Customer Reviews

Savage Species: Playing Monstrous Characters (Dungeons & Dragons Supplement)

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

 

 

And that's something you'll never, ever have heard a PC utter before, but you might now.

Savage Species is, as the notes say, the D&D 3e sourcebook on playing monster characters. Not necessarily hideously evil psychopaths (that's where Book of Vile Darkness comes in), but non-standard races...anything from the bugbear up to a stone giant.

Monster PCs have two things to concern themselves about...hit dice (i.e. how many hit dice they naturally start with) and level adjustment (having abilities that are worth a class level or two on their own). For example, our umber hulk friend has eight hit dice and a level adjustment of +6, for an ECL of 14...so an umber hulk is theoretically equivalent to a 14th-level Player's Handbook character.

So, the authors go through and list a chart of almost every existing monster in the game that has an ECL of 20 or below, along with official level adjustments for templates (lycanthrope, celestial, half-dragon, etc.) They also discuss letting a player start as a first-level monster, which must get to its base statistics before multiclassing...there's no using a minotaur's base stats at 1 HD, because they don't get them until they reach their final hit die. There's a 52-page appendix of sample monsters' ECL broken out into class levels, which is fairly nice.

You'll also find feats suited to monsters, new prestige classes, new gear, a lot of new templates (my favorite's Gelatinous...a semi-ooze creature), and new and/or reprinted creatures, including a long list of anthropomorphic races, such as dog-men and wolverine-people, the desmodu and loxo from MM2, and the half-ogre starting race. There are also rules for transforming characters between races and adding templates.

Something like this has been needed for a long time. Not only does it follow in the footsteps of AD&D2's Complete Book of Humanoids, but it answers rules questions that have popped up ever since the first PC got infected by lycanthropy. Some creatures will be less-playable than others, simply because their level adjustment is so high that they won't have the hit points to survive combat at their ECL. And there are a few questions, too...for dragons, do they require XP to gain hit dice, since they grow by aging? After all, 10 years can go by in a game fairly quickly, and that young dragon can become a juvenile and get stat and HD bonuses...

This is a great supplement, and I highly recommend it. It's probably most useful if you're going to start a new game, but it'll be useful for everybody at some point.

I picked Savage Species up the first day it hit the shelves of my local bookstore. I've been wanting to throw monster characters into my campaign but all the PCs are under level 5 so my options for PC monsters are kind of limited. This book has provided a way for me to throw a child to that fire elemental they just killed without a thought---a mere innocent---into the game as an NPC that they somehow have to deal with. (Hopefully not by killing it) More importantly, if they so choose, they can adventure alongside a fire elemental as it grows into its powers.

The book itself is well organized and has a little of everything and a lot of some things. For DMs who don't want to go through the work of interpolating an ECL 15 Mind Flayer into fifteen separate levels, each acquired at standard experience point intervals, or even *determine* the ECL for a Mind Flayer, you don't have to. Many monster races have entire monster class levels separated for you. For those that don't, there are guidelines both for determining level adjustments and breaking up effective levels into actual levels, i.e. "W00t, I'm now a level six Drider! I get spell resistance!"

There's a lot of stuff in this book. New spells (some good for non-monster PCs, too), new equipment (Including the Gloves of Man, so your paws/tentacles can grip those pesky crossbows or lock picks), new feats (Area Attack lets your colossal Mountain Giant smack a whole bunch of PCs when he swings a stone column), new prestige classes (Illithid Savant, for...well...eating brains for self-improvement), new templates (The illustration for the example Gelatinous Bear is great) and, of course, more.

A lot of people are highly interested in the artwork in Dungeons & Dragons books, and if that's what they want out of the book, they'll be disappointed. I personally don't need illustrations to accompany descriptions for how an Ogre Mage advances to ECL 12 because I already know what they look like. This book is almost devoid of reprinted material, but much of it is being presented in ways far and beyond what Monster Manual I (or II) ever planned. This small paradox makes a great number of illustrations unnecessary relative to most books with so much new material. Drawings of all the weird weapons and equipment are comparable to those in the Player's Guide and other books. It's really pretty irrelevant, though, because if you took the pictures out of the second half of the book it would still be wonderful, if rather drab.

One of the more reassuring touches is a tiny list at the beginning of the book that mentions a few changes from Monster Manual I that are/will also be in the revised Monster Manual I. No one wants a book that will be obsolete in just a few months.

