Is it possible, in some future Bestiary, to include a picture of an average human next to it (or at least somehow to show how big/small the monster is compared to an average person)? I find it that I can't really comprehend the magnitude of a creature based on a solo picture of it. For example, Charybdis (in Bestiary 2) does this right. If I had seen that picture without the human next to it, I would have thought it's some sort of a water bug. Shemhazian Demon doesn't at all translate its Gargantuan size. 3.5 Monster Manual had a great picture of few creatures of all sizes on next to each other (Red Dragon, Purple Worm, Giant, Ogre and a Human if memory serves me correctly). I'm not saying that every single artwork should have a different humanoid person next to it (since that probably costs more), but if folks and paizo could somehow mark where humans are in comparison to other monsters, it would make their monsters look more vivid!
Just my 2 cents.
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Is it possible, in some future Bestiary, to include a picture of an average human next to it (or at least somehow to show how big/small the monster is compared to an average person)? I find it that I can't really comprehend the magnitude of a creature based on a solo picture of it. For example, Charybdis (in Bestiary 2) does this right. If I had seen that picture without the human next to it, I would have thought it's some sort of a water bug. Shemhazian Demon doesn't at all translate its Gargantuan size. 3.5 Monster Manual had a great picture of few creatures of all sizes on next to each other (Red Dragon, Purple Worm, Giant, Ogre and a Human if memory serves me correctly). I'm not saying that every single artwork should have a different humanoid person next to it (since that probably costs more), but if folks and paizo could somehow mark where humans are in comparison to other monsters, it would make their monsters look more vivid!
Just my 2 cents.
Every monster has Size listed, that gives you a ballpark of how they compare to a human ...
Of course I know that, but it's not the same.
If you've got photoshop you could put together images yourself, obviously you can't share them here what with legal constraints, but that would do the job. Many of the monsters give size dimensions in their descriptions.
Creative Director
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In the first six volumes of the Pathfinder AP, we did precisely this. We opened each bestiary up with a "police line-up" style image of the monsters in that bestiary next to Valeros for scale.
Alas... it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this idea wasn't great. Since monster art comes in all shapes imaginable, and since some monsters are vastly bigger than others, making this happen right ended up being weirdly super-complicated.
As a result, it's not something we're all that eager to try again.
In the first six volumes of the Pathfinder AP, we did precisely this. We opened each bestiary up with a "police line-up" style image of the monsters in that bestiary next to Valeros for scale.
Alas... it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this idea wasn't great. Since monster art comes in all shapes imaginable, and since some monsters are vastly bigger than others, making this happen right ended up being weirdly super-complicated.
As a result, it's not something we're all that eager to try again.
I could see it working as a poster, but /I/ wouldn't want to be the one doing that art finagling.
Size and reach work fine by me.
In the first six volumes of the Pathfinder AP, we did precisely this. We opened each bestiary up with a "police line-up" style image of the monsters in that bestiary next to Valeros for scale.
Alas... it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this idea wasn't great. Since monster art comes in all shapes imaginable, and since some monsters are vastly bigger than others, making this happen right ended up being weirdly super-complicated.
As a result, it's not something we're all that eager to try again.
I didn't mean the line up like in RotR (although I found it cool), but precisely this thing with Valeros. Putting his silouette next to the monster shouldn't be too hard, right?
Or at least precise height on every monster? Just saying that something is gargantuan doesn't do it, since I'm sure not every single gargantuan monster is 20 ft tall/long.
In the first six volumes of the Pathfinder AP, we did precisely this. We opened each bestiary up with a "police line-up" style image of the monsters in that bestiary next to Valeros for scale.
Alas... it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this idea wasn't great. Since monster art comes in all shapes imaginable, and since some monsters are vastly bigger than others, making this happen right ended up being weirdly super-complicated.
As a result, it's not something we're all that eager to try again.
I didn't mean the line up like in RotR (although I found it cool), but precisely this thing with Valeros. Putting his silouette next to the monster shouldn't be too hard, right?
Or at least precise height on every monster? Just saying that something is gargantuan doesn't do it, since I'm sure not every single gargantuan monster is 20 ft tall/long.
Even the same monster can have a wide size range. Not all ______(fill in a monster name) are going to be the same size. Even two huge dragons can vary greatly in size. Look at us humans as an example. Some of us are below 5ft in height, and others are up to 7, and even taller.
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Creative Director
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In the first six volumes of the Pathfinder AP, we did precisely this. We opened each bestiary up with a "police line-up" style image of the monsters in that bestiary next to Valeros for scale.
Alas... it became pretty clear pretty quickly that this idea wasn't great. Since monster art comes in all shapes imaginable, and since some monsters are vastly bigger than others, making this happen right ended up being weirdly super-complicated.
As a result, it's not something we're all that eager to try again.
I didn't mean the line up like in RotR (although I found it cool), but precisely this thing with Valeros. Putting his silouette next to the monster shouldn't be too hard, right?
Or at least precise height on every monster? Just saying that something is gargantuan doesn't do it, since I'm sure not every single gargantuan monster is 20 ft tall/long.
Actually, it would be VERY hard. Since the art staff doesn't really know about monster sizes, and since the editorial staff can't resize art, it'd take two people out of commission to do this type of thing. And there are actually quite a lot of monsters that are so enormous that it'd get pretty ridiculous. We try to put numbers in for length/height and for weigh for most monsters in the text, but going beyond that to do size comparisons for every single one just isn't the best use of production time.
The first edition of Shadowrun did a great job with this in their bestiaries. What they did was for each creature, they put a small one inch square in the bottom corner of the page. Then they put a silhoutte of a human (just a black outline), adn then next to it, a black silhouette of the monster. For the really big ones, like a megaladon, it was just a fin-tip. :) It might be possible to do as a watermark type thing so it doesn't take up any space, but it'd take someone making a black negative of the image, and then shrinking it to fit correctly on a standardized watermark.