GuardianLurker
Adventurer
I go mine on Saturday. Quick takes.
1) I like the new dragons. I'll miss the old style elemental dragons, but the new "tradition-bound" dragons work really well, and give room for a lot more, and thematically stronger, dragons. I also feel sorry for the new Fortune Dragon, also voted as "Most Likely to be Beat Up By Adventurers", and "Least Likely to Ever Develop a Hoard" (see previous vote).
2) There are a LOT of gratuitous name changes (Kholos instead of Gnolls, for instance).
3) The changes to the mid-tier undead (ghouls, wights, and wraiths) are ... um ... interesting. I have no idea why the ghoul is now a "gentleman cannibal". And wraiths have been debuffed so much, that they're practically cuddly. Also I can see the truly amoral power-gamers seeking them out, just so they can stay in Stage 2/3 of the curse. The wight's and wraith's curses are a lot more flavorful, but are big debuffs from their previous power-levels.
4) The various extra-planar monsters have gotten such a rewrite I don't even know what the basic mappings are anymore (except for the obvious ones). A "Living Landslide" does not sound like the standard, boring, bog-standard Earth Elemental to me. It is.
My short answer: if you could buy the dragons separately, maybe at $10-15 for a PDF, it'd be great. But Monster Core is a lot weaker than the previous Bestiaries. If you have those, I wouldn't bother.
[Oh, and personally, I could wish that the monsters where less bound to Golarion, as I run a homebrew PF2e campaign. But that's a problem I have with all of the Pathfinder products - they're less friendly to homebrew than I'd like. But that's me, and my preferences, and I understand why Paizo does it. I just wish they had a much stronger stance towards isolating the Golarion flavor into the Lost Omens line.]
1) I like the new dragons. I'll miss the old style elemental dragons, but the new "tradition-bound" dragons work really well, and give room for a lot more, and thematically stronger, dragons. I also feel sorry for the new Fortune Dragon, also voted as "Most Likely to be Beat Up By Adventurers", and "Least Likely to Ever Develop a Hoard" (see previous vote).
2) There are a LOT of gratuitous name changes (Kholos instead of Gnolls, for instance).
3) The changes to the mid-tier undead (ghouls, wights, and wraiths) are ... um ... interesting. I have no idea why the ghoul is now a "gentleman cannibal". And wraiths have been debuffed so much, that they're practically cuddly. Also I can see the truly amoral power-gamers seeking them out, just so they can stay in Stage 2/3 of the curse. The wight's and wraith's curses are a lot more flavorful, but are big debuffs from their previous power-levels.
4) The various extra-planar monsters have gotten such a rewrite I don't even know what the basic mappings are anymore (except for the obvious ones). A "Living Landslide" does not sound like the standard, boring, bog-standard Earth Elemental to me. It is.
My short answer: if you could buy the dragons separately, maybe at $10-15 for a PDF, it'd be great. But Monster Core is a lot weaker than the previous Bestiaries. If you have those, I wouldn't bother.
[Oh, and personally, I could wish that the monsters where less bound to Golarion, as I run a homebrew PF2e campaign. But that's a problem I have with all of the Pathfinder products - they're less friendly to homebrew than I'd like. But that's me, and my preferences, and I understand why Paizo does it. I just wish they had a much stronger stance towards isolating the Golarion flavor into the Lost Omens line.]