The 5E version of the Battlezoo Bestiary (for which I statted up the 5e monsters) is out now, and you can buy it! The book contains more than 100 balanced, mechanically interesting monsters, plus a cool monster-parts magic item creation system which I worked on as well and which has been a ton of fun in my playtests.
check out this in-depth review of the Battlezoo Bestiary from Knights of Last Call, which is called “Move over Paizo and WOTC, is THIS the best monster book for PF2 and D&D 5e?”. Spoiler: they give the PF2 an A grade, and the 5e version got an A+ and was called “an oasis in the desert” of 5e monster design.
I’m proud of how it came out. Take a look!
Is this still in preorder mode? Looks like it won’t ship till late May?
When designing monsters, what is the number one thing you modify from the base 5e monsters and why?
#1 is Challenge Rating consistency. While CR will never be a 100% reliable indicator of how hard a battle is at your table, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement. I’ve tried to make sure that no monster is a surprise TPK or pushover.
Then second, I don’t want any bag-of-hit-point monsters with no interesting abilities. Not that that was a problem with the source material for this book!