Creature Monthly #1 (PFRPG) PDF

This collection of monster is 49 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page FAQ on creaturedaily,3 pages of advertisement and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 41 pages of content for the new monsters, so what exactly do we get?

The creatures herein follow a two-page standard - one page artwork/statblocks and then additional information about tactics/strategy etc.
The first creature, the Blood Shadow, already provides for quite an interesting read. It's a creature of the "mode"-type, as I've dubbed them in my homebrew - essentially, it has two different versions: One is its incorporeal version that is quite alike a powerful shadow. However, as soon as it deals its con-damage to its foes, it becomes corporeal, gains access to the ability to spray damage-dealing blood and vulnerabilities. I do like this one, however, it suffers from editing that is below sub-par (including more than 3 editing glitches in its entry) and the blood spray signature ability does not specify which kind of damage its blood spray deals. Acid? Cold? Piercing/slashing? We don't know.

The second creature herein is the Boglin - a subtype of goblin that can squeeze its body through tight spaces and eat just about everything. Unfortunately, the amount of editing glitches remains in that one and while no abilities suffer from that, it rips you from the entry.

The Frost Hag is dependent on her winter stone for power (a nice weakness to exploit) and add the [cold]-descriptor to any of her spells. The hag can also stun foes with her glare. Her statblock doesn't put the spells she knows into italics, violating the formatting standard.

The Glacial Gaunt (with a very disturbing artwork) can chill the blood of mortals via their bites and also come with a neat aura. Unfortunately, this critter also suffers from the prevalent editing problems.

The Goblin Naga is a spined serpent with poison and an oversized maw - a great creature per se, but again, editing and the lack of italicized spells detract from the quality of the critter.

The Great Yeti seems to have been made for people like me, who'd rather use the Yeti as the mythical force of nature than as a kind of humanoid - it clocks in at CR 16, can call avalanches and will tear foes that meet it in melee to shreds. Unfortunately, the avalanche call does not specify, which kind of earthquake-effect it duplicates - just that the avalanche works like the spell. Unfortunately, the spell works differently for different terrains. It should be noted that SGG's Avalanche spell is much better suited to be used.

The malignly intelligent Hoarfrost Hound can lure foes into its clutches and comes with a breath weapon - I do like this critter, as I do the Hoarfrost Rams, a neat new, potentially deadly animal with again, an awesome artwork. Speaking of cool, deadly animals, the Horned Bear is another winner. I'm going to stop commenting on the editing glitches.

The Icewisp is a neat lower level, ice-themed wisp - once again, nice! The Ighalan is a disturbing kind of savage degenerated humanoid. What's truly awesome, though, is the Iron Swamr Golem, which can change from swarm to golem-form and back.

Evil, lightning-imbued treants seek to pulverize foes via electricity, while Nysrogha demons (subtype demon, should be under "d" in the alphabetical order) has the option to frighten foes and gain combat bonuses via its tumorous growths. While the latter ability is cool, I think it could have been easily expanded to make this one even more awesome.

The Flea-covered Rat Ogre may already be known to those owning the Ecology of the Ratfolk, but its revised edition in this book is better - it now has a cool signature ability and feels better rounded and unique - nice!

Stone Goblins are dwarf-hating, elemental earth-infused goblins that can throw clusterbomb-like stones that deal splash damage.

The Storm Phoenix, Storm Wraith and Storm Angel provide 3 cool creatures, all with their very own signature abilities and awesome artworks as well - nice, especially due to the iconicity of storm-riding magical birds and its potential usefulness in Skull and Shackles.

The final creature is the winter wight, an undead that causes hypothermia - and treats it as a poison. That's not how hypothermia works in PFRPG.
"Creatures that suffer nonlethal damage from the cold climate become frostbitten or hypothermic, and are fatigued until the nonlethal damage is removed. It is possible for a character to undergo both frostbite and hypothermia simultaneously by failing two or more saves against cold or exposure, at which point she is treated as though suffering multiple fatigue effects, becoming exhausted."

Why not make its attacks grant a fort-save, on a failure the target suffers from hypothermia until all damage inflicted by the wight is healed. On a second hit and failed save exhausted etc. If you would have wanted to make them deadly and frightening, the third hit would bring unconsciousness. Why shoehorn hypothermia into a lame, easily curable, temporary fatigue-like poison? Also, the DC is miscalculated, I think. Undead use Cha instead of Con for the calculation of such abilities and the wight has a Cha of 17, but the ability has a DC of 14 to resist. It does have the ability focus-feat, though, so we'd actually arrive at a DC of 15, at least if the hypothermia is supposed to be an extension of the touch attack. However, said touch has a DC of 16 to resist and I don't get how that's correct.

