[guymc]

Greetings!

My long-time writing partner Greg Poehlein (with my assistance) is working on an official Bestiary of Cidri - a cataloguing of the creatures of Cidri that is inclusive of (but not exclusive to) all the creatures that appear in In the Labyrinth.

Greg, being a life scientist by trade and training, is approaching this from a scientific and scholarly bent, trying to produce a book that looks like it could have been created by Cidrian scholars while still being of maximal use to GMs in preparing campaigns and to players in researching. (I also want to make it great fun to read, which is my primary role in the enterprise!)

I want to solicit your comments on what the scope of the book should be. We want it to be useful to you, and don't want to leave out things that you need, but we also don't want the book to be blob-like and unorganized, just trying to include everything.

There are several possible schools of thought on the approach:

NO SENTIENT CREATURES
One take is to have this be a "beasts only" book, eliminating anything of human or human-like intelligence. This would mean no entries for anything of human-like IQ level. It eliminates the usual human/elf/dwarf/halfling group, as well as giants, mermen, neanderthals, orcs and the like (semi-humans), and totally non-human intelligent beings like reptile men, octopi, basilisks and dragons. The dividing line would be intellect only. This implies a separate book at some point on the intelligent races of Cidri.

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
Under this philosophy, every creature on Cidri, including player character races, would have entries which treated them from a biological and physical standpoint. Races wouldn't be covered in terms of their societies, but would get entries that specified their habitats, biology, traits, and of course game stats for average specimens. This wouldn't prevent doing a separate book on the societies of Cidri later -- but it would end up being a LOT bigger book.

Consider these the extreme ends of the spectrum. Another possible approach would be:

HUMANOID-CENTRIC
This approach would consider the basically human-shaped races (humans, elves, dwarves, halflings) together as variations of the same core biology, dealing with them biologically in a short section at the beginning of the book, with everything else getting full entries, sentient or not. (Orcs are a fringe case here. ITL specifies them as being a separate species, but they are interfertile with humans so... where do YOU want them?) This is basically a compromise to let us put in the dragons, reptile men, etc. that we think of as "foes" even though they are basically fellow sentients with the overwhelmingly humanoid types normally found as player characters.

Which of these would you favor, or do you have other ideas?