JoeGKushner
Adventurer
The Random Esoteric Creature Generator is a 32 page black and white stapled book written by James Edward Raggi IV and illustrated by Brad McDevitt, William Mcausland and David Griffith.
As its name implies. It is a collection of tables designed to generate strange monsters. In addition to the tables themselves, there is advice on how to place them. The book starts off with an introduction on why the author came up with the book, because he’s trying to “reintroduce that sense of wonder… making it easy to introduce new and unique creatures into their game…” Sounds simple enough right?
In terms of game systems, the book has none in terms of laying out specifics, but it does come with basic guidelines that would be useful for almost any edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game. This is done by two pages which describe sound ground terms like AC, HD, Saves and Treasure among others. It’s a fair system for what it’s trying to do, but doesn’t really do a lot for determining how much XP such a creature would be worth, specifics of the creature, and other utilities. Those the GM will have to determine a bit more after looking through the rest of the tables and making some calculations.
The other tables start off with basic body shape. Using 2d10 in this case, you can roll a 20, and get a polyhedron, which means you get to roll 2d10 again and perhaps get a hexahedron, a cube shaped creature. Tables for basic characteristics, size, movement, attack methods, features and other goodies are after.
Going through a sample rolling, we get the following: A serpentine creature that is a plant of some sort that is some type of thorn bush that is human is large (which grants it a +1 HD and increases damage by one die type), that has movement of standard that has an attack method of tail with distinctive features of constantly shedding with the special ability of drain constitution with a random effect, that is delivered by an area effect cone that always attacks the foe with the most remaining hit points that’s motivated by territorial.
The last section is about putting it all together. Making sure that the monster “fits”, that it “works” for your game. It then goes against it’s initial grain with some advice that harkens back to Tucker’s Kobolds, “it is certainly possible to have a rich, fulfilling campaign just using monsters straight out of the official books.” And provides guidelines on doing just that.
Goodman Games efforts here wield a book that’s some what useful to all editions, and is a workhorse style book in that if you enjoy random tables for inspiration, then it’s going to be a perfect fit for your library.
As its name implies. It is a collection of tables designed to generate strange monsters. In addition to the tables themselves, there is advice on how to place them. The book starts off with an introduction on why the author came up with the book, because he’s trying to “reintroduce that sense of wonder… making it easy to introduce new and unique creatures into their game…” Sounds simple enough right?
In terms of game systems, the book has none in terms of laying out specifics, but it does come with basic guidelines that would be useful for almost any edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game. This is done by two pages which describe sound ground terms like AC, HD, Saves and Treasure among others. It’s a fair system for what it’s trying to do, but doesn’t really do a lot for determining how much XP such a creature would be worth, specifics of the creature, and other utilities. Those the GM will have to determine a bit more after looking through the rest of the tables and making some calculations.
The other tables start off with basic body shape. Using 2d10 in this case, you can roll a 20, and get a polyhedron, which means you get to roll 2d10 again and perhaps get a hexahedron, a cube shaped creature. Tables for basic characteristics, size, movement, attack methods, features and other goodies are after.
Going through a sample rolling, we get the following: A serpentine creature that is a plant of some sort that is some type of thorn bush that is human is large (which grants it a +1 HD and increases damage by one die type), that has movement of standard that has an attack method of tail with distinctive features of constantly shedding with the special ability of drain constitution with a random effect, that is delivered by an area effect cone that always attacks the foe with the most remaining hit points that’s motivated by territorial.
The last section is about putting it all together. Making sure that the monster “fits”, that it “works” for your game. It then goes against it’s initial grain with some advice that harkens back to Tucker’s Kobolds, “it is certainly possible to have a rich, fulfilling campaign just using monsters straight out of the official books.” And provides guidelines on doing just that.
Goodman Games efforts here wield a book that’s some what useful to all editions, and is a workhorse style book in that if you enjoy random tables for inspiration, then it’s going to be a perfect fit for your library.
