I just want to see the daemon as soon as possible! Especially the illustration of the purrodaemon. Is it likely that the same artist that did the leukodaemon will do the other three deacons? For visual cohesion?
Creative Director
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I just want to see the daemon as soon as possible! Especially the illustration of the purrodaemon. Is it likely that the same artist that did the leukodaemon will do the other three deacons? For visual cohesion?
The daemons are unlikely to appear in the first Bestiary. I suspect they'll be in the 2nd Bestiary. As for which artist we'll get to illustrate them... still way too early to say.
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You can invent the BEST MONSTER EVER but if it gets saddled with bad art, no one will ever know.
We'll be trying to make sure that bad art stays out of the book as a result.
What ever was the thinking behind the Second Edition picture of the Salamander?
It looked like Duane Dibbley!
I must be one of very few that doesn't care about the art, I guess.
Blasphemer! Heathen! Get your "black and white text only" out of this thread.
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Creative Director
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Demn. I need some kind of psionic/space/astral civilization to use as a part of a setting. Perhaps some kind of psionic elves?
Just because they're closed content to publishers doesn't mean they're closed content to home games. If githyanki work perfectly in the game you want to run, in fact, they should fit perfectly into the Pathfinder RPG, since both githyanki and Pathfinder RPG were designed with the same core world in mind.
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Demn. I need some kind of psionic/space/astral civilization to use as a part of a setting. Perhaps some kind of psionic elves?Just because they're closed content to publishers doesn't mean they're closed content to home games. If githyanki work perfectly in the game you want to run, in fact, they should fit perfectly into the Pathfinder RPG, since both githyanki and Pathfinder RPG were designed with the same core world in mind.
I know, but I wanted to see what will you guys make of them. In my home game I need an alien like culture concentrated in a city-state, which combines psionics, spelljaming and lifeshaping (like in Dark Sun) with acces to astral plane and some others, perhaps. This city should be Ptolus-like setting with non-standard races thrown in the mix with standard ones, such as thri-kreen, some kind of cat-folk, Loxi etc. This should be a great port, for both sea and space vessels. A sort of starting point for offworld adventures.
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Creative Director
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I know, but I wanted to see what will you guys make of them. In my home game I need an alien like culture concentrated in a city-state, which combines psionics, spelljaming and lifeshaping (like in Dark Sun) with acces to astral plane and some others, perhaps. This city should be Ptolus-like setting with non-standard races thrown in the mix with standard ones, such as thri-kreen, some kind of cat-folk, Loxi etc. This should be a great port, for both sea and space vessels. A sort of starting point for offworld adventures.
Ah. Well, the answer there is, of course, that we can't really do anything at all with these types of creatures. If I DO do something with githyanki, it'd be for my own campaign and thus private and not out for the public to see. And since it makes more sense to me to focus my creative energies on things that CAN be used to support Paizo products, I'm pretty likely to avoid using non-open content in my home games as it is anyway.
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I know, I know. It's just wishful thinking on my part. But, is there any possibility of Paizo's response to gith-races? Perhaps in Paizo's Psionic Handbook you could explore some kind of psionic elves from space? Dinosaur-controlling (Exiles, by Julian May), life-shaping (In the Courts of the Crimson King, by S. M. Stirling) soulknife and psion favorite class elves? Please?
You seem to have a pretty firm idea already, why not do them up yourself, with a benevolent non-sacrificial aztec/mayan culture, and maybe gith or eberron xen'drik giant ruins style architecture and clothing etc.
You've already got a solid idea, I like that the bestiary, etc, inspires you to do your own things, and you seem to have a great idea, that you certainly like.
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You seem to have a pretty firm idea already, why not do them up yourself, with a benevolent non-sacrificial aztec/mayan culture, and maybe gith or eberron xen'drik giant ruins style architecture and clothing etc.
You've already got a solid idea, I like that the bestiary, etc, inspires you to do your own things, and you seem to have a great idea, that you certainly like.
