Does anyone have any ideas or guesses on whether or not magical beast would be an ideal choice for a starting ranger? Any suggestions in this area?
Does anyone have any ideas or guesses on whether or not magical beast would be an ideal choice for a starting ranger? Any suggestions in this area?
There are a lot of magical beasts in the Monster Manual, and most of those have a CR of 3,4, or 5 (such as the cockatrice, basilisk, giant eagle, displacer beast, owlbear, girallon, spider eater, and unicorn). There are very few magical beasts with very low CR's or CR's above 10. Even tough magical beasts like the behir, chimera, gorgon, and yrthak have CR's in the range of 7-9.
Using this as a starting point, magical beast seems like a good choice for a 1st-level ranger, but there are a few things to consider:
1. At low levels (1st-5th) rangers are far more likely to be fighting humanoids, animals, or vermin than magical beasts. That being said, magical beasts begin appearing as foes when characters are still fairly low level, since a single cockatrice or griffon is a good challenge for a party of 3rd level characters.
2. At high levels (10th-15th) magical beasts tend to be encountered far less, and the rangers bonuses against them are less useful. A 12th level party containing a ranger is far more likely to be fighting aberrations or outsiders than magical beasts. Still, some of the other monster books do introduce some powerful magical beasts thet might appear in AP2.
3. Given what has already been said about the second AP, magical beasts probably won't figure as the series main villains. I'd say that aberrations, outsiders, and undead will figure far more prominently than magical beasts.
Of course, none of what I have said is fullproof. Other people might come up with some very good reasons to choose magical beasts as a rangers favored enemy.
I should have pointed out that most magical beasts are neutral in alignment and have a fairly low intelligence. This might also figure into a ranger's choice.
I'm guessing that there are going to be undead in almost every adventure in Age of Worms.
Creative Director
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One can probably split the best choices for Ranger favored enemies down in the following camps:
Good throughout the entire Age of Worms Adventure Path:
Humanoid (human)
Undead
Good for low-level
Elemental
Humanoid (reptilian)
Vermin
Good for mid-level
Aberration
Monstrous Humanoid
Elemental
Good for high-level
Dragon
Aberration
Of course, most of the mid-level and all of the high-level adventures are still unwritten, so those are more educated guesses on my behalf based on what we've got planned. Outsider (evil) may certainly be a good choice later on, if only because there's a lot of high-level outsiders in the Monster Manual, but we don't have any plans to go as overboard with the outsiders in Age of Worms as we did in Shackled City.
Plus... we'll be doing our best to make sure all monster types are represented so that even rangers that pick other choices won't be completely left out.
I only ask because I see "Age of Worms," and I see large worms on the front of issue #24, so I assume there will eventually be an enormous amount of large, wormlike monsters in future modules, which seems to suggest that magical beast is a good choice.
Then again, concerning FR, the region, and Obould, orc might be a great choice.
I think I might try selling undead to any possible rangers in the party.
Actually, the worms suggest, to me, aberrations. The ones on the cover remind me of the Wyste (MM2 and Speaker in Dreams) which is a CR 5 IIRC.