Savage Species is a great book, and has almost everything you could possibly want in it. What it doesn't have, it offers guidelines for working out on your own. Dungeon Masters who spend fifteen hours planning sessions will be able to do anything they want, but if you just want to create an poor little orphaned fire elemental, you can do it as quickly as any other NPC. As a player's book, the pre-made monster classes will help provide some variety, even if the game is starting from level one. Pre-made=easier DM approval, too. Of course, *buying* your DM the book would help your case, but I would *never* condone such bribery...

Just...keep the fire elemental outta my bar, will ya?

The material in this book is excellent for a DM. You can pick and choose your favourite rules and variations to make your own monstrous classes, or just flip to the appendix at the back and take information straight from the book. The magic items vary from the silly to the useful, the spells are well-written and the feats seem suitably tailored to monstrous playing.

The templates are what really make this book sing, along with a long appendix full of examples of monstrous classes that should empower any DM to turn a monster into a playable character.

This is, however, a book in serious need of one more working draft. The writers and editors took on a mighty task with this book, so I'm willing to forgive a lot, but references to incorrect pages, tables that don't exist and simple proofreading errors hamper the Savage Species experience. Also, there are numerous glaring examples of critters that bust wide open the abilities that a PC should be permitted at 1st level. This happens mostly with the advanced monsters, but many of them start with no attribute penalties, no serious drawbacks and numerous magical abilities. A little more scaling was needed for these, I think.

Still, now I can have that troll/barbarian I always dreamed of . . . and with more complete information that the "Complete" Book of Humanoids.

(edited in)

I've now read through the book cover to cover and, as a result, must downgrade my rating from 4 to 3 stars. The editing is more than just inconsistent, in parts its deeply confusing. Numerous feat and spell entries are extremely contradictory. For example, the spell "Earth Reaver" calls for no saving throw, but the last line of the spell description says that those who fail the saving throw will be made prone. I can guess what kind of saving throw is necessary, but, honestly, this is the sort of thing that should've been easy to spot in the editing process.

The excellence of the appendices, the prestige classes and the suggested rules are the saving graces of this book.

Aside from the countless typos that have now become standard with all their publications, this item truly is among their worst work. It was bad enough to inspire me to write reviews where I could in hopes I may save folks a few bucks and avoid my mistake.

The book starts out well enough with a detailed table on page 11 for the exact calculation of ECLs. It also encourages an acid test situation to verify the ECLs so calculated. These tools both generate an ECL that seems quite accurate in terms of balance.

The book then lists countless monster races from the Monster Manual 1 and another source. However, almost NONE have an ECL that would suggest it used EITHER of the two aforementioned tools. On average, their ECLs were all off by two and the acid test confirms this.

The book has 4 recycled monsters in it labeled as new: half-ogre, desmodu, thi-kreen, and Loxo. As an example of their errors: The half-ogre has a level adjustment listed as 1, but the ECL calculator gives it an ECL of 3 (+1 for the super stats, +1 for reach, +1 nat AC 4) and the acid test shows it to need a level adjustment of at least 2.

Of the great list of monster as PCs, only a random half are detailed to where they can be played without a lot of guesswork on the DM's part. I for one bought the book to remove guesswork, NOT create it. Those who enjoy the game are better off without this book and the chaos it threatens to impose in an otherwise fun game.

One might think that it is common sense to take monster stats, scale them back and then balance them along the same power levels as PC's...and they would be right. The thing is, i never thought of it myself, and Savage Species takes several hundred pages with full examples to show some ways it might be done. The book is not perfect, such as mistakes and a complete lack of creature background, history, culture, etc...everyting that the 2nd ed. book had. Still, this is much better than the earlier book (which wouldn't even let you play a troll as it was too powerful; not anymore).
It has lots of monstrous feats, some better than others, great magic items with art, wonderful illustrations, some good templates and some so-so templates, but mostly just text that gets you thinking, "hey, i want to make my own special class." The rules are set down, the options are there, and if anyone wants to take the time to craft their own beasties it's not too difficult. Plus, it lets a DM scale down monsters for lower level parties, and easily boost them for higher level.
Ideally, if a DM were starting his own campaign in a monster-dominated world, you can't do without this book. SCrap the standard races of humans and elves and leave in the minotaurs and troglodytes, celestials and djinn.
Lastly, the book says that a monster class should be taken completely from 1st level to whatever level it maxes out at before one can add on regular character classes. The reasoning is that someone can take the powers of a 1st level monster and tack on character levels from there on out. I'm bending this rule myself; if players wanted to take several levels of mindflayer and go rogue the rest of the way, fine, but they can never go back to mind flayer. Besides, a mind flayer at 3rd level would not have the abilities of say, a 3rd level dwarf cleric, and far from the lethal mindblast talent.
A great resource, it just takes some determined reading to fully implement the usefulness.

