Has anyone got Kobold Press's "Tome of Beasts" yet?

[RPG_NPC]

Would love to read a review/rating of it...

[Oramac]

I assume you mean "Tome of Beasts"? :P A tomb of beasts would be much more deadly, I think.

In any case, a friend of mine has it. I haven't seen most of the monsters, but the ones I did see were pretty cool.

[RPG_NPC]

Ooops! Edit made, I'm going to blame my spellchecker. Sorry!

[Reosoul]

I'm a backer for the Kickstarter and picked up the Fantasy Grounds bundle. Unfortunately, either Kobold Press or Smiteworks fumbled my information and I still haven't gotten access to it even after it's been released, but I'll review it after it's available to me.

[Thomasd851]

I have the PDF and while I love the lore and flavour I think a lot of the monsters are VERY powerful. For instance the dogmole. A CR 1 beast, with 14 AC 71 HP. Has walking burrowing and swimming speeds, and blindsight 30ft. Plus multiattack for 1d6 +2 and 3d6 + 2. Far outclassing the power of the brown bear...and many of the other beasts are the same.

All in all I do recommend the book as it does give good creatures, but I think the damage ratio and CR are a bit unbalanced.

[TentacleSurpris]

I have the PDF and while I love the lore and flavour I think a lot of the monsters are VERY powerful. For instance the dogmole. A CR 1 beast, with 14 AC 71 HP. Has walking burrowing and swimming speeds, and blindsight 30ft. Plus multiattack for 1d6 +2 and 3d6 + 2. Far outclassing the power of the brown bear...and many of the other beasts are the same.

All in all I do recommend the book as it does give good creatures, but I think the damage ratio and CR are a bit unbalanced.

That's problematic, as any power creep with beasts is power creep for moon druids .

I'm looking at the Dogmole now, and I'm sure the CR is a typo. It has 11 hit dice.

Edit again. No, these beasts are crazy for moon druids. Bastet temple cat is a CR 1 with innate spellcasting and 9 HD. Bone crab is a CR 1/2 with 6 HD. Zanskaran Viper is CR 1 with 4 hd but a bite that does poisoned, blindness, and DOT every turn.

[Daishain]

Have the book, it is beautifully made. It is also big. Same broad dimensions as the PHB and other 5E books, but just over an inch thick with over 400 pages. Ask me in a few months about its durability.

Leaving aside potential Moon druid abuse, which can be handled by DM fiat, the creatures the TOB adds are of wonderful variety, ranging from a type of tiny but fat drake that hangs around in taverns and loves spreading mischief and gossip, to a terrifying variety of hivemind undead consisting of tiny swarming bones, to legendary lords of the fey, the abyss and the nine hells.

[eastmabl]

It showed up in my mailbox in Maryland yesterday. I've been looking through the PDF beforehand, and there's a lot of really good ideas for monsters in the book.

With Volo's Guide to Monsters coming out in November, I don't know how essential that it will be now (compared to when I kickstarted the book), but it's still probably well worth the money.

[Nemenia]

I have it. What do you want to know?

[alkatrazjr]

Really happy with this book; one of the things I miss as a DM after moving on from Pathfinder is just the massive breadth of creatures to draw from; even if my players metagame a little and know most of the generic D&D monsters already, in Pathfinder I could always throw something they've never heard of at them. This book fills in that gap a little.

[Shining Wrath]

I have the PDF and have skimmed it through the D's.

There's no way a small company like KP extensively playtested all these monsters. Almost all of them are juiced up in some fashion, by which I mean they are more than an AC, some HP, and a melee attack. They have some sort of what 3.5 called "special qualities". And that's great! But did they assign a good CR to them, or even see whether or not the special quality is playable? I'm not so sure.

For example, they've added a few new dinosaurs, but rather than using any of the dozens of real species, they made things up with algae colonies in their armor plates and what have you. And they added a "spinosaurus" with a CR of 13 - and gave instructions for how to use it as a mount. It's one thing to add more dinosaurs; it's another to have a carnivore the size of a sauropod (70 feet long!) that can be ridden.

Another thing I've noticed is lots of ability score damage - reducing STR or CON or what have you. I personally try to avoid that because it requires on-the-fly bookkeeping by players and / or DM and slows down the game.

[R.Shackleford]

I have the PDF and have skimmed it through the D's.

There's no way a small company like KP extensively playtested all these monsters. Almost all of them are juiced up in some fashion, by which I mean they are more than an AC, some HP, and a melee attack. They have some sort of what 3.5 called "special qualities". And that's great! But did they assign a good CR to them, or even see whether or not the special quality is playable? I'm not so sure.

For example, they've added a few new dinosaurs, but rather than using any of the dozens of real species, they made things up with algae colonies in their armor plates and what have you. And they added a "spinosaurus" with a CR of 13 - and gave instructions for how to use it as a mount. It's one thing to add more dinosaurs; it's another to have a carnivore the size of a sauropod (70 feet long!) that can be ridden.

Another thing I've noticed is lots of ability score damage - reducing STR or CON or what have you. I personally try to avoid that because it requires on-the-fly bookkeeping by players and / or DM and slows down the game.

:smallannoyed:

I saw a preview of it and it looked just as bad as the MM (mechanically speaking) but if it has this... Well.. No thank you KP.

[Nicrosil]

I really like it! The monsