Okay, so, the pdf doesn’t start on its best foot with the Al, an invisible roughly female thing that hunts mothers and seeks to kill their newborn and steal their livers their teeth can cause bleeding wounds, and interestingly, they will be hard to confront: They free sharp objects. An old-school non-Disney fairy tale/folklore-esque angle suffuses the supplement. That being said, the book does manage to maintain a sort of consistence in its themes and feeling I enjoyed. Thematically, the creatures herein are partially original creations, and partially drawn from the rich and oftentimes untapped resource of Persian folklore, with which I share a particular fascination. Each creature has its special attacks and/or weaknesses listed after their flavor text. Anyhow, each creature notes an alignment on the law-chaos axis, a movement (120 seems to be the default value), an ascending AC value, the number of HD, the number of attacks, the damage dealt, and a single save value, which uses a descending value. Some of my readers might shrug this off, while some will very much think that this does matter. These “general” OSR supplements lack this frame. run a B/X-Old-School-Essentials critter in a retro game based on AD&D 2e, I know by how much I need to upgrade it same goes in reverse for running e.g. It also makes it more difficult, at least for me, to actually decide how hard a critter should hit. You know what this means: We only get very basic stats, and depending on the old-school system you favor, you’ll need to do some adjusting. Now, on a less impressed level, it should be noted that this book does not actually subscribe to a specific OSR-system. It’s been a long time since I first read this bestiary, and I still could recall every single critter herein. I like that style it gives the book a genuinely unique visual identity and helped me retain my memory of these monsters. Each of the creatures herein has an illustration done in the same style, which I’d call uncanny and slightly creepy old fairy tale illustration. The second thing would be art: Co-author Nahid Taheri has a truly unique style.
Okay, so, the first thing you should know about this booklet would be that, yes, this is a bestiary, but it’s not a book of things designed to be hacked apart as throwaway monsters this bestiary focuses on what I like calling “narrative monsters”, so creatures that have a more significant impact or that are intended to form the center of a narrative. This review was requested to be moved up in my reviewing queue by my supporters.
My review is based on the pdf I don’t have the print version. Monsterarium clocks in at 27 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page introduction, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 21 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
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