Well, the idea that I'm playing with is centered around elven spelljaming ship that crashed on the shore of a great sea, at the edge of a wasteland that came to be as a result of an ancient wizard war. The ship crashed during a conflict with a githyanki vessel, so that surviving elves and githyanki were forced to pull their resources together to survive. The result was a new race of psionic half-elves/half-githyankis that live in a crystal city of great towers, grown by the life-shaping skills of the elves from their living spelljamming ship. In time, that city-state started to trade with various (mutant) races of the wastelands. Etc.
Hey, I appreciate a good italic and the occasional bolding.
God, why does that sound so wrong?
Well, the idea that I'm playing with is centered around elven spelljaming ship that crashed on the shore of a great sea, at the edge of a wasteland that came to be as a result of an ancient wizard war. The ship crashed during a conflict with a githyanki vessel, so that surviving elves and githyanki were forced to pull their resources together to survive. The result was a new race of psionic half-elves/half-githyankis that live in a crystal city of great towers, grown by the life-shaping skills of the elves from their living spelljamming ship. In time, that city-state started to trade with various (mutant) races of the wastelands. Etc.
I mean that sounds pretty damn well rounded out. You really don't need any official help and support, its a pretty complete idea that could easily be thrown into Golarion or the great beyond, as indeed are the gith, who would need absolutely zero modification to fit into paizo's world.
Or for use in your own world using the great beyond as its cosmology.
{edit} Cool idea by the way, very sci-fi. I like it.
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I just wrote a huge post and forum ate it! Could we please have some kind of monster in the Bestiary which eats words, so that wizards can't finish their spells, clerics can't heal and bards can't sing? On another note, when will we be able to see some kind of general list of monsters to be included in the bestiary? And on a third note, I need some help with that city I mentioned. I envisioned city guards riding axebeaks and having velociraptors instead of attack dogs, high caste lords and ladies of the city having psionic pseudodragons as pets (like in Pern novels, by Anne McCaffrey), trading caravans fighting off bulettes, sand worms and desert wyverns... In which part of the forum should I post ideas for this setting, so that I could get some response from experienced players and DMs? I just recently started 3.5 game. Before that I ran a very long campaign (1998-2007) using Skills and Powers in combination with ADnD 2nd Ed. so Ićm not exactly on familiar grounds here.
What would be nice for the Bestiary is a way to weaken (un-improve?) enemies for a lower CR.
For example, let's say I want my players to take on a juvenile Bullette just striking out to establish its territory.
Or if I want a smaller analogue to the deinonychus (like a velociraptor) to serve as an Improved Familiar.
Or the Worm that Walks. Oh, the Worm that Walks! Maybe this should be a different topic, but what the heck, I'm feeling it now. Goodness knows I've wanted to make a villain of one of these [squeally voice] lovely [/squeally voice] buckets of vermin, but I've never run an epic level game. And despite that the template's CR lists as base creature +3, with a +20 insight bonus to AC, a touch attack that deals a flat 100 points of damage a hit, and a bunch of spell-like abilities at CL 20, it's clearly designed as an epic opponent. What I really need is a Lich tier foe. How frustrating.
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Creative Director
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What would be nice for the Bestiary is a way to weaken (un-improve?) enemies for a lower CR.
For example, let's say I want my players to take on a juvenile Bullette just striking out to establish its territory.
Or if I want a smaller analogue to the deinonychus (like a velociraptor) to serve as an Improved Familiar.
Or the Worm that Walks. Oh, the Worm that Walks! Maybe this should be a different topic, but what the heck, I'm feeling it now. Goodness knows I've wanted to make a villain of one of these [squeally voice] lovely [/squeally voice] buckets of vermin, but I've never run an epic level game. And despite that the template's CR lists as base creature +3, with a +20 insight bonus to AC, a touch attack that deals a flat 100 points of damage a hit, and a bunch of spell-like abilities at CL 20, it's clearly designed as an epic opponent. What I really need is a Lich tier foe. How frustrating.
