm the Creative Director.
If you're still buying Golarion and Pathfinder stuff, I'll take that as a sign that I'm doing my job right by building products that, even if they contain some elements someone doesn't like or hates, are still vastly outweighed by the cool stuff.

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James Jacobs wrote:Steelfiredragon wrote:Well, I guess you just saved yourself 40 bucks! Huzzah!I refuse to buy this if it has anything ressembling Cthulu or his minions in it.
I dislike lovecraft's work
nothing wrong with horror mind you....
well no
you peaked my intrest with the previous post of yours saying that alot of creatures from international myths...so now atleast I'll make a bigger point to look at it.
I STILL HATE Lovecraft's work.my favorite creature of all time though is an aberration... the mimic...
[pedant]You piqued my interest./pedant]

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Generic Villain wrote:As this is clearly the "Asian" Bestiary, I'm guessing imperial dragons are "Asian"/lung dragons.It's actually the "International" bestiary. We'll have a lot of monsters from Inuit lore, Norwegian lore, Arabian lore, Asian lore, Russian lore, etc. (Not much from Africa, since we did a lot of that stuff in Serpent's Skull and that AP was too recent—its monsters missed the "cut off" for inclusion in this one, but if we do Bestiary 4 next year... there ya go.)
I'm glad about this. I think giving a whole bestiary too restrictive of a theme would be very limiting, and reduce it's overall appeal.
There will be some Lovecraft monsters in Bestiary 3, but not any from Wake of the Watcher. As with the monsters from Serpent's Skull, that book's still too soon to reprint any monsters from there in a hardcover Bestairy.
I believe there are 4 actual Lovecraft monsters in Bestiary 3, but I'm not 100% sure. And no, I'm not gonna list them. Maybe in a few months. MAYBE.
I would wager I can guess one of them, since I seem to remember you mentioning one that got cut from WotW. Perhaps the flying polyps?

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Hmmmm, for now, i LOVE it, as usual, you never cease to get me to spend money on your products, which is a good thing. I love having hardcover books on my shelves anyway.
I presume clockwork killers are technically refluffed clockwork horrors from MM2? If that is the case, Nice! I loved those guys and used them in several successful campaigns.
What i would like to know is if there is going to be something like automatons from MM2. I liked the concept of those things, and made several more.
Also, any chance of ibixians being there somewhere?

FenrysStar |

It's June and this comes out when? October? Great Gods of Gaming! Wait for the freaking announcements! Anybody who has been on these boards with any frequency knows that they'll be giving us plenty of teases in the coming months about what is going to be in the book. I know a lot of you have the patience of gnats, not to mention the attention span, but that's a whole nother matter... In any case we have some teases already, I'm just glad right now that this isn't a place holder illustration. It's killing me with anticipation but you know what? I'm going to wait and see what gets in for the full list. And Mr. Jacobs, if you can do so legally, you can always update the template you already created way back when. It was a good template, and an awesome article in Dragon, back when it was still a real magazine...

DeathQuaker RPG Superstar 2015 Top 8 |

Just saw this. And I need to say something.
When I was a GM running 3rd edition, I never owned more than the core Monster Manual. Seriously. Occasionally I might borrow other MMs to use a creature here and there, but I often felt very ambivalent about the overall quality, with some things I wasn't really interested in and other stuff I was frustrated with, design wise. When I would hear a new one was coming out, my immediate response was, "Meh."
NOW, I own the Bestiary and Bestiary 2. And based on my experience with those books, my initial response to seeing this thread was, "OOOOOH BESTIARY THREE!!!!! YAY!!!" And I'm not even running a game right now.
Well done, Paizo. I am a cynical and selective buyer and don't like a lot of splats, and you've gotten me excited about a kind of thing I never thought I would be.

Eric Hinkle |

Orannis wrote:Second: Russian and Norwegian folklore!? Awesome! Kikimora and Vodyanoy, then? I'm having trouble thinking of a Norwegian critter you guys haven't done yet...There are actually quite a lot of them.
Any chance of seeing the Raven (note, that 'a' should have an umlaut), the Norwegian Foxwoman? I remember a band called Hedningarma made a song about one that was both very well done and downright spooky.

Kaiyanwang |

Narwals? They would counter any issues of overdoing cthulhu lovecraft monsters. :D
My.. sanity..
Gone.

Kaiyanwang |

Kaiyanwang wrote:You have not seen this before?Dorje Sylas wrote:Narwals? They would counter any issues of overdoing cthulhu lovecraft monsters. :DMy.. sanity..
Gone.
No.

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ProfPotts wrote:
Could we possibly hope for expanded Summon Monster and Summon Nature's Ally lists in this one? Or, at least, some rules / guidelines for creating custom lists?Nope. That's not a direction we wish to go with Pathfinder's summon monster spells.
What you'll be seeing instead are NEW spells that allow for more specialized summons.
We're not interested in bloating the summon monster spell lists and creating option paralysis in play with constantly evolving and changing summon monster lists.
Thanks for unleashing the Flurry of Answers!
Here's hoping the new summon spells are called out as backwards-compatable with the various Druid archetypes' Totemic Summons class features, if and where appropriate (since, for example, there's only one specific 'lizard' on the entire SNA lists for the Dragon Shaman, and only one shark - and no rays at all - for the Shark Shaman).

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Robert Little wrote:Yeah, I seem to remember being promised a bunch of new templates in Bestiary 2 and being supremely underwhelmed.
I'd certainly like to see a source cited there about promising templates.
Because template bloat is not really part of the Pathfinder monster design philosophy.
"Hosts of new templates and variants, including simple templates for on-the-fly creature customization" from the Bestiary 2 product page.
Total number of new templates (compared to Bestiary): 6. 4 full templates and 2 simple templates.
Not exactly what comes to mind when I see the word "hosts". And for Bestiary 3 the copy says "hordes". If hordes turns out to be 7, someone needs to get a better thesaurus.
(That said, I'm fine with not going for template bloat. However, given the amount of times I've seen templates from Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary show up in Pathfinder, I was expecting more love than we got.)

