Psionic Bestiary (PFRPG) PDF

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Horrors abound in this tome of psionic monsters for use in your Pathfinder Roleplaying Game campaign!

From the tiny, yet dangerous puppeteers, to the huge thought slayer, psionic monsters for every level of play are included. Create an entire campaign out of the insidious phrenic scourge, or simply drop in an encounter with the carnvivorous mathara tree while the party is out exploring.

Find the classic psionic monsters like the brain mole to the psion killer, as well as dozens of brand new, never-before-seen monsters like the skull thrasher and the deep hound, or psionic dragons like you've never seen them before, all within the pages of the Psionic Bestiary!

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5.00/5 (based on 4 ratings)

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Excelent

5/5

Great looking bestiary in perfect quality


Excellent Bestiary for Psionic Campaigns

5/5

I was thoroughly impressed with this bestiary. With a handful of exceptions, the quality of it was on par with anything that I would expect from Paizo themselves. While I was not crazy about all of the creatures, nor with all of the art, I generally tend to feel that way about Paizo produced bestiaries as well, which I feel is a pretty good benchmark.

Perhaps the thing I found least appealing was certain pieces of art, though some of that stemmed from my dislike of anything resembling HR Geiger, and there was one monster in particular (and not the Cerebrilith) that was very xenomorph inspired, and not well done at that.

That having been said, I loved virtually all of the remaining art, as it was suitably creepy and amazing as needed, and often both those qualities at once.

Though I could not speak with authority on the balance of the creatures, they seemed to be well balanced for psionic parties, giving a lot more credence to the breadth of psionics in general. I loved the creatures that were updated for psionics as well, such as the Intellect Devourer, as those creatures fit perfectly well, but lack the support that make them fit in more properly in a psionics driven campaign.

One other minor quibble was the propensity for creatures to negate psionics entirely. For being a psionic bestiary, it makes sense that some creatures might be angled towards simply being a scourge, given that traditional campaigns are rife with terrible enemies that have spell resistance. However, there were numerous monsters that completely negate psionics, sometimes as an area effect. I suppose this is more of a matter of taste.

However, I did find that the book dripped with plenty of creepiness and weirdness, which I found wholly appropriate given the nature of the bestiary. I also was impressed with the range of creature types and subtypes that were present in the book, given that most psionic type creatures tend heavily towards aberrant creatures.

Overall, I was very happy with the product, and am suitably inspired to use it for reference many number of future games. Well done!


5/5

There isn't much to say about this product. Its a bestiary with psionic creatures. Some of them are psionic versions of things that you already find in Paizo's bestiaries such as Aboleth and Brain Devourers, but also there are some unique and campaign inspiring ones. They each come with some useful fluff and lists arranging them by terrain, type and CR.

If I had a gripe I think the book is too short. There are a lot of potential critters that would have been done justice if this book was a lot bigger making for a huge psionic campaigns although that's just a nitpick reflecting my greed for psionic creatures. Honestly I think the real thing missing is a focus on Templates. The Marked Ones template helps a bit but having more templates would have effectively multiplied this book's value by the amount of creatures in every other bestiary.

Those complaints aside this book delivers what it promises and is bound to be used whenever I have any psioncs in my games, particularly some of the converted creatures that feel like they should have been psionic in the first place giving this book five stars.


An Endzeitgeist.com review

5/5

This massive bestiary clocks in at 105 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD, 1 page advertisement, leaving us with a massive 100 pages of content, so let's take a look!

First of all - this is a massive bestiary and as such, I can't go into the details of every creature herein without bloating it beyond belief. Additionally, I have reviewed the ongoing subscription (with the exception of ~2-3 installments, I think), so if in doubt, there are some reviews in the ether that are more detailed regarding the respective creatures. Finally, if you're like me and have accompanied the evolution of PFRPG's psionics, then you'll notice that Ultimate Psionics no longer featured monsters - well, that's why this book exists - handy player/DM separation by book - nice.

