GURPS Bestiary - 4th ed.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

GMs who are proudly ignorant of the many potentially useful mobility traits and sensory traits possessed by a great variety of animals, which makes each species useful in different ways as familiars, as something to shapeshift into, and so forth.

QFT. Animals are Allies, racial templates, Enemies, forms for Shapeshifting or Alternate Form, you name it. Players use these as well as GMs. The utility of such a book is huge.

[DanHoward]

This has come up recently on RPG.net and I thought I'd cross-post my thoughts

IMO a hardback bestiary, full of creatures fully statted with points, will never recover the investment required to write and edit it and will likely take longer than Low-Tech to produce. It might be better to publish a series of smaller e23 books with each mini-bestiary limited to a specific theme. Each could have a title such as African Carnivores, Dinosaurs, Greek Mythological Creatures, Reptile Repository, etc. There could be a few overlaps such as crocodiles in both the African and Reptile book. It will also reduce problems created when a creature is omitted. Once you produce a hardbacked compendium of "all creatures ever" it is far harder to include more entries than just bringing out another pdf supplement in an ongoing series.

That way you won't tie up the GURPS staff for years trying to produce one large book. It could be done piecemeal whenever resources could be allocated. I know that some people don't like pdf but SJG have already given their arguments many times for going down this route. If you want SJG to continue to support GURPS then get used to ebooks. I'd rather get some stuff in pdf format in the near future than wait for the perfect hardback that may never come. You could always combine the pdfs into a hardback if the series is popular enough.

[DanHoward]

Another option is to have the big book, but with a small number of fully-statted creatures and the bulk of the book consisting of compact stat blocks. At the start of a section you'd have one archetypical creature fully statted up on its own page and the following pages full of related creatures with summarised stat blocks. Instead of many hundreds of detailed creatures you'd have a few dozen with hundreds of others in the smaller format. For example, a section on canines will have, say, a timber wolf fully statted out on its own page. Then, in the next few pages, you'd include all of the other dogs and wolves (including fantasy ones) in stat blocks.

[Quietman]

I truly like the idea of the species specific pdf booklets. As stated, you can create the basic creatures and then list out what makes the animal different from its base line.

Canines are a marvelous example of how things have expanded from the basic tamed wolf like creatures from our past. However, they still start with several basic similarities.

This would then allow the players and the GMs to modify them to fit what is needed.

I have used pets and trained animals in a few of the games I have played in the past, it was rather helpful when the trained to be a war dog / guardian sniffed out where the real person was as opposed to that was presented to our group as the target of our rescue foray.

If you look at the real world scenarios, trained warhorses were the "rage" for the Crusaders and even throughout the Arabic world, trained horses were of inestimable value to their owners.

A specific forum would be a good place for people to start providing information that can be used to create the templates and the variations for SJG to bundle up into a useable format.

So who shall start a new thread ??

Also, let it not degenerate into a nitpicking forum. Start with a basic idea and let it get placed onto the list.

[dataweaver]

This applies to more than just Bestiary, IMHO. PDF publishing makes it feasible to produce a series of low-cost supplements that cover a topic in a piecemeal fashion (e.g., the Spaceships series, or the Low-Tech Companions); I'd like to see a move to this sort of thing rather than an "everything you ever wanted to know about X" approach. Spaceships is an especially good model: the first book in the series covered what rules issues need to be addressed up front, and each of the supplements built on that.

For a Bestiary, I'd be inclined to build each supplement around a small set of related meta-traits that spell out the most common features of the general type of animal to be covered in that supplement.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

For a Bestiary, I'd be inclined to build each supplement around a small set of related meta-traits that spell out the most common features of the general type of animal to be covered in that supplement.

I agree with this. I had the start of a Bestiary 1: Domesticated Animals at one point, with plans for Bestiary 2: Modern Megafauna, Bestiary 3: Birds of Prey, and a few others... but I ran into two major snags:

1) I'm no biologist, nor have I even played one in a game, and
2) I lost most of my work on the first draft of Domesticated Animals when my hard drive crashed. :/

And besides, most of what Domesticated Animals covers has been covered in Low-Tech Companion 3.