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He killed the God of War. He ascended into his divinity. No one told him that was the easy part.

Look into the inner workings of gods and how they build worlds. From a divine perch, map your world and experience tectonics, magical geography, predation, ecological conflict, and cultural development. Following in the foodsteps of A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (Gen Con ENnies 2003 Best Setting Supplement), A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture provides real-world phenomena for a fantasy game. This 160-page supplement helps world builders make their world from scratch, including topics like tectonics, mapping, weather, ecological conflict, and cultural development.

Build Your World. Better.

Authors: Suzi Yee and Joseph Browning

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Nominated for two 2005 Gen Con Awards including Best Adversary Product, A Magical Society: Beast Builder is 224 pages packed with information that helps you make your own monsters. In the tradition of A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe and A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture, A Magical Society: Beast Builder gives you the tools you need to make your own campaign-specific monsters to challenge and excite your players while adding to the depth and realism of your campaign world.

Chapter One: Monster Concepts and Functions
Monster concepts and functions drive what a monster is and even more importantly, what it does. This chapter discusses common concepts such as creature hierarchies (juvenile, adult, elder etc.), additive abilities (like the vrock's dance of ruin), mythological inspiration and other monster building aspects.

It gives advice on creating a good concept based upon the function of a creature. Every monster has a concept and a type (such as giant, vermin, etc.), but more than that every monster has a function; the part of the monster that answers the question "What does it do?" It outlines the 20 most common functions such as grappler, caster, disabler, energy attacker and PC killer, and how such functions play out in the game. Under each function, you'll also find a list of the creatures from the SRD as well as creatures from Monster Geographica: Underground that possess that function.

Chapter Two: Monsters and their Environment
Every monster has a place in your world and every place has its monsters. This chapter is simply stuffed with useful information about environment, ecology, biology, and behavior that will help you completely customize every creature to suit your needs. We all know that statistics alone don't make a great monster. The best monsters are ones with a rich place within your world and this chapter will help you give your new creation a fitting background.

Chapter Three: Monster Statistics
Although a great background is a must for a great monster, statistical accuracy is just as important. This 19-page chapter discusses every bit of the monster stat block and gives you the information you need to insure your great fluff isn't let down by poor crunch.

Chapter Four: Type and Subtype
Continuing the statistical breakdown of creatures, type and subtype is analyzed in chapter four. It give advices about determining subtype (just what is an aberration anyway?) as well as breakdown on ability scores based upon the SRD monsters. You'll find that although the rules say one thing, the execution often shows another when it comes to ability scores.

Chapter Five: Templates
Worthy of their own chapter, templates are great additions to any GMs bag of tricks. This chapter gives you information on the main 14 template themes (such as archetypal, greater, half, and planar-aligned) as well as seven main ways of acquiring a template. It finishes with a template-only version of chapters four and seven, giving you all existing information so you'll have more options when designing your own templates.

Chapter Six: Bits and Pieces
Bits and pieces is a short chapter filled with campaign-oriented monster parts. In a magical world filled with hostile monsters, holistic magic plays its role and the remains of fallen foes can often be used against those who lived. This chapter helps think of monsters from yet another perspective.

Chapter Seven: Special Attacks, Special Qualities, and Conditions
This huge chapter provides you with 600 special abilities taken from all the creatures in the SRD and all the creatures in Monster Geographica: Underground. Each of these abilities has been broken down to component parts to demonstrate useful guidelines when using them with any CR creature. For example the balor's death throes SA/SQ is now tied to a creature's HD, instead of being a straight 100 points of damage. Every SA/SQ has its source monsters (the monsters that possess that ability) listed as well. Once you jump into this chapter there's no turning back; there are simply so many cool things you could do when making your monsters you may not want to move on.

Appendix I: D20 Mechanic Table
A single table showing the d20 mechanic. You'll be surprised how useful this is when deciding monster hit percentages and saving throw percentages. It's much easier than just doing it in your head.

Appendix II: Editing Checklist
Every monster should face the checklist! A short outline-format editing checklist that covers the most common dangers/errors of d20 monster creation.

Appendix III: Random(ish) Monster Generator
And last but not least, a random(ish) monster generator is provided for when inspiration has simply gone dry. Don't expect the most sensible results, but anything can happen! This is particularly useful if you want to make creatures for the hordes of chaos.

Author: Joseph Browning

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A Magical Society: Silk Road is a 160-page supplement detailing great overland trade routes.

Borrowing extensively from the caravans of Central Asia, A Magical Society: Silk Road covers a variety of topics: what factors engender great overland trade routes, what elements accompany the existence of silk roads, and how do caravans function on the road (with consideration to terrain). Due to general unfamiliarity with Central Asia, an entire chapter is dedicated to the historic Silk Road with maps detailing the major trade destinations. And, last but not least, there is a trade system with over 1,000 trade goods, giving ultimate tools for economic simulation.

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This second edition adds an entirely new chapter about magical medieval warfare and expands upon two other chapters. A total of 22 new pages of material are contained in the Second edition.

Regarding the 1st Edition of A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, Monte Cook (author of the 3E Dungeon Master's Guide) said: "If you're a DM and running a D&D game, you should have this book. Period."

