Topic: Bestiary vs M:AFG?

[craig]

How does the new Bestiary compare to the old Monsters: A Field Guide?

Is there much new in it? Is it worth getting if you already have M:AFG?

Things I'm most interested in:

• new monsters
• new monster templates
• new talents / abilities / skills
• new rules

and does the PDF have :

• decent clickable indexes/bookmarks/table of contents
• fully searchable text(*)

(*) i.e. none of the kind of nonsense where heading text is actually an allegedly "cool" graphic rather than actual text.

Things I'm less interested in (for a monster book):

• setting or cosmology or background info and other fluff

I've got nothing against setting info, but IMO that belongs in a setting book, not a monsters book.

[Twistor]

Sorry I can't comment much on the comparison of the content to Monsters: A Field Guide, since I mostly run RM. I only bought Bestiary since it was on sale and it had some cool stuff about planes of existence (although I also like the adventure notes on all the creatures), which apparently doesn't interest you that much anyway. In this book, those are treated as examples.

However, for the meta questions I can comment:

The current version does not have clickable indexes nor bookmarks, though it has a regular table of contents. Perhaps this will be added later. Unfortunately it appears that the section titles are not searchable, though all the descriptive text and the chapter titles are.

[Colin-ICE]

I don't have a copy of Monsters: A field guide to compare against but I wrote the 'real life animals' and 'sea monsters'. I don't see the harm in sharing the list of sea monsters that I wrote up:

Bishop Fish
Blink Shark
Blood weed
Charybdis
Demon Whale
Dobharchu
Drogue Weed
Electric Jelly Fish
Giant Hellbender
Giant Lobster
Grendel
Hippocampus
Hydra
Kraken
Lake Monster
Leviathan Ray
Pond Stalker
Red Feeder
Spineshark
Vampire Leech
Water Watcher

Hopefully that gives a bit of an indication as to whathas been replicated.