Chances for reverse advancement rules being in the PF RPG are pretty high, to support all of one's baby bulette and velociraptor needs.
I actually almost put rules for a non-epic worm that walks into Into the Darklands, but had to cut it for space. I don't have the time to reformat the the stat block here, but I can post the sidebar that was gonna go along with it:
CREATING A WORM THAT WALKS
The worm that walks is an epic template originally intended to be a way to bolster extremely high-level spellcasters, yet the concept of a creature made of worms seemed to fit with the neothelid empire so well that I decided to see what happened when I put the template on a drow 10th-level sorcerer. Usually when applying a template, you’ll want to follow the rules pretty closely, but in this case the result was a bit lopsided—a CR 14 monster that can do 100 points of damage with a touch attack but only had 55 hit points was broken on both sides.
So I made a few adjustments here and there, giving the template a +20 racial bonus to Constitution and reworking the engulf ability. Even with its unusually high insight bonus to AC (a benefit of being made up of thousands of worms, each capable of sensing danger and able to react appropriately to incoming threats) and high racial bonuses to skills, the end result fits pretty well for a CR 14 foe.
You can adjust this worm that walks by increasing its wizard level; each level added increases its CR by 1. For the truly adventurous, you can use the worm that walks template from the SRD to make all sorts of different wormy minions for the neothelids. Just be careful when you do—that AC insight bonus can get pretty grisly if you put the template on a creature with a high armor class already! Don’t be afraid to adjust things here and there as I’ve done in order to get a CR-appropriate monster in the end.
Aw man, I would haved loved to have seen useable worm that walks stats, all those kyuss and worm wizard WAR pics could have been put to such good, use.
Any specific suggestions for making it non-epic?
Or chances of it showing up randomly on the blog, as a darklands overload?
What would be nice for the Bestiary is a way to weaken (un-improve?) enemies for a lower CR.
For example, let's say I want my players to take on a juvenile Bullette just striking out to establish its territory.
Or if I want a smaller analogue to the deinonychus (like a velociraptor) to serve as an Improved Familiar.
Or the Worm that Walks. Oh, the Worm that Walks! Maybe this should be a different topic, but what the heck, I'm feeling it now. Goodness knows I've wanted to make a villain of one of these [squeally voice] lovely [/squeally voice] buckets of vermin, but I've never run an epic level game. And despite that the template's CR lists as base creature +3, with a +20 insight bonus to AC, a touch attack that deals a flat 100 points of damage a hit, and a bunch of spell-like abilities at CL 20, it's clearly designed as an epic opponent. What I really need is a Lich tier foe. How frustrating.
Chances for reverse advancement rules being in the PF RPG are pretty high, to support all of one's baby bulette and velociraptor needs.
I actually almost put rules for a non-epic worm that walks into Into the Darklands, but had to cut it for space. I don't have the time to reformat the the stat block here, but I can post the sidebar that was gonna go along with it:
CREATING A WORM THAT WALKS
The worm that walks is an epic template originally intended to be a way to bolster extremely high-level spellcasters, yet the concept of a creature made of worms seemed to fit with the neothelid empire so well that I decided to see what happened when I put the template on a drow 10th-level sorcerer. Usually when applying a template, you’ll want to follow the rules pretty closely, but in this case the result was a bit lopsided—a CR 14 monster that can do 100 points of damage with a touch attack but only had 55 hit points was broken on both sides.So I made a few adjustments here and there, giving the template a +20 racial bonus to Constitution and reworking the engulf...
I don't really know the template, but maybe it's an idea to make the abilities subjective to the creature's final CR ?
the drow sorcerer would have CR 14 eventually and the template was made for a CR 20 creature. maybe grant it + 14 insight bonus to AC and a touch attack for 70 damage.. not sure what else is in that template, finally compare it with a similar creature of that CR and see how well it fits in terms of power.