This 192-page supplement is for GMs and players who wish to add a touch of realism to their game. It's for the people who'd like to flesh out the background of their gaming world, but don't have the time to dig through scholarly books. A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe provides you flexibility and advice in creating your own world. It contains a massive amount of game-usable information about the medieval period and focuses on how D20 magic could change a traditional medieval setting. Generation systems for kingdoms, cities, manors, aristocratic wealth and landholding; a thorough construction system; and an economic simulator allow GMs to recreate the high middle ages feel with ease.

A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe solves age-old dilemmas like: How much does it cost for my PCs to repair the formerly orc-infested abandoned keep they want to use as a home base? What would happen, politically, were the PCs to set up their keep? How big is my city of 15,000 people? How many buildings are in my city? What do all the NPCs do? How do I start my PCs on the road to becoming kings? Just how much does a king earn a year anyway? What about just a regular noble? How big is a kingdom of 5,000,000 people? How many cultivated acres does it take to feed them? How should I map towns, cities, and smaller communities within my kingdom? What type of government should I use for my kingdom? How does magical religion really work? Just what do those NPCs do with all their time?

The questions plaguing DMs and world-builders for the past twenty-five years have now been answered!

Here's what other reviewers have been saying about the 1st Edition:
• "It's not a setting in and of itself, but a meta-setting you utilize for depth and richness on your own setting."
  —Joe G Kushner at EN World
• "This is one product I'd recommend that every GM who is serious about world creation have on his or her bookshelf."
  —Glenn Dean at D20 Magazine Rack

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A Magical Medieval Society: Western European Warfare is a 19-page PDF discussing how medieval people regarded and engaged in war and how to integrate magic while maintaining the fabric of medieval life.

While A Magical Medieval Society: Western European Warfare will become the ninth chapter to the award-winning A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, we at Expeditious Retreat Press wanted to make the new chapter available to fans while we are working on more new chapters for the second edition.

Authors: Joseph Browning

Note: The second edition of A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe is now available for sale!

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Bring the rich history of place names into your game! A Magical Medieval Society: On Place Names provides tips and tricks for GM interested in creating good place names for their campaign. Included is a 500+ word list providing detailed information regarding the historical naming of places in the UK. This powerful resource can be used as a guide for newly created words in a campaign language, or as a drop-and-roll resource providing limitless combinations right out of the gate.

Make the names on your maps make sense! Pick up A Magical Medieval Society: On Place Names!

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What is an aggressive ecology? It's a new type of challenge for your players, a monster with many faces, a web of interrelated challenges that can together form a complex encounter-in-depth. It is a world-building device based upon a magical interrelationship between disparate, yet connected creatures. It is, in short, something not seen before and something not quickly forgotten.

There are few aggressive ecologies found in the deep oceans, and only one centered upon the rotting carcass of a fallen whale. A whale fall is an unusual event in and of itself, but occasionally these massive bounties of detrital material land in places that simply cannot sustain natural life of any sort: a negative energy sink. These strange negative energies infuse a whale carcass with unholy power giving unlife, mobility, and malevolence-creating an undead leviathan. But worse, after enough time, the undead leviathan rises to torment the land!

This aggressive ecology presents appropriate challenges for groups of 10th to 25th levels, ranging from the oceans to the land. Present your players a new type of challenge, the Aggressive Ecology!

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This excerpt from A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe is the winner of 2 ENnies awards: Best Electronic Product and Best Free Product!

Since the release of A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe, we at Expeditious Retreat Press have fielded more questions concerning cities than other questions combined. Because of this tremendous interest in city creation and the utter lack of material to support needy GMs, we've decided to gather all the city-specific information from A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe into one free product. A Magical Medieval Society: City Guide is the complete third and fourth chapters from A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe (second printing).

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This free PDF is a 37-page peek into A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture. A collection of the three mapping sections in MS:EC, A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping is a stand alone document that helps people make maps for plausible worlds. Taken from a macro perspective, the mapping guide goes through nine steps, each step illustrated with examples, supporting text, and a sample world map. If you want to expand upon the ideas presented in this free PDF, pick up A Magical Society: Ecology and Culture, which fills your world with biomes, ecological wonders, and cultural groups.

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A Magical Society: Guide to Monster Statistics is a 19-page PDF that breaks down the d20 monster stat block, delineating the interconnectivity between statistics, how each entry shapes a monster's CR, and how to properly present information within the monster stat block. Besides being an excellent resource in and of itself, A Magical Society: Guide to Monster Statistics is an entire chapter from a larger work, A Magical Society: Beast Builder.

A Magical Society: Beast Builder weighs in at a whopping 256 pages, covering the following concepts: what makes a good monster, how monsters fit in their environment, classifying monsters by their function rather than their physiology, breaking down types and subtypes, demystifying templates, how to use bits and pieces from monsters to enrich your game, and a comprehensive list of 600 special attacks and special qualities taken from the SRD and Monster Geographica: Underground. And don't forget the appendices—what would a Magical Society book be without its useful appendices? A Magical Society: Beast Builder has 4 appendices: a d20 Mechanic Table (you'll never have to use your fingers again), an editing checklist to get you well on the road to John Coopering your own creations, and the Random(ish) Monster Generator.