We begin this book with some explanations on how psionic creatures work, what to look out for etc., before 2 new feats that are used in this book are depicted - the aberration-only feat that nets you acidic blood, plus one 6-rank-prerequisite feat that allows the creature with it to avoid detection by e.g. blindsight etc. - while I get the intent behind the feat and applaud it, I do think that different abilities should add different bonuses to the perception-check for fairness's sake - after all, quite a feat creatures are very much dependant on blindsight and more often than not fail to invest ranks in perception. Now rest assured that this is a VERY minor nitpick and will not influence the verdict, but I'd urge DMs allowing this feat to take a look at eligible creatures and potentially reassign skill-ranks.

All right, got that? Neato, then let's dive head first into the array of psionic creatures presented herein - and, as per the tradition, we begin with the iconic astral constructs and all the table to customize them...but I assume you're familiar with these guys. Much cooler would be the psionic inevitables, the automata - crystalline machinery, deadly tricks, a regeneration only foiled by sonic damage...these guys are nasty and the direct foes of aberrations and similar creatures!

Classics like the crysmal, caller in darkness, folugub, psion-killer or cerebrelith can be found in these pages as well, though more often than not, I have to admit to by now simply having a higher standard for monsters - when compared to quite a few critters herein, the "classics" feel a bit conventional at times.

Now if you've followed my reviews, Hellfire aura-bearing devils, cerebremorte undead, beetles with a truly disturbing life cycle and brain parasite worms may sound familiar - and if you haven't encountered them, the phrenic hegemony, heirs to the illithids, may very well be the more disturbing (and complex) type of creature - they were awesome in the WiP-pdf and by now have more artworks - and these are simply awesome. Speaking of awesome - when I complained about the polearm masters of the Pyn-Gok race not getting any cool signature tricks via their plummage, I was heard - they now have quite a bunch of cool additional tricks! The T'artys have alas, not received a similar treatment - they still are ye' old mischief-causing fey, only with psionics. *shrugs* Their artwork ahs been upgraded, though!

A nod to Forgotten Realms' Saurians can be found in this pdf alongside some delightfully demented plant creatures -from the classic udoroot that now has some actually unique tricks to strange, mouth-studded trees, many of the artworks perfectly drive home the utter weirdness and partially alien flavor of psionics - take the humanoid plants with EYES, the Iniro. One look at their nightmareish artwork and you'll know you want to use these fellows! The Mindseed Tree is no less disturbing to me and just a fun adversary as well!

Dreamborn, colossal magical beasts adrift in the ether, the last members of a dying race, a strange array of mutated creatures that have been driven insane by a cataclysm, only to endure...how? Upon death of one , another member of their race hideously splits in two... The crystalline shackle using Dedrakons and similar hunters make for iconic magical beasts as hunters that work well in a context of a given world requiring appropriate predators.

And speaking of predators - beyond the awesomeness that is the phrenic hegemony, we also receive examples of psionic apex predators - psionic dragons. A total of 5 dragon types are provided - all of which radically different from the gem-dragon tradition: We receive the Cypher, Imagos, Keris, Lorican and Scourge dragons. Cypher dragons are travelers of the planes and do have some rather cool, unique abilities - they can disrupt patterns just like the Cryptic-class and indeed, their age-category abilities gained fall in line with this concept and remain their uniqueness.

Imago dragons do not cause fear, instead using confusion and are the wilders among dragonkind, coupling wilder-style tricks with a theme of oneiromancy etc. - cool! Now if you're like me, at one point, the color-coding of dragons annoyed you - while templates etc. by now allow for ways past that, simply introducing the energy-type changing Kerris dragons and their tricks might do the trick as well. Two thumbs up! Speaking of which - the Lorican dragon's tricks are imaginative as well - these guys can wrap essentially a pocket astral plane around themselves and exert control over this area, modifying magic affinity, gravity etc. - innovative and just incredibly cool!

Finally, the Scourge Dragons would be the dread-equivalent to the cypher dragon's cryptic-affinity -masters of fear with an affinity for the plane of shadows, they should be considered rather awesome as well. But this would not be all - beyond these trueborn dragons, there also are Ksarite dragons and drakes, partially composed of psionic force -compared to the true born dragons, though, these guys feel less impressive.

