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In my original review of the Bestiary Fantastic, I wrote a rather scathing - and rather short - review of how the game was essentially another bug-on-the-windshield, let's-put-on-a-show-in-our-garage attempt to replicate a game that had already had millions of dollars, tens of thousands of hours of playtesting and instant name recognition. I was wrong, though, because 54 - and its related bestiary - actually use the OGL system, an official Get Out of Jail Free card for writing a fantasy heartbreaker. So let me say this: 54 is not a fantasy heartbreaker. It's a version of D&D 3.0 that uses cards instead of dice.

Here's the problem: The D&D gold rush ended a long time ago. If you're lucky enough to have a Half-Price Books in your state, you can go to the game section and see the layer of unsellable 3.0/3.5 stuff that washed up in the aftermath, the dead kelp and fish skeletons of the industry. Just about every game store will have the same thing, their capital invested in stuff that'll just never sell. Start a fire and keep it burning bright, is my thinking. 

I'm as guilty as anybody in all of this; I used to demand that people use d20 if they were going to write a new fantasy gamse, especially if it was one whose function was essentially to rewrite D&D. I still stand by that - and I think that the OGL has done a lot to clip the creation of unnecessary new systems - but I was hoping that people would exercise their imaginations to come up with new and interesting stuff, introducing stuff from outside of the insular world of D&D - new Planescapes, new Dark Suns, just something other than the standard run of Tolkienesque fantasy as run through the Gygaxizer. There was - and still is - some of that; Wraith Recon, Midnight, the fantastic stuff done with the OGL by Mutants and Masterminds and points related. But not enough.

So, we come to 54. And we come to the Bestiary Fantastic. Which is, basically, the Monster Manual, entirely rewritten to use 54's rules and with different flavor text. As it's 528 pages, I was initially going to write it off as a heroic, Henry-Dargeresque act of heroic obsession, one guy - one guy - writing a truly titanic amount of information and publishing it as a PDF. It's still a mighty impressive feat, but...

I should talk about the art. I generally tend to not like to deride people's artwork, mostly because I can't draw worth a damn myself and feel rather awkward dissing other people's artwork unless it's really, nakedly bad. (I especially don't like ripping on amateur artists because I know how long it takes to get good, and don't want to discourage people.) The art in here runs the gamut. A lot of it is public domain art from the 1800's, usually representing the subject matter in some tangential sense. The stuff that isn't covers a pretty wide range; some of it is pretty decent, while other stuff looks like it was drawn in a notebook during a lazy chemistry class or in Microsoft Paint. 

Well, I guess here's the thing: D&D used to be about exercising your imagination. And I think that more and more it's becoming about climbing up the same path that hundreds of people have already been up, except with a slightly different set of steps. I guess that if you're in the market for the Monster Manual except with a system that you're going to have to teach your players - and you want to pay $12 for something you can get for free online, in the d20 format - or much less than that if you're, again, lucky enough to have a Half-Price Books nearby - then you should pick this, and 54 up, and enjoy using cards instead of dice. Uh. I guess. I have to confess that I don't entirely see the point.

-Darren MacLennan

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