Conclusion:
Layout adheres to a beautiful 2-column full color standard and the artworks by Rick Hershey are stellar and a joy to behold - e.g. the Iron Golem Swarm is AWESOME. Editing and formatting. Oh, editing and formatting. This pdf does not need another pass, it needs a couple of them. Each entry has one or more glitches. Spells are not italicized. Sometimes damage-type is not specified. The version of the pdf that works with my version of adobe (the second still having problems with the artworks) has no bookmarks, which is a pity. This pdf is one of those that hurt me - the artworks are stellar. The creatures are mostly awesome in concept and their ideas rock. Their artworks also underline the awesomeness that most of these creatures are, or rather could have been. Welcome to the subjunctive, everything could be so awesome here.
In fact, were this an ideal world, I'd give this the full 5 stars for the creatures - nice signature abilities, cool concepts etc. Unfortunately, the at best sloppy editing all but ruins this pdf, at least for me. I did not make all the calculations because I frankly don't have the time to, but the wonky DCs of the Winter Wight make me fear that the glitches extend to the other creatures as well. It's really sad, actually - the ideas are great, the signature abilities sometimes even inspired, but the editing and formatting glitches all but ruin this pdf for me. Generally, this pdf unfortunately has so many flaws, from one version that doesn't work to statblock errors and wonky mechanics, that all greatness of the ideas, at least for me utterly evaporates. If I want hand-waved monsters, I can build them myself - I want solid statblocks and this pdf just does not deliver and breaks conventions a couple of times - a subtype that does not exist, a CN angel - the list goes on.

And those are the ones that IMMEDIATELY came to my intentions - sorting through this with a fine-tooth comb would probably result in many, many more glitches. I'm not picky when it comes to statblocks, but the errors herein are significant and impede the usability of these critters. Add the price and not even the good concepts and great artworks can save this. I'll settle for a final verdict of 1.5 stars, as it fails VERY hard at editing and displays a lack of sureness regarding the rules - I'll have to round down on this one for now. Let's hope this gets a revision to make the creatures shine as they deserve to.

Endzeitgeist out.

Ever feel like every day is another challenge to be overcome? Not in that “it’s a new adventure today!” feeling, but more of a “what awful thing is going to happen today?” sorta way. I imagine that PCs must feel that way a lot, and if so then the endless parade of monsters probably has quite a bit to do with it. Sometimes it must seem like there’s a new monster every day. Speaking of which…

Creature Monthly is the aptly-named monthly compendium of creatures from the Creature Daily website, which delivers a new monster for your Pathfinder game every weekday. This first compilation presents the monsters for April, 2012. Let’s flip through the pages and see what creatures lie in store.

This product comes with two different PDF files, one called April12CDweb and another called April12CDpdf. I’m not sure what the technical difference between the two is, but there’s clearly some sort of difference, because my computer can view the former file smoothly, but the latter one has persistent viewing problems. To be more specific, whenever I try to look through the “April12CDpdf” file, my Acrobat Reader X (on Windows XP Home, if that helps) informs me that it’s having a problem viewing the file (error code 40), and refuses to display the artwork – the text comes through just fine, it’s only the artwork that refuses to display.

Of course, it’s something of a moot point, though a disturbing one, as the April12CDweb file displays just fine. From what I can make out, the two files are meant to be identical in terms of their visual presentation, so there’s no loss of content for the error. Hence, the rest of this review will deal exclusively with what’s in the “…web” file.

The April ’12 Creature Monthly is a forty-seven page PDF that contains exactly twenty monsters, something that always seemed slightly off to me, as there were twenty-one weekdays in April. I know that one missing monster is a small thing, but I can’t help but wonder what happened to the twenty-first creature.

Unfortunately, the book irked me from the get-go, as it lacked the ease-of-navigation tools I’ve come to expect both for PDF files and for bestiaries. To be clear, the book does have a table of contents, listing each monster alphabetically by name. That’s it. No hyperlinks in the table of contents, no bookmarks, no index of monsters by CR or creature type or even terrain. The only way to get an overview of what’s here is to read through the entire book and use the table of contents as a refresher. Hopefully future months will be more forthcoming with the GM aids.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the artwork here, however. Each monster has a full color illustration, and the quality for the picture if exceptionally high. In each case the picture fairly leaps off the page, and will definitely wow your players. Given that the book it set on a light grey background, with borders of darker grey and slight whorl patterns on them, the presentation element of the book is strong. It’s so strong, however, that the lack of a printer-friendly version is notable in its absence. Likewise, size-specific counters to represent the creatures on the battlemat aren’t to be found either.

But after all of these technical issues, what about the monsters themselves, you ask?

The twenty monsters to be found here run a range of CRs, from ½ to 16, and surprisingly there’s an underlying theme to the monsters here – the majority of them are from a cold environment. Now, there are plenty of monsters for whom that’s not so, but a significant number of them are monsters with a wintery theme.

I should mention that most of these monsters could have stood to go a few more rounds of editing. In reading over what’s here, I found creatures with typographical errors (e.g. an opening parenthesis one space too soon for the Blood Shadow’s Ability Focus feat), stylistic errors (the storm angel is a Chaotic Neutral creature with the angel subtype, for instance, or how the Storm Wraith has the electricity subtype…which doesn’t exist), and errors in stat blocks (e.g. the Storm Wraith’s AC bonuses are +1 dodge, +4 deflection, and +7 Dex, giving it an AC of…24? What?). Little errors like these peppered the vast majority of the monsters here, and that’s just on a casual inspection.

Overall, this is a monster book with good intentions but flawed execution. The monsters here are, for the most part, very good in terms of their underlying idea, and in how they want to stat those ideas up. It’s a host of technical problems, from the PDF format to the stat blocks themselves that are holding the book back. Hopefully, these will be a learning experience for the publisher, and next month’s creatures will be easier to use to terrify your players.