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Chapter One: The Role of Creatures In Your Game is something of an overview chapter with general options. Long generically refers to the entries in the book as “creatures” although the term “animals” is also used. Specifically, an animal is defined by the following characteristics: It's of non-humanoid shape (there are exceptions, like primates), it's non-sentient, and has physical existence. The general term creature includes not only animals but “aliens”, noncorporeal beings (like ghosts) and non-living constructs (like robots). This introductory section also briefly addresses the roles creatures and animals have in games, from outright threats to companions or “red herrings”.
There is also review of how to build animals in HERO System. For instance, whereas human and nonhuman characters have Everyman Skills, animals have “Everycreature Skills” (Analyze Animal, for instance, is what a wolf uses to judge the dynamics of its pack and ability to challenge the alpha). This section also goes over the Animal Handler skill, which since 5th Edition is highly specialized: Buying all the various categories of animals you can effect with it takes 14 points in standard rules and in this book includes categories for everything from “Birds (but not Raptors)”, “Lagomorphs” and “Weasels.” More importantly, the Bestiary goes over animal training using Animal Handler, with uses including calming ferocious animals, training animals, and teaching trained animals to perform tricks. With regard to the latter, the time it takes to teach a trick and the number of separate tricks (like targeting a separate enemy in combat) a given animal can learn depends on its level of intellect, which for animals is a Complication that has nothing to do with its INT score- most animals in fact have a human Intelligence range in game rules, but most also have an “Limited Intellect” Complication reflecting their inability to grasp much in the way of abstractions. This section also includes rules for other Skills used with animals (like Riding) and some Skills used by animals, like Survival and even Martial Arts (some predators have a set of maneuvers called 'Red in Tooth and Claw' which is mentioned in HERO System Martial Arts). In building animals, there are some Powers that are necessary to make things like venom or carried diseases (see below) and there are rules for defining Complications like the aforementioned Limited Intellect Complication and the Physical Complication “Cold-Blooded.”
Next, Chapter One gives us a few Creature Templates that can be spliced onto a given creature, such as “Augmented” (either through cyberware or some kind of magic; the basilisk and chimera being examples of the latter, based on real animals). There is also the “Diseased” template. Just in case you really wanted to get rabies or bubonic plague, this book shows how they work in the game. Likewise the Venom template gives rules for the strengths of various venoms. Page 34 then gives a set of Humanoid Templates that can be added onto humans and humanoid monsters, for those who are experienced officers, Psionic, Shamans, etc.
After this, Chapter One goes over the use of animals in combat, noting for instance that animals rarely Block but often Dodge during retreat. A good deal of text is given to the use of gigantic monsters in combat. There is also an important list of Hit Location tables for non-humanoid monsters, including fantastic creatures.
Finally, this chapter includes a brief mention of how to consider the density of an animal population for its environment (even though it's also stated that the number of animals in an area is basically whatever the GM needs it to be), and rules for how to assess the value of animal or creature parts (in the Skills section it's mentioned that the Streetwise Skill can be used to access the poachers' market).
Chapter Two: Monsters and Fantastic Creatures is a big chapter, but does not include real animals (Chapter Six), sci-fi monsters (Chapter Five) or humanoid races or undead (Chapter Three). These are generally the sort of creatures that one expects in a generic Fantasy game, although they do include Giant versions of normal animals like rats, Centaurs (who are partially humanoid), Demons (who are often humanoid) and actual new inventions like the Butatsch ('a shapeless mass of glistening gray tissue. Its body is studded with large red eyes from which it can emit blasts of fire').