Two issues from Beta have come to my attention, the first,
Elemental immunity, which I was reminded of from the remorhaz metion on the dino thread.
There was a discussion, feuled by Sean K. Reynolds near the time he joined the queue about fire immunity.
I'd like to chip this into the bestiary thread to say, that almost no living creature should have immunity, but instead replace current immunity with fire resistance 50, or maybe 40+ for level scaling.
Giants, humanoids, magical beasts, even dragons.
Elementals, and creatures composed of entirely elemental or 'immune to something' or other materials are fine to keep it, as indeed are outsiders, who are spirits and so on, and can be made exempt from reality by nature of their outside reality origins.
Secondly, and more importnantly,
I'd really like to see that sidebar on rogue sneak ttack applied to the Bestiary. Every creature specifically immune to sneak attacks should state such, it can be in elemental and ooze traits, but constructs, and undead, etc, who have should explicitly state so, in bold in their SQ if neccesary.
Same goes for fortification, or abilities that mimic such.
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Maybe this was covered, i don't have time to read 400 posts to catch up on one thing.Since there is alot of changes that will obviously happen in august, Grappling in particular, something that wil have to be in the Beastiary. How will they release it a month Early? That means that they have to be ready to print in april/may. So there will be an immidiate Eretta in August. AND I HATE ERETTA! They are a pain in the butt. Tell me. After an Erretta is produced, are the appropriate changes made in future prints? I'll wait till then.
Maybe this was covered, i don't have time to read 400 posts to catch up on one thing.Since there is alot of changes that will obviously happen in august, Grappling in particular, something that wil have to be in the Beastiary. How will they release it a month Early? That means that they have to be ready to print in april/may. So there will be an immidiate Eretta in August. AND I HATE ERETTA! They are a pain in the butt. Tell me. After an Erretta is produced, are the appropriate changes made in future prints? I'll wait till then.
If your question is "Will there be errata to make the Bestiary compatible with Pathfinder RPG (which comes out in the following month)?" I believe the answer is that the Bestiary will be Pathfinder RPG compatible despite it coming out before the RPG.
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Creative Director
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Yeah; we send our books to print about 2 months before they ship: For the PF RPG we're sending it even further out since we don't want to risk it being caught in customs or otherwise delayed on its way back from China. All of which means that even though the monster book's coming out a few weeks before it, the final rules will be done except POSSIBLY for some last-minute proofreading passes when we send off the monster book. The rules themselves are going to be set in stone well before we send off the monster book, because they have to be: After all, all the other books we're releasing in August are going to use the PF RPG rules too, and those books are being written several months beforehand, so the authors need the rules done early.
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I had an idea relating to the undead ... what if all of the undead creatures were templates instead of just basic monsters? So you'd have bodak, morhg, mummified, ghoul, wight, wraith, shadow, and spectre templates in addition to ghost, vampire, lich and skeleton and zombie Here's my reasoning: if a halfling or a gnome got killed by a wights energy drain would it upon rising as a new wight suddenly double in height and octuple its weight to become the regular wight entry? Now halflings and gnomes would most likely not be so vicious normally as to risk becoming a morhg (leaving the Jerren from BoVD out of the discussion); Pathfinder goblins, on the other hand...
I know that bodak ghoulish and ghastly templates were printed in Dragon Compendium and wight, spectral, wraith, mummified, and umbral templates were printed in Savage Species and that neither of those sources are OGC but I still think the idea could be worth investigating with your own approach. Actually in so doing you could add that one of the special qualities gained upon becoming undead would be profane resilience (or some other sufficiently cool and appropriate name of your choice): HDxCha modifier bonus hit point s to solve the anemic HP issue.
Contributor
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I like this idea. It makes sense that most of the undead that can be created from a dead body should be presented as a template.
Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary has templates for "Dread" versions of most of the favorite undead creatures, including the bodak. These templates create a variant of the original undead and are clearly defined as being different from their SRD progenitors (there's even a "dread lich" template), but that might be a good place to start.
