Customer Reviews

The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary (D20)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book greatly exceeded my expectations. It easily met the standards set by the various D&D Monster Manuals put out by Wizards of the Coast.

All of the 200+ monsters are solid, campaign neutral additions to my d20/D&D games. A few maybe a little over or under powered, but overall balance is good. Challenge Ratings range from 1/8 through 20+, with little bias toward any particular CR range. There is also a nice range of good and neutral aligned monsters.

The descriptive text is very well done. The best feature of the book is probably the 'Adventure Seed' paragraph included in each monster description. The 'Seeds' give GM's a quick and easy way to incorporate the new beasts into their game.

The only potential weak point of the book is the artwork, which ranges from somewhat campy 1st Edition AD&D style line art to some excellent charcoals. All of the art and text is in black and white. I'm more interested in content and consider artwork to be secondary, however. The text descriptions of the monsters more than make up for any of the art's shortcomings.

Overall, this is an excellent addition to my d20 collection.

This is a terrific creature collection, the creatures are varied and with few exceptions do not seem to be forced or useless, the layout for the most part is excellent (I like the separation of the combat info from the description and adventure hooks in the text, but my only complaint about that is the particular font that was used for the fluffy bits is a little hard to read) and the artwork is surprisingly good for a third party publisher. Yes, it is black and white, but the vast majority of the art is at least as good as that found in the Monster Manuals, and a lot of it is considerably better. Of course, with the sheer volume of art and creatures found within there are going to be a few lemons, but this gigantic book has far more winners. But the real reason it gets five stars in my opinion are the exhaustive appendices! These made me want to send the editors of the Monster Manuals to an eternity in the abyss for their failures! For everyone who has ever complained about the strictly alphabetical layout of the Monster Manuals and wished that there was some more logical way to find creatures, check out the appendices at the back of this book. Lists of creatures by type and subtype, by terrain (so useful! Your PCs unexpectedly wandered off into the desert? Just thumb to this appendix and sick one of the 17 desert creatures onto them!), by CR (yes I know that the MM do this as well), and perhaps most impressively, an appendix supplementing the summon monster and summon nature's ally spells with new options for each level of those old standby spells! But wait, more appendices! An appendix listing creatures that advance by class, a bibliography for those who want to add even more background detail to these monsters, and an appendix listing the new D20 material besides monsters (new deities, diseases, familiars, botanical substances, magic items and spells) sprinkled throughout the text makes this much more than just another creature collection. Another bright spot in the organization of this book is the system of signs that tell you at a glance what each monster's role mainly is (melee, stealthy, magical or supernatural power, personality and roleplaying, or truly epic level challenges). This hardcover book is almost 400 pages crammed with usable monsters, new items and spells, and after reading it I think my monster manuals will get much less use from here on out; they suddenly seem small and clunky, almost unusable compared to this book's genius. No more thumbing through endless pages trying to find that creature that lived in the swamp but you can't quite remember its name!
Thanks, Penumbra (no I am not affiliated in any way with Penumbra, I just REALLY liked this product!)