For those of you who don't know about Saga system and the 5th age game let me start out by saying - you really should find out. The Bestiary is a supplement for Dragonlance 5th age, using the Saga system, that gives you copious amounts of information on beasts, animals, and monsters in the 5th age.
Physically the book is nicely done - it follows the trade paperback sizing of the other 5th age books, but is significantly heavier and better bound than most of it's boxed set brethern. The paper is also nice, a fairly heavy weight gloss that I just love.
The Bestiary starts out with game notes for using creatures in Dragonlance games - a nice section with a fairly wide range of powers that is adequately described (though not brilliantly) in game terms. This section is necessary for playing - because most of the rest of the book is set up without much reference to the statistics or game mechanics of the creatures (something I like actually).
The vast majority of the rest of the book is set up as an IC book written by Cameron Majare and Bertrem. The writing is all done from the POV of these two characters - giving the book lots of information, but also giving different ideas about each creature, and allowing the Storyteller to override anything they said as being incorrect. The writing is well done, actually very engaging - which is very unusual in a monstrous manual style book. My gripes with this section are limited to 3. First - some of the "handwriting" fonts are a pain to read. Second - the adventure hooks for the monsters are not really that inspired. Finally - I wanted more monsters! They do a great job of detailing and building stories around the ones they present - but the section is not as huge as I was hoping for.
The last section is back to a game mechanics section - a little bit of advise about how to make your own monsters without having them suck. It's nice - but also rather basic stuff. Finally there is a table of all the monsters in this and the main book with comprehensive game stats for all of them - a very nice little feature.
Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)