Of course, the down side is that GMs who wish to use those undead will rarely be able to run them "out of the book." Sample templated creatures are helpful, but they take up word count that could be used for other fun creatures or information in a monster's write-up.
I think templates would be appropriate for some undead, while other specialized undead might be better suited as static creatures.
For those interested in taking a look, The Menace Manual SRD (for D20 modern) has an OGL template for the ghoul. The Urban Arcana SRD has an OGL liquefied zombie template (representing a zombie in advanced stages of decay). Both could be adapted to Pathfinder.
As mentioned, the Advanced Bestiary is also a good source for undead templates. Many of the "dread" templates even give hints at how to create none dread versions.
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Creative Director
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Will we see the Grell, or are they closed content? Incidentally, what monsters from the MM and other 3.5 books are considered closed content? I know the Illithids are, and I think the Beholders are too. Are there any others?
The grell is closed content.
Most of what's in the 3.5 Monster Manual is open, with the exception of a dozen or so monsters (illithid, displacer beast, carrion crawler, umber hulk, kuo-toa, yuan-ti, beholders, githyanki, githzerai, and the slaadi for sure).
Most of what's in the 3rd edition MM2 and the Monsters of Faerun softcover are not open, unless the monster is from mythology (like the banshee or the linnorms), in which case the monster is public domain.
Many of the classic D&D monsters that weren't in the MM2 or MoF were then picked up by the Tome of Horrors and made into open content, with WotC's permission. But as a result, there's a "window" that includes things like grells, hook horrors, ixitxachitils, some of the daemons, and other classic monsters in a weird non-open limbo.
Anyway, meh, I really like the mythology bent of pathfinder.
I hope the siren, luecrotta and peryton, as well as at least the lamia matriarch makes it into the bestiary.
Though I think the PF lamia's will be more interesting and usable just as they are.
Sigh...I hope the Hook Horror can be done in Pathfinder, that's one of my favorite monsters to use.Hook Horror is Wizards of the Coast's Intellectual Property. It's off-limits to us.
But, thanks to Necromancer, the vilstrak (tunnel thug) is. With some adjustments, the creature can easily fill the same role.
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Creative Director
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Anyway, meh, I really like the mythology bent of pathfinder.
I hope the siren, luecrotta and peryton, as well as at least the lamia matriarch makes it into the bestiary.
Though I think the PF lamia's will be more interesting and usable just as they are.
VERY little from Pathfinder's bestiary will end up in the hardcover Bestairy. The hardcover Bestairy is mostly monsters from the MM and a few from ToH. We'll very likely be doing additional Bestiaries though, and Pathfinder Bestiary II is a more likely place for the more successful AP new monsters to show up.
I just hope there is no space wasted with lairs, advanced versions of creatures, how to use such creatures in this world or that, and so on like WotC did with its later MMs. I really don't need to see what a troglodyte looks like as a 7th level warrior, what the lair of a hill giant might look like, the difference between a doppelganger in one game world to the next, and so on. If people want to see how to adjust monsters and settings for their game worlds, show that in the DMG (or equivalent); that's what that book is for. I DO want to see a comprehensive advancement table and how to design your own monsters section in the back of the book (or front, whatever is easier) like the OGL MM has; THAT is very handy, and I use it frequently for my own campaigns. Update that section for Pathfinder and I'll be happy. I also would like to see one section devoted to templates, and just templates; anarchic, axiomatic, celestial, draconic, fiendish, half-anarchic, half-axiomatic, half-celestial, half-dragon, half-elemental, half-fey, half-fiendish, half-golem, etc. all in one place rather than scattered throughout the book. Too bad you can't also put in bone creature and corpse creature, unless you change "skeleton" and "zombie" into templates instead of creature types. When you think about it, that WOULD make more sense since technically they're both just animated corpses and really could be ANY corpse, after all. Actually, when you think about it, MOST of the undead creatures in MM are mostly just templates themselves: ghost, skeleton, spectre, vampire, wight, wraith, zombie...
