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Tradition seems to demand that reviewers of role-playing game products should warn those reading the review of any personal quirks that might influence the opinions offered.
In this case, my personal quirk is that I have only played the D20 rules version of Fading Suns, and my review will therefore treat the Stellar Bestiary as a D20 supplement. There are rules for the Victory Point System as well, but since I have never used this ruleset, I can’t comment on how well these statistics are crafted.
PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION
“Lord Erbian’s Stellar Bestiary” is a slim, softcover, perfect-bound book running to 112 pages. I tend to prefer hardcover books for gaming, since they are far, far sturdier, but their cost is so high that one can easily understand why a company like Holistic Games has to make do with softcover printings of its products. Within the limits of a softcover’s durability, the Stellar Bestiary is well-made, solidly bound with good-quality interior paper and professional printing quality throughout.
BEASTS
The heart of any “monster” book is, of course, the creatures presented in it, and the Stellar Bestiary attempts to offer a good selection of beings which can be used both in planetside and shipboard scenarios. And, unfortunately, this is where one of the book’s major weaknesses lies. Out of all the creatures in the Stellar Bestiary, only a handful have a Challenge Rating of more than 3, and the vast majority have a CR of 1 or less. Even giant, formidable tyrannosaur-like monsters have a CR of 4. The highest CR in the book is 11, and you will search in vain for weird and deadly entities to pit against your upper-level heroes.
The problem with the low-end Challenge Ratings in the Stellar Bestiary, of course, is that it is suggested in the main Fading Suns D20 rulebook that Player Characters should begin their careers at 3rd level. This, in turn, means that most of the creatures in this book are trivial opponents for even starting characters, and will be totally useless once the heroes reach 5th or 6th level.
And this is truly a shame, because all of the creatures have long and interesting write-ups which could make them the foci of small adventures or intriguing subplots within larger quests, if only they weren’t so weak compared to the PCs.
As an example, one of the monsters, the Severan Angler, a huge bipedal insect that preys on Ascorbites and anything else that ventures into its jungle ambushes, has a meager CR of 4 – despite standing 20 feet tall, weighing 1100 pounds, and sporting arm-blades which could impale an average human through his ceramsteel plate armor with a single jab, from the looks of them. A party of scrubs on their first adventure could very likely blow it to pieces in a few rounds.
This is one of the tougher beasts – there are so many 1/6 and 1/4 CR monsters in the Stellar Bestiary, things that can’t even be dignified as speed bumps, that you feel a bit like you’ve bought a book that should be titled “Kobolds and Mosquitos in Space.”
There are a few creatures which I simply take exception to on the basis of the fact that they’re Earth creatures with a slight cosmetic change (“hey, let’s give a hippo an extra pair of legs and call it a Jukar T’ogh! We’ll even have it live in rivers and lakes!”) or seem to be ludicrous examples of sophomoric humor (the “regis,” a cartoonish-looking duck that defends itself with flatulence that smells so bad, predators leave it alone – sadly, I don’t jest ... oh, yes, and the Inquisition hates it, thus proving that they are sensible fellows...). Or the species of monkey with edible dung, whose portrait shows it defecating on a plate, complete with a cartoon-squiggle of “stink” rising from the object which it has just deposited beside the knife and fork.
ART
The art in the book is black-and-white, mostly pen and ink with washes for shading. Most of it is serviceable if not inspired. Several of the pieces are completely cartoonish, however, and several others are either gratuitously gory (the picture of a psi-crow ripping the eye out of a screaming human face, with the optic nerve flapping in midair, is particularly notable in this regard – especially since there is nothing in the creature’s description to suggest that they even eat physical flesh, preying on mental energy instead) or show monkeys taking a dump on dinner plates.
SUMMARY
Style 1 – The Fading Suns setting seems to me to project a sort of grim dignity all its own – a dark and brooding world shot through with gleams of hope, despair, heroism, faith, doom, and redemption. The Duck of Dire Flatulence and the Monkey of Edible Feces are just so ludicrous that they run violently counter to the mood of setting – perhaps to the extent of destroying it entirely, were one to use them. Mood is crucial in a game like Fading Suns, and the idea of the Inquisition dedicating resources to persecuting a duck because it makes amazingly smelly farts basically spits in the face of any GM who is trying to run a campaign rather than a cartoon.
Substance 3 – My substance rating would be lower if the descriptions of the creatures weren’t so painstaking and detailed. The effort taken to flesh the Stellar Bestiary’s monsters out is what saves this book from being a complete disaster. As it stands, most of the beasts have Challenge Ratings far too low to make them viable in a D20 campaign – particularly if the GM follows the main rulebook’s advice about starting all PCs at 3rd level. But the detail given to the entries makes it worthwhile for a Fading Suns fanatic to “upgrade” the more inventive or interesting beasts to higher Challenge Ratings, thus making them deadlier threats that subplots or adventures can be built around.
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