Kajehase |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

James Jacobs wrote:Any chance of seeing the Räven, the Norwegian Foxwoman? I remember a band called Hedningarma made a song about one that was both very well done and downright spooky.Orannis wrote:Second: Russian and Norwegian folklore!? Awesome! Kikimora and Vodyanoy, then? I'm having trouble thinking of a Norwegian critter you guys haven't done yet...There are actually quite a lot of them.
You mean this one?
(And on a nit-picking note, Räven just means "the Fox" [tagging "-en, -n, -et, or -t" at the end is our version of "the"], so no need for the the) ;)

Berselius |

Kaiju!? I love you folks. Seriously, infinite high-fives.
Berselius knew this roleplaying company well.
He need only wait.
The black scaled, colossal, regenerating, radioactive-fire breathing, killing machine will come.
The black scaled, colossal, regenerating, radioactive-fire breathing, killing machine will come.

Berselius |

Swan familiars/animal companions and Swanmays!
Let's not forget the Swanmays tropical version (aka the Bird Maiden). ^_^
And there actually WAS a kaiju template in 3.5—I wrote it for Dragon magazine. Good times.
Good times indeed but making Gojira simply by slapping a template on a stat block seems kinda like a disservice to the big G ya knows? It might be just me but I think the king of monsters kinda deserves his own rightful and unique stats.

gbonehead Owner - House of Books and Games LLC |

James Jacobs wrote:Robert Little wrote:Yeah, I seem to remember being promised a bunch of new templates in Bestiary 2 and being supremely underwhelmed.
I'd certainly like to see a source cited there about promising templates.
Because template bloat is not really part of the Pathfinder monster design philosophy.
"Hosts of new templates and variants, including simple templates for on-the-fly creature customization" from the Bestiary 2 product page.
Total number of new templates (compared to Bestiary): 6. 4 full templates and 2 simple templates.
Not exactly what comes to mind when I see the word "hosts". And for Bestiary 3 the copy says "hordes". If hordes turns out to be 7, someone needs to get a better thesaurus.
(That said, I'm fine with not going for template bloat. However, given the amount of times I've seen templates from Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary show up in Pathfinder, I was expecting more love than we got.)
While I don't intend to get into a debate on the precise quantitative value of "hosts", it does say and variants.. So it's not just counting the 6 templates in the book.
(And I love templates - I am looking forward to the uber-Tome of Horrors that's coming out, and I'd love for Green Ronin to update the Advanced Bestiary.)

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If you're still buying Golarion and Pathfinder stuff, I'll take that as a sign that I'm doing my job right by building products that, even if they contain some elements someone doesn't like or hates, are still vastly outweighed by the cool stuff.
This.
I've always been... uncomfortable with Lovecraftian stuff, but I've been finding I actually like the way it's been integrated into Golarion. (I've actually scared myself a bit when I realized that. 8^)

gbonehead Owner - House of Books and Games LLC |

Berselius wrote:Oh No, it's God*illa, Run.
He need only wait.The black scaled, colossal, regenerating, radioactive-fire breathing, killing machine will come.
The black scaled, colossal, regenerating, radioactive-fire breathing, killing machine will come.
Godpilla? Godfilla? Godoilla? Give me a hint, here ...

gbonehead Owner - House of Books and Games LLC |

I am especially excited about more monsters from real-world myth , Inuit in particular. I'm working on a Fringe Buffy the Supernatural Highlander Brimstone Files game, and wanted some Inuit for the opening adventure.
I'll work on other details now, since it looks like the pros have my back!
I laughed and then realized it probably wasn't a joke :)
(taps the sarcasm-O-matic to see if it's working)

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Just one question - will the Bestiary 3 finally address, update, better explain, or fix the entire Grab/Constrict mess? I won't rehash the details here, as I'm sure everyone is aware of the hundreds of confused posts on the matter. Lots of critters Grab, and many of them also Constrict. These universal monster rules need an overhaul, or clear explanation of the rules...badly.

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Just one question - will the Bestiary 3 finally address, update, better explain, or fix the entire Grab/Constrict mess? I won't rehash the details here, as I'm sure everyone is aware of the hundreds of confused posts on the matter. Lots of critters Grab, and many of them also Constrict. These universal monster rules need an overhaul, or clear explanation of the rules...badly.
Dunno, always seemed perfectly clear to me. A creature with grab can start a grapple as a free action if it hits with the natural attack that has grab attached to it. It gains a +4 bonus to grapple checks and can choose to maintain grapple without it being grappled but with a -20 penalty to any grapple check.
Constrict just means that if the grappling creature chooses to do damage while grappling, it adds constrict damage to it's natural weapon damage. What's not to understand?

Eric Hinkle |

Eric Hinkle wrote:James Jacobs wrote:Any chance of seeing the Räven, the Norwegian Foxwoman? I remember a band called Hedningarma made a song about one that was both very well done and downright spooky.Orannis wrote:Second: Russian and Norwegian folklore!? Awesome! Kikimora and Vodyanoy, then? I'm having trouble thinking of a Norwegian critter you guys haven't done yet...There are actually quite a lot of them.You mean this one?
(And on a nit-picking note, Räven just means "the Fox" [tagging "-en, -n, -et, or -t" at the end is our version of "the"], so no need for the the) ;)
Thanks for the link and the correction on how to use proper Norwegian.