The quality of the content in this book is not up to that of the other WTOC hardcover rule books. The chapter and rules on playing monstrous characters (with character classes) is pretty solid but the remainder of the book is much weaker. The monstrous feats aren't that impressive. The chapter on advancing as a monster (without a character class) seem silly (1HD Fire Giants? Whatever?). There is a whole chapter on monster templates that simply doesn't belong here... it belongs in a monster manual. No one is going to play a gelatinous monster or a mummified monster. The small chapter on monstrous campaigns is wholly unimaginative. If the first chapter wasn't solid (and even there you have to read things over a couple of times to understand the rules) I'd give this book a 2.

Though this text is a handsome volume, packed with cool ideas and tons of crunchy bits, and moreover though I happen to like it quite a lot, it does not fully overcome the charges levelled against it, namely:

--it is a partial rehashing of 2E's *Complete Book of Humanoids* (which is less serious than the following, since 3E is basically just a rehashing of 2E in general),

--its unfortunate partial obsolescence (3.5E does indeed provide LA for each "playable" creature in the most recent *MM*--though *Savage Species* will ultimately consider all creatures to be "playable," whereas *MM* clearly does not), and

--the sad fact that WotC invests what must be approaching $0 in copyediting.

Those reservations noted, it must be said that the text opens up in 3E a new vista; instead of relying on the vanilla races of the *PH*, one can now, say, run a party of harpy infiltrators, a band of trollish barbarians, a medusa rogue, or (gods forbid it) a hive of illithids, demons, or some other uberpowerful beasties as PCs. (Though the *DMG* hints at such a vista, its suggestions proved to be unwieldy, incomplete, and generally confusing to most of us gamer-geeks.)

The text has many virtues in this regard:

1) new feats, spells, items, and prestige classes for monstrous folk, all generally well conceived.

2) some fair-to-middling notes on how to run a campiagn centered on the misadventures and cross accidents inevitably encountered by a group of bugbear PCs, for instance.

3) loads of bombass templates (these really are worthy of attention).

4) the reconceptualization of the game system entirely in terms of class--now, everything is a matter of class--no more monster advancing by the nebulous Hit Die (but this still doesn't resolve the bizarre aspect that Hit Die never correlated with CR; recall that level in a PC class always correlates with CR--why the inconsistency?).

5) tons and tons of statistical tables (the true value of the text). These also come with a set of guidelines to produce similar "class template" tables for any monster in the system--a very high degree of diversity for any game, which is surely a plus.

6) the introduction of both the "half-ogre" and "anthropomorphic animal" standard PC races (very good additions to the rules).

7) some very fine artwork

In these respects, there is value here, but unfortunately the aforementioned problems will limit its appeal and utility.

Well, the book starts out with a great concept- Monster races as PC's and how to balance them. It also introduces the idea of "monster class progression"- which allows one to start a beginning campaign with a "first level rakshasa" if one gets DM OK.

How did this brilliant idea go so very wrong? First is the literaly scads of typos & mistakes. Nearly every "monster class" has several very significant errors (the Rakshasa does not have any natural armour listed, for instance). WotC has also failed to do any Errata on this book- so far (and it seems doubtful- see next paragraph).

But worse is the timing and planning. The book was pushed as being compliant with 3.5, but after the 3.5 MM came out, it was clear that Savage Species was anything but. Thus, a fairly expensive book became mostly obsolete within months of it's publication.

Still, there is an extensive system the DM can use to design his own "monster classes", and this remains useful. But the timing & errors make this book a bad buy for the player who has updated to 3.5.

I have been playing D&D for 13 years, and when third edition came out I was very reluctant to try it. But once I did it grew on me very quickly. This book is one of the better third edition books out yet. If you are interested in playing a monster or allowing them into your campaign I would strongly recommend this book. It was informative, and well put together. Some of the prestige classes I did not care for but over all great book. It took a lot of the guess work out of using monsters as PC. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wanted to play a monster, or runs a game with players who wish to do so. I gave it 4 stars because it is good but not perfect!

There is no better book for integrating monster PC's into a regular campaign, or for making a group of monsters into protagonists. Crafty GM's will also find great material for making unique and memorable monsters that add variety and flavor to their campaigns. There are excellent suggestions for making monster NPC's that the characters can interact with, and level progressions for scaling monsters exactly to PC's of their level for whatever reason. The book is reasonably easy to adapt to Pathfinder.

If you're a GM and you love making your own monsters, or if the idea of playing a monster PC in D&D or Pathfinder sounds fun to you, then I recommend you get this book.