Bestiary comment thread

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Proteus

I once contemplated whether a Bestiary might better end up as a back-door compilation of other products. I realize that’s the solution others fear, though it also seems a more likely way to get them written and sold. You might have titles like:

• GURPS Aerial Adventures —
  
• GURPS Fantasy: Familiars —
  
• GURPS Powers: Lycanthropy — with stats for wolves, dingos, jackals, coyotes, maybe foxes, and assorted domestic canines, along with myths and mechanics?
  
• GURPS High-Tech: Safari —
  
• GURPS Horror: Cats —
  
• GURPS Low-Tech: Beasts of Burden —
  
• GURPS Low-Tech: Farmers and Hunters —
  
• GURPS Ultra-Tech: Uplifted Companions —
  
• GURPS Underwater Adventures —

I dont think that addresses the core problem. The core issue is of Perception to where people overlook the bestiaries because they dont see a easily recognized title, except as part of DF.
Also it makes the "Where do I find that?" problem harder.
That said I love most of those titles!

Aerial and Underwater Adventures both could be really useful, though I had an idea once upon a time for GURPS 3D Combat (I bet I'm not the only one either) It could cover each of the major mediums in a chapter with an intro chapter for common rules and traits.
I'd buy that book.
GURPS Fantasy Familiars could be a great small book.
GURPS Powers: Lycanthropy would be fun to write, I know I have plenty of material for a book like that and its pretty much on the Wishlist.
GURPS High-Tech Safari sounds good, but maybe either as a Cliffhangers book or a Generic Safari book covering multiple tech levels. I think thats your weakest suggestion and I'd still find it a fun read.

Beasts of Burden and Farmers and Hunters would make a great single book dealing with a perennial question about growing a low tech settlement.

Uplifted Companions could be another in the Template Toolkit line or something else.

[Sam Baughn]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

The prior GURPS Bestiary was mostly real world animals with some extinct and some cryptids, not fantasy creatures. GURPS Fantasy Bestiary was a separate book.

When I think of 'GURPS Bestiary' I think of that kind of thing; information about real-world animals (including extinct ones, but mostly modern) and maybe some small amount of extra stuff about fantastic (possibly including science-fictional) versions of them. Monsters are genre-specific and already well covered.
Real-world animals can be found in a much wider variety of settings than most monsters and are useful to have templates for in case shape-shifting characters want to turn into them. A bit of real-world research would also be helpful for those of us who lack a good grasp on what it is actually like to own a horse, for example.
Unfortunately, it seems that a single bestiary is probably too ambitious a project; I doubt there are many zoologists with a broad knowledge of animals in general who are familiar with the system and have time to write a gaming supplement and anything longer than a few dozen pages seems like a big project, risking a lot of wasted time and resources. Turning it into a series of smaller supplements would seem to be the way to go; while we may not have anyone who will write several hundred pages about a massive range of animals, we could have a few people who would be willing to write a few dozen pages about a handful of species they know a bit about. The tricky part would seem to be dividing the topic up into manageable chunks; do we do it by region, climate, ecological niche, biological taxonomy, or what? I feel that if SJG would put a list of ten titles they would like in the series, they might have more luck finding a writer for at least some of them.

[Black Leviathan]

I'd like something setting-specific so that intelligent monsters like Goblins have cultural specific information. Quality over quantity. I'd like monsters organized by area you encounter them so that I don't have to read descriptions for dozens of creatures in different books to find one that my players can bump into while travelling the desert.

I'd like a Beastiary that deals with a wide spread of ordinary animals. The Core books are great if I want my players to fight a black bear, but what about a shark? How dangerous is scorpion venom? Could I get a sidebar about what's involved in preparing poison from animal vemons? Could I get a little chapter on what's involved in skinning and prepping game and how to guess that value of a wild animal skin? I've never ridden a horse. I'd really like some background on how horses are used through history, some explanation about what the big deal about saddles is, some suggested penalties for improvised saddles or bridles. Is there cool equipment I could buy for my Animal Handling skill? I really think if you think about what people do with animals in games you could construct a whole High-tech-like hardcover for just Animals.

[Culture20]

The biggest problem now is there are so many people who have made their own bestiaries online that I don't know how many will buy an official one. I needed animal stats for a nee game I'm running where one PC might deal with a variety of animals, and absent a collected and organized work, I chose to use Chandley's GURPS TMNT stuff:
https://sites.google.com/site/chandl...rps/gurps-tmnt

That, and DF monsters (I assume) would better match the 300+ pt DF PCs instead of a 100-150 pt PC group, so having works organized by genre would be nice. The first of each genre doesn't have to be comprehensive either; just enough to be worth buying. Perhaps make the index of each subsequent book in a genre also include the prior books (volume 6 of GURPS Real Bestiary might be 1/4 index...), that way you can check just one index (the newest book)

[Pursuivant]

Perhaps a Bestiary for DF would sell better if you described it as a "Monster Manual." :)

For a "generic" GURPS Monster Manual, I could see three ways to go:

* Revision of GURPS 3E Bestiary 3E mostly with stat blocks replaced.

* Reworking of GURPS 3E Bestiary with fantasy critters and "fluff" text removed but added animal "racial" templates. (A printed/pdf version of Pizard's Animalia web site, with conversion notes how to realistically scale animals up or down would be a good starting point).

