Due to a minor mistake, probably by a clerk who didn't know better, I managed to pick up a copy of Savage Species before the street release date of Friday, February 14th. That means an early review for you folks.
Savage Species is essentially to the 3rd edition what the old Complete Humanoids Handbook was to 2nd edition. No, it's not just humanoids -- as with all things 3e, there's a much wider scope covered here. Savage Species takes monster characters from concept to execution, showing the reasoning for different types of character decisions and rules calls along the way. Not only does it finally settle all of the questions about ECLs and monster advancement, but it provides a good double-handful of advancement templates for all manner of monstrous characters, as well as a thorough examination of how to insert monsters into a campaign -- or make a new monster-based campaign.
CONTENTS: Savage Species is a stand-alone hardcover book. The binding is a slightly different stock than the past books from WotC -- my copy had a slightly backward-bent cover, and one of my associates who's intimately familiar with WotC's stock and publication strategies felt it for a while and said it was different.
SYNOPSIS: The Savage Species book takes a very well-organized approach. It starts with an introduction to character creation with the differences necessary to build a monster character. It also covers definitions of various special terms, and finally sorts out the differences between a monster with an ECL (an effective "bump" to its level due to its powers) and a monster with high Hit Dice (an otherwise standard guy with the fighty- and damage-absorbing abilities of a character of similar level).
As you might expect, the book includes some specific feats, spells, and equipment especially useful for monsters. A lot of the new "monstrous" feats are not necessarily useful only to monsters, and some are pretty powerful. The spells in general are good for monsters, especially given the special types presented later in the book. The equipment also varies from the mostly mundane (a very strong and concise section covering scaling weapons) to the bizarre (weird harnesses and multi-axis swords for very unhuman creatures).
Late in the book are the three major sections for creating monsters of various types: introductory monsters (things that are easy to translate like orcs), moderate monsters (slightly tougher to translate, like trolls) and advanced monsters (critters that are really tough to play well, like archons). There's a special table just for dragons.
A huge section of the book covers, specifically, templates. Now you can put a gelatinous template or a wight template on any number of monsters. You're not limited to stock wights -- you can have a wight that's made from a lizardfolk or a troglodyte (their example). The templates also include shadows, spectres, reptilians (reptilian bugbear!), insectoids, and more.
The section everyone's waiting for is the monster level section. Basically, the way to build a hard monster with lots of powers is to break its powers down and spread them out over several levels. Then, you spend your levels on the monster class, instead of getting a normal class. For monster with more than 1 Hit Die, this works very nicely. You can build elementals, giants, mind flayers, succubi, djinnis, and more. Some have short level progressions -- the ghoul, for instance, only takes 5 levels to gain all of its powers. Others can take 15 or more; some monster types have 20 levels, meaning you never get a class until you enter epic play. If you take a monster class, though, you must see it through to the end before you can multiclass. Because of the way ECLs work, you might not gain a hit die at every level, either; the ghoul, for instance, ends with 2d12 hit dice at 5th level -- which means that it counts as a 2nd level (2 Hit Die) character for skills, feats, and ability mods. Some monsters with high ECLs can have as little as half as many hit dice as their effective levels, meaning the character will lag behind in skills, feats and ability scores compared to other classed characters with the same XP totals.
A tiny section in back covers a few new potential PC races, including the half-ogre, and a whole table of anthropomorphic animals: Ways to have wolf-people, cat-people, rat-people, and so on.
THE HIGHS: Mind flayer PCs! Efreet! Succubi! Thri-kreen! Scalable weapons! The return of the half-ogre! Feats to improve your racial powers! Prestige classes that make sense for your nonhuman characters! (Most of them, you could actually use with a PC!) The list goes on and on. The book is chock-full of useful information. There's not a single page to skip, because none of it's filler. Whether offering advice on what feats are useful to various creatures, or covering how certain monster traits can throw an adventure (sucks to play a spectre wizard since you can't even touch spell components or spellbooks), or even giving solutions for your game (like how to turn any item, such as the aforementioned spellbook, into a ghost touch item), the book doesn't miss a beat in its constant information flow.
THE LOWS: Some of the rules make a limited amount of sense. The restriction prohibiting a monster from taking other class levels before finishing its monster class has some logic behind it -- it prevents people from min-maxing by taking some class levels to mitigate monster weaknesses without having to fight through the whole progression -- but that seems to be more of a DM's call about what makes an effective game. Some of the feats are maddeningly powerful: With a starting dwarf fighter, you can now take a feat that grants DR 2/-, and at third level, take another feat that gives you DR 4/-.
Also, the lack of advice on how to start 1-HD creatures with ECLs in a 1st level game is annoying. The book goes to great lengths to explain how to deconstruct a multiple-Hit Die monster into levels, but 1 Hit Die monsters lose their Hit Die and skills in favor of their class's. There's no explicit ruling on how to deconstruct, say, a Dark Elf so that you can play a first-level Dark Elf fighter with some partial powers and then spend your next two levels gaining the rest of your Dark Elf powers instead of class levels (to "buy off" the ECL). Of course, for all that the book presents, this is really just begging for more goodness, not complaining about something done wrong.
A couple points of layout/editing were obviously rushed; some page references go to the wrong page, and there are a couple niggling places of editorial gaffes (like all of the skill listings on one of the appendix tables missing their closing parentheses). In general these are very minor and certainly less common than in other companies' products.
Lastly, it's a mystery why the book includes rules for scaling weapons up and down in size, but doesn't do the same for armor. If my Large size half-ogre wants a suit of chain armor, what does it cost and how much does it weigh? For that matter, maybe this is for the best; the scaling rules are a little inconsistent. Scaling a weapon up in size increases its weight and cost by 50%, but scaling down decreases it by 25%. So, if I make a weapon bigger and then smaller again, it winds up larger than it started? Weird.
OVERALL: The Savage Species book shows the more "toolkit"-like design of D&D 3e off quite well. It certainly makes the play of various monsters a reasonable proposition, and goes a long way toward answering the motives behind them. The thought put into what powers can be unbalancing helps DMs to decide what monsters to allow or exclude, or how to design their adventures with those creatures in mind. Not a bad buy -- although it will really shine if future releases help with the construction of 1-HD monsters and their special rules.
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