Want Help Designing Your Own Monsters? Check Out The Genius Guide to The Talented Bestiary!

One of the hardest jobs you have as a DM is designing your own monsters. On the one hand, you don't want to make something that's ridiculous, silly, or which goes down in two hits. On the other hand, you don't want to be the DM that players tell horror stories about, because the monster you made up to "challenge" them ended up wiping the party out, and ending your campaign. Finding that happy medium is a chore, and in a crunchy game like Pathfinder it can be a nightmare for someone who doesn't have a huge amount of prep time, a graphing calculator, and who's forgotten everything they learned in trigonometry.

On the third hand, there is an Armageddon Tarrasque... for when your players get cocky.

That is where the latest collaborative effort between Rogue Genius Games and The Four Horsemen comes into the picture. This guide is a book that breaks down creature types, and divorces them from established crunch so that you can build truly unique creatures, and keep your players on their toes, without worrying that you overdid it.

Seriously, check out The Genius Guide to The Talented Bestiary!

So How Does This Thing Work?

One of the biggest issues dungeon masters face with experienced players is that they've seen it all, and done most of it twice. You can't say the word "goblin," "troll," or "zombie" and expect a reaction. To the players, these are quantifiable enemies, and they understand them in ways that strip out all of the mystery, even if they attempt to keep their meta knowledge out of the game itself. What The Genius Guide to The Talented Bestiary does, is allow the DM to get creative with monster presentation and abilities, removing that lifetime of meta knowledge from the equation.

Go for the head? I don't know, that worked before!

Take the troll, for example. A smooth DM would give a unique description of the hulking, tusked beast, streaming filthy water and raking its claws through the muck as it charges. That's simple enough, but once players dope out the ruse, the excitement is gone. This guide lets you do more than just give a creature a new paint job so your players don't recognize it right away. It gives you the tools to re-design monsters using simple formulas and stat blocks that will keep your players from making any assumptions whenever the dice start rolling.

And, of course, it provides hundreds of new monsters (with fully-tested mechanics) for you to use straight out of the book, so your party won't have any idea what's coming at them.

As of right now there's a little under two weeks for anyone who wants to back this project, so go check out The Genius Guide to The Talented Bestiary right now, and get in on the action!

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