* Fold the Bestiary into a "GURPS Animals" product which riffs off of the GURPS 3E Bunnies and Burrows conversion and GURPS 3E Shapeshifters (and possible old Pyramid articles?) to cover animal-based and shapeshifter campaigns.

If done well, I'd buy any version of the above. Even though there's a lot of fan-based material out there, it's of uneven quality and not always accessible.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Even though there's a lot of fan-based material out there, it's of uneven quality and not always accessible.

Perhaps it's because I'm old and cranky, but I don't trust web-based material to be around the next time I go looking for it. People move their websites or stop paying their hosting bills, search algorithms drift, and Facebook buries content that doesn't get paid-promoted.

I half expect any random website to be replaced with a bad Under Construction animated GIF the next time I use it.

Never mind the mercurial nature of my actual network connection.

I'm nerdy enough that I scrape useful websites and mirror them on my drive, and/or convert them to a handy-dandy ebook format. This is out of reach of most folks.

And there's always the simple fact that PDFs coming from one source are going to be crosschecked against each other (we know SJG is good for it) - so you won't get inconsistent statistics.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

I'd like something setting-specific so that intelligent monsters like Goblins have cultural specific information.

This already exists. As there is only one fantasy setting for 4e, Banestorm, and it has goblins listed in it.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I'm nerdy enough that I scrape useful websites and mirror them on my drive, and/or convert them to a handy-dandy ebook format. This is out of reach of most folks.

It's pretty simple to Print to PDF, but there are a lot of websites do not take well to printing.

[Phantasm]

I'm less concerned about setting-specific goblins or trolls than I am things that are the baseline of stuff I can tweak. If I have an Indian elephant, I can come up with the stats for the North African Elephants that Hannibal brought over the Alps. If I have a rhinoceros, I can come up with a Wakandan War Rhino. If I have a Bigfoot or Yeti, I can come up with any number of sci-fi aliens along the same lines; etc. etc.

[Joseph Paul]

I am not so much an extrapolator. I want breadth and depth in a bestiary. Wouldn't mind if it was a series so that I could pick what was important to me - everything that has lived on this Earth, Fantasy from Folktales, DF Monsters, Alien Ecologies, etc rather than another smattering of stuff.

I don't want a Bestiary Toolkit. At least not in the first 2/3rds of the book. I want it to help me at the table when I open it.

Expand the info for an animal to include behaviours in hunting, mating, travel, best attacks, when will a beast break contact (or that it never will), cooperative behaviours with like animals or other species, if it can be used as a mount how does that work. Side bars on tracking and capture (or evading being tracked by the animals!), captivity and domestication, animal husbandry/ranching.

Changing any stat in a stat block can create a cascade of changed skills or effective numbers deriving from advantages. So examples of a type of beast with different experience - young beasts, mature beasts, kings of beasts in their prime and cagey old beasts that have seen all the traps before...is a boon at the table as I am not making hasty changes on the fly for what ever reason has cropped up.

Icelander did a whole slew of horse types for a game of his. That example is something that can be used again and again as soon as the book is opened. No messing around with guestimating what nags, poor quality mounts, run of the mill ones, quality blood lines, pick of the herd, or Secretariat-class animals should be statted as under GURPS rules. If I want something a little different I have enough data points to make a reasonable guess and to learn some things about how to put a beastie together. Thoroughbreds probably don't get just better stats but also Enhanced Move, Running, and Very Fit I would wager.

By not having to do extensive interpolation/extrapolation I can spread some of the work out - "Fred look at the Horses entry and copy out the stats for 4 good pack horses, 2 poor ones"

However if I ask Fred to pull stats for 6 rouncys and 'shake them up a little' by changing a stat or adding to or subtracting from a skill, Fred has to contend with 'wall of words' stat blocks and weed through it to find all of the skills that a change to a particular stat will affect. How about arranging the skills in order of the ruling stat first and then alphabetically? Change an animal's DX by +1 and you can get by with noting that all of the DX skills are +1. If we just change a skill by one or two points we still need to cross check anything that might be at default from that skill but anything like that is probably in the block with the controlling stat.

Oh, Pack Stats for running wolf hoards, herds of buffalo/elephants/lemmings, pods of porpoise and orca, crashes of rhinoceri, mobs of starlings and exhaltations of larks. Organization for the chaos of melee - Basic stats, HP and FP with room to mark them down as our heroes' weapons wound and kill them. A pre-done sheet with headings and the GM fills in the blanks (and saves a PDF of it for later) would work. Space for noting specifics of the species reactions to wounds, HT rolls to make, specifics of strange attacks etc. Best of both - some Pack Stat pages for the most commonly encountered beasts to copy (wolves, stampedes of cattle, skeletons...) and generics as models to fill in - differentiate on body type - Quadruped, Bipedal(non -humanoid like an Allosaurus), Flying - and the page includes the Hit location chart for the body type. Another thing I don't have to look up in Basic.

Don't give me a reference to Basic in the Bestiary. E. g. reprint the material about Poisons as it pertains to venomous animals. Don't make me have to flip back and forth between books to resolve a bite.

If we get a Bestiary I don't want adventures to rely on it by directing the GM to see 'the entry on hippotami on pg XXX of the bestiary.' Put the most relevant info in the adventure and keep my book swapping to a minimum.