Which reminds me: since it wouldn't be possible to section creatures off by creature type (I assume all creatures will be arranged alphabetically), what's the chances that there will be a table listing them by type AND challenge rating? That would make it SO much easier to plan location-specific encounters without having to cross-reference 16 different tables. Just my two cents' worth.
I just hope there is no space wasted with lairs, advanced versions of creatures, how to use such creatures in this world or that, and so on like WotC did with its later MMs. I really don't need to see what a troglodyte looks like as a 7th level warrior, what the lair of a hill giant might look like, the difference between a doppelganger in one game world to the next, and so on. If people want to see how to adjust monsters and settings for their game worlds, show that in the DMG (or equivalent); that's what that book is for. I DO want to see a comprehensive advancement table and how to design your own monsters section in the back of the book (or front, whatever is easier) like the OGL MM has; THAT is very handy, and I use it frequently for my own campaigns. Update that section for Pathfinder and I'll be happy. I also would like to see one section devoted to templates, and just templates; anarchic, axiomatic, celestial, draconic, fiendish, half-anarchic, half-axiomatic, half-celestial, half-dragon, half-elemental, half-fey, half-fiendish, half-golem, etc. all in one place rather than scattered throughout the book. Too bad you can't also put in bone creature and corpse creature, unless you change "skeleton" and "zombie" into templates instead of creature types. When you think about it, that WOULD make more sense since technically they're both just animated corpses and really could be ANY corpse, after all. Actually, when you think about it, MOST of the undead creatures in MM are mostly just templates themselves: ghost, skeleton, spectre, vampire, wight, wraith, zombie...
Which reminds me: since it wouldn't be possible to section creatures off by creature type (I assume all creatures will be arranged alphabetically), what's the chances that there will be a table listing them by type AND challenge rating? That would make it SO much easier to plan location-specific encounters without having to cross-reference 16 different tables. Just my two cents' worth.
Aye, it would indeed make certain things easier if they were organized together instead of splattered all over the book. Templates with templates, type with type and all that. And for the love of the gawds keep the organization that way when printing subsequent books!
And decent indexes too, lacking a proper index inhales eggs.
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Creative Director
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The Bestiary will not have advanced monster examples, sample lairs, or any of that stuff. That's content best suited to adventures or the Pathfinder Chronicles line of sourcebooks, not a monster book. The Bestiary will just have monster stats and flavor.
The monsters will be sorted alphabetically, but I intend on making sure there'll be a table listed by CR and one by Type. One by environment would be cool too.
The Bestiary will not have advanced monster examples, sample lairs, or any of that stuff. That's content best suited to adventures or the Pathfinder Chronicles line of sourcebooks, not a monster book. The Bestiary will just have monster stats and flavor.
The monsters will be sorted alphabetically, but I intend on making sure there'll be a table listed by CR and one by Type. One by environment would be cool too.
And let me just say, WOO! to that.
And an by enviroment table would be great.
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The Bestiary will not have advanced monster examples, sample lairs, or any of that stuff. That's content best suited to adventures or the Pathfinder Chronicles line of sourcebooks, not a monster book. The Bestiary will just have monster stats and flavor.
The monsters will be sorted alphabetically, but I intend on making sure there'll be a table listed by CR and one by Type. One by environment would be cool too.
Yeah, I don't remember anything more in the good ol' original Monster Manual...
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Creative Director
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Oh well, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles. Did you by any chance improve the stats and CR of Tyrannosaurus rex? In the MM1 he's a CR 8 critter. I always thought T. rex should be far more powerful.So will the Grell be in the Beastiary or no? I sure hope you guys manage to pull it off.The grell and the hook horror are owned by Wizards of the Coast. They will never be in a Pathfinder Bestiary. Just the way it is, alas.
That type of information will need to wait until the book releases... but we're doing our best to make sure that the CRs of monsters stays unchanged... or at least within a few points of its 3.5 version.