Chapter Three: Humanoid Monsters is self-explanatory. There are Dark Dwarves and Dark Elves, but not 'regular' Dwarves and Elves, probably because these are PC templates for Fantasy HERO. There are a few races that are fairly obvious re-skins (the 'Astral Corsair' for instance, seems inspired by D&D's Githyanki). More interestingly there are races introduced in Long's The Turakian Age setting including the catlike Pakasa and the goatlike Kallicantzari. And in the Undead section there are expanded options for Zombies. The new Bestiary is actually well-timed to take advantage of the contemporary zombie craze. Not only do you have new writeups for applying various genre powers to zombies (stench, infectious bite, etc.) there is also a fairly long section on gamemastering stories that use zombies as the main monster, pointing out for one thing that zombies in themselves aren't terribly interesting. Most zombie horror media simply turn the faceless, mindless undead into a force-of-nature hazard that the human heroes have to avoid as best as possible, at which point the real horror becomes what the human survivors have to do to survive a suddenly hostile environment (as in the recent TV adaptation of The Walking Dead comic).
Chapter Four: Monsters From Around The World is basically an adaptation of material from previous (5th Edition) books, namely Michael Surbook's Asian Bestiary (volumes 1 and 2).
The Celtic section of course goes into some detail on the Faerie as a group although most of the monsters in this section qualify as some type of fae, as would nature spirits like the Nymph or the Leshi in Chapter Three or some of the Asian monsters later in this chapter. This info is similar in format to the data in Long's 5th Edition Celtic fantasy sourcebook Tuala Morn, but actually more detailed. There are even more pronunciation guides for the Gaelic words, but they still don't tell you how to say “pishogue.”
The Chinese, Japanese and Indian sections are much smaller compared to the Asian Bestiary and include some beings analogous to faeries (like the Chinese shen) but also some who resemble undead in the sense that they were formerly mortals but are trapped on Earth either due to some evil they committed or due to the proper funeral rites not being performed. These include the Chinese kuei (ghosts) and Indian preta (also considered to be the same as the Japanese gaki).
The “Rest of Asia” section is even more of a grab-bag and even more bizarre. Such as the Filipino Ghoul, which is distinguished from the Regular Ghoul in that it can turn invisible, cause accidents (RKA with a Triggered delay) and create an illusion that causes a banana tree trunk to resemble a corpse. Then you have the Indonesian penanggalan, who resembles a human woman by day but who separates into a flying head with attached viscera that flies around by night and drinks the blood of pregnant women. And then the related sundal bolong, a vampire who has a hole in her back and whose name literally translates as “prostitute with a hole in her.”
As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.
Chapter Five: Science Fiction, Horror and Movie Monsters is basically for a range of things that are more associated with movies and TV than anything else, even though some of them (like the Animal-Men ) could just as easily go to Chapter Three, and likewise the Zombies could just as easily classify as Movie Monsters. Other examples include the “Ape, Giant” and “Giant Dinosaur” (note the alphabetical order), the “Chromedog” (a Doberman with cyberware), actual Robots (examples of Automatons in this system). Still others include the Giant Space Amoeba and the “Engine of Destruction” (somewhere between Star Trek's Doomsday Machine and an automated Death Star, which I guess WOULD be The Doomsday Machine).
Chapter Six: Mundane Beasts is also self-explanatory. The main value here, as with Chapter One, is that it shows the sort of animals that characters would realistically be able to interact with, either as companions of threats. This section also includes writeups of dinosaurs, as in the real dinosaur species (who are not mundane beasts now, but were once).
SUMMARY
As with much if not most HERO 6th Edition material, The HERO System Bestiary is a necessary expansion on the previous edition, which in this case is noteworthy for its expanded rules for Zombies and the “Monsters From Around The World” chapter; while that does not have all the detail of the 5th Edition material, it does mean that there's a pretty good sampling of stuff for one 6th Edition sourcebook. As my review indicates, I find some of the classifications for which monster goes to which section, and in which order, to be a bit subjective, but for the most part it's easy to follow. It should be noted that there's no Index, but given the nature of the text, the Table of Contents should suffice for finding a given entry.
Style: 3
The Bestiary is straightforward text with some original art, a few stock illustrations from other HERO stuff and miscellaneous sources (a couple of Faerie illustrations are often from 19th Century books, for example).
Substance: 4
The HERO System Bestiary for 6th Edition improves on the prior material, in both the range of creatures presented and the rules for using them in a game.
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