In case you're looking for templates to apply to creatures, we also receive fodder in that regard beyond aforementioned brain worm hosts - take the Marked One (CR +3) template - studded with psionic tattoos they can spread, these guys are obsessed with order and there might very well be a global agenda behind the phenomenon... narrative gold hiding here. Speaking of which - by now, you can create your own deranged trepanner-constructs -cool to see the missing crafting information showing up herein. I just wished the psychotrope drugs of a shambler variant had received similar treatment.

A massive appendix of creatures by type, by CR and by terrain makes this bestiary easy to handle for the DM - kudos!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch: At this point a shout-out to Anguish on the Paizo boards who did a massive bunch of editing for this book, checking statblocks for even the most minute of errors. My hat's off to you, sir (or madam)! The pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience and layout adheres to Dreamscarred Press' two-column full color standard. The artworks provided for the creatures herein are universally full-color and belong to the more gorgeous, unique of artworks you'll see. While not adhering to a uniform style, the artworks are great and the less than awesome ones from the WiP have been exchanged with higher quality pieces - neat! It should also be noted that the pdf of this book comes with an additional, more printer-friendly version - nice! I can't comment on the print-version since I do not have it.

The team of designers Jeremy Smith, Andreas Rönnqvist, Michael McCarthy, Dale McCoy Jr., Michael Pixton, Jim Hunnicutt, Jade Ripley and Dean Siemsen have done a great job - the psionic bestiary offers quite an array of damn cool psionic creatures, studded with unique signature abilities, using the rules to their full extent, often significantly improving the less than superb examples among the WiP-files. Indeed, the majority of the creatures herein have something significantly cool going for them. Now if there is something to said against the pdf, it would be that there is no template to turn non-psionic creatures into psionic creatures and wilder in the class rules of the respective psionic classes. This is especially baffling to me due to the cover offering an aboleth, of which there is a distinct lack of in the book - why not provide some psionic versions of these iconic foes?

This would constitute the only thing truly missing from this book - a way to codify psionics in a massive choose-your-tricks template - other than that oversight, this book is a glorious bestiary, especially if you're looking for far-out creatures...and for fans of psionics, there's no way past this, anyways. My final verdict will hence clock in at a high recommendation of 5 stars, just shy by a tiny margin of my seal of approval.

Endzeitgeist out.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Hmm, this book is quite interesting in that there is seemingly a greater percentage of essentially benign or well-intentioned creatures than I recall seeing in a lot of other monster books (though mostly still of neutral alignments, with the potential of fighting against PCs as minions of malevolent monsters or through misunderstandings [or in the case of one or two of the monsters, delusion].)


Dreaming Psion wrote:
Hmm, this book is quite interesting in that there is seemingly a greater percentage of essentially benign or well-intentioned creatures than I recall seeing in a lot of other monster books (though mostly still of neutral alignments, with the potential of fighting against PCs as minions of malevolent monsters or through misunderstandings [or in the case of one or two of the monsters, delusion].)

Any in particular catch your interest? I know I was involved in several of those benign monsters; I wanted to be able to add 'positive' plot hooks, where something striking and unusual is not necessarily trying to kill you.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Prince of Knives wrote:
Dreaming Psion wrote:
Hmm, this book is quite interesting in that there is seemingly a greater percentage of essentially benign or well-intentioned creatures than I recall seeing in a lot of other monster books (though mostly still of neutral alignments, with the potential of fighting against PCs as minions of malevolent monsters or through misunderstandings [or in the case of one or two of the monsters, delusion].)
Any in particular catch your interest? I know I was involved in several of those benign monsters; I wanted to be able to add 'positive' plot hooks, where something striking and unusual is not necessarily trying to kill you.

I am overall pretty fond of most of the monsters (although just by a subjective glance the dedrakon looks to be more of a CR 4 than a CR 3.) In a possible future revision or later supplement, it might be good to have a "cohort equivalent" level if you wanted to recruit them with leadership.

The dread trepanner is perhaps my favorite of the "benign intentioned" monsters because I like the freakiness of monsters who do you harm "for your own good." And with the right social skills you could reasonably calm one down, but you're still playing a dangerous game by letting it hang out with you. They also make the perfect assistants to torturers or mad scientist types.

