[Tymathee]

Hmm, should've known my idea was too good, it was already good and done!

The core critter build-apply lenses-make monsters idea was just a tangential thinking really, but I'll have to bookmark that for later reading at least. What complicates things is that I've got very particular fluff in mind that won't allow for much more abstraction than what I'm working with already. I know I'm being needlessly opaque with that explanation but... well, actually, it is totally arbitrary that I'm being so secretive. Those details aren't too pertinent to the discussion so I'll enjoy my own mystique. :^)

Oh yes, the Demons book. If things had gone just a little differently the entirety of my bestiary would just be demons. I think I've gone too deep into writing up all the crunch details for my campaign though to go back to square one. I'll dare to say the creatures of the setting could be summed up as "the fantastic natural". The single and only professional template (One? What about nice protection? It's so that they all have a core, standardized suite of abilities and skills they'll all need; there's some options to differentiate too) that all the PCs will be built on was hard enough for me to put together, and if I swapped to a wholly demons bestiary it'd be a real pain to redo all that work! Although if I could strip the book of all the demon fluff and crunch to repurpose for my own needs, that'd be helpful... but I suspect that'd I'd be almost rewriting a great deal of the supplement.

I once worked a soul-sucking customer service and sales job for about two years that had me doing some light database work in Excel, but I can't say I even remember what little I did know to use it. Oh well!