09 December 2020

Review: Creatures

I backed the Kickstarter for Creatures which billed itself as "Designed by the creators of Shadows of Esteren and Fateforge, Creatures is a love letter to fantasy bestiaries." Still waiting on the hard copy to arrive, I am going to talk through the draft document I have my hands on. Things may change, grain of salt etc.

tl;dr - nice product, a new angle on classic city and fantasy countrside plus a whole new steppe setting; I will be putting it to use.

First impressions on a flick through is that its gorgeous and exactly what I hoped it would be - one of those bestiary / setting combos similar to Veins of the Earth. The art is great, all tied together in a more 'pencils and watercolours of a real place' than the high fantasy standard of D&D main line products.

Screengrab of Creatures cover from the Kickstarter page


Set out in five sections; foreword, a section each for Free City (urban), Drakenbergen (wilderness) and Great Kaan (steppe) and finally an appendix of useful tools. Overall I like this a lot - it has a useful blend of 'grouping things by type for use'. The Foreword lays out explicitly the intention for this to be a book of hooks, ideas and inspirations and I think it succeeds well. Another purpose given is to reinvent orcs, goblins and others to make them more than 'evil by default' and we will come to this later.

The Free City section includes items and lots of mundane NPCs to be found in the city - merchants, soldiers, cultists that are likely to be your go to adversaries for urban adventuring. This is great, echoing one of my favourite innovations of the 5e Monster Manual - Appendix B NPCs. Split out by theme - crime, temples, things that hide as humans - I like how it gives a selection of increasingly challenging and strange options for each theme.

A similar split happens in Drakenbergen with themes of wilderness, volcanic and undead. Here many small entries for un-complicated creature give lots of variety in low challenge rating things and larger entries for the fewer, scarier entities (complete with isometric lair maps) give options for various string-pullers and big bosses. The evocative art is nice and I like the page design a lot - creating a scrap-book, folio of notes effect that fits in all the info but breaks it up in a visually pleasing way.

Next is the Great Kaan section which I think it my favourite. The Free City and Drakenbergen sections are nice reorganisations and sylish recombinations of things with close approximations in the Monster Manual while the Great Kaan includes a great new region and its peoples to fold into anything. This was the section that really caught my eye and at just under half the book (45%) including a reweaving of goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, orcs and bugbears into a new interesting tapestry. Subsections include, these peoples, warriors of the steppe and mounts, then three sections of a similar terrain-based focus of challenges and dwellers tied to steppes, artic and 'dark magic' which could work for dungeons or things found roaming abroad in any terrain. I like the mounts selection quite a bit, from camels to worgs there are some great options for players to play with.

Coming back to the forewords objective of building more into orcs, goblins, kobolds, etc. I think the proposed new cultures are very interesting, giving a broader base for each of those species to be good or evil as the individual so chooses, which is nice. I like how explicit among the hobgoblins is a group launching on a project to break the division by clans and species and build a nation that can encompass all. This kind of broad canvas I can work with or adapt to whatever I want.

Lastly there is an Appendix with a bunch of references that look to me like the things a DM would end up picking up the PHB for so that is a nice touch to have it all in one cover. There is a section on traps which is interesting and useful and a section on perils which I liked a lot. These are effectively terrain threats or challenges that need to be dealt with and a framework for dealing with them - warning signs (giving time to avoid or mitigate) and then what happens once the threat arrives. These contain some very neat ideas for volcanic perils, falls in mountains, crossing ice - each in a compact few paragraphs, no more than a half page.

Wrap-up Overall I like it a lot and am glad to have backed the book. I can see the Free City, Great Kaan and Perils bits going into immediate use at my table. I have an as yet partially described northern nation in my home game that the Great Kaan is going to provide highly useable inputs for. I anticipate I will like this all the more once I get my hands on the physical hard-copy. I could easily see that a stripped out load for a DM could be your notes, DM-screen and Creatures as there are enough monsters and hazards to run for quite some time.

If you want to see more there are some page previews on the Kickstarter page. There is also a players guide for the overall setting of Esteren available on DriveThruRPG for $0 if you want to investigate the setting more.

(Edited to reflect initial tagged 'see more' content was only accessible to Kickstarter backers.)

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