The ghaar's another interesting one because of its past and affinity for necromancy (inferring that it has a tendency for taking levels in necromancer type wizards, sorcerers, or clerics because of the race's lack of inborn necromantic ability.) It strikes me as having the most mystery of the lot. The ural is similarly interesting, but its insane mind, solitary nature, poof saves, and lack of plant immunities makes it seem like it would be trickier to use in a game when hostilities likely break out.

I liked the iniro because you have to give something up for its symbiosis. Knowing its weight would be helpful though as it seems like the host would have to carry it around.

The fither strikes me as the psionic equivalent of a disenchanter beast but with a bit more punch (in the form of psionic powers) and less of a permanent gotcha factor (in that its magic/psionic item drain is temporary- still good for a momentary "OH CRAP" moment from the players the first time you spring it on them without totally putting them through the wringer.)

Generally speaking, I like that having friendly relations with a bunch of these creatures might cost you something (even if it's just being judged as being sympathetic to "horrible monsters".) Their hideous (from our human perspective) appearances makes me think they suffer from the same problem as the flumph- wanting to help/get a long but being rejected by many societies because of their monstrous natures. This in turn implies they will seek to attach themselves to more monstrous societies (for the presumed lack of judgmental sensibilities.) The reva seems to me to be the poster child of this phenomenon.

For the most part, I would surmise the monsters in this book are easier than a lot of monsters to "plug in and play" in an adventure because they seem to have a great affinity for being minions of other monsters in unique yet understandable ways.

The monsters in this book can take on multiple roles in adventures too- the mindseed tree can be trying to solicit its seeds or it could be on the warpath out of sheer frustration. Even the relatively obviously evil cerebremorte (great name, btw) has a couple of built in M.O.s- revenge or greed for further knowledge/dominance. Three if you pick up on the implicit nod that some of them don't even realize they are dead- an irony I find delicious considering their psionic natures. Overall, you guys did a great job of hinting at things without dictating how they are and thus enabling the creative imagination to run wild.

Publisher, Dreamscarred Press

FYI, I've uploaded a revised PDF. Given PaizoCon, it may be a few days before it gets approved. Here are the changes:

Deranged Trepanner now has Construction information
Bonus feats on T'artys and Pyn-gok properly superscripted
Bookmark added for Appendex: Creatures by Terrain
Appendex: Creatures by Terrain added to Table of Contents
Several graphics lightened due to printing out too dark
Pyn-gok has a new signature ability dealing with its plumage
Psi-Like Ability formatting standardized

Publisher, Dreamscarred Press

3 people marked this as a favorite.

Proof arrived from the printer and everything looks good! Off to print!

Dark Archive

Soon!


Does anyone know if the rules content (monster stat-blocks etc) of this book is published under the OGL?

Scarab Sages

looks like it per the OGL statement on p103.

Publisher, Dreamscarred Press

All of our mechanics are always released as open content.


Jeremy Smith wrote:
All of our mechanics are always released as open content.

Brilliant! Thanks!


Super pumped. I just heard my print version is being shipped. The PDF is gorgeous, and I look forward to holding hard copy in my greedy mitts


I need to get the cash together for the hard copy!!


Mine finally arrived yesterday!!!


Reviewed first on endzeitgeist.com, then submitted to Nerdtrek and GMS magazine and Lou Agresta's RPGaggression and posted here, on OBS and d20pfsrd.com's shop. Cheers!


Also: Weirdly, the book has the wrong cover here in the shop.

Webstore Gninja Minion

Endzeitgeist wrote:
Also: Weirdly, the book has the wrong cover here in the shop.

It's been fixed!

Grand Lodge

So i ordered my book in November and it still hasn't shipped from Paizo. When might my book ship to me? Its been a few months?

Webstore Gninja Minion

1 person marked this as a favorite.
GarnathFrostmantle wrote:
So i ordered my book in November and it still hasn't shipped from Paizo. When might my book ship to me? Its been a few months?

On its way to us, and from our friendly clever warehouse raptor claws to your game table.


Is this a softcover or a hardcover?


Covent wrote:
Is this a softcover or a hardcover?

Softcover.


Thank you


Why is the aboleth on the cover but not in the contents?


DungeonmasterCal wrote:
Why is the aboleth on the cover but not in the contents?

Balls were dropped.


That's too bad. Maybe they could picked up and tacked onto the download as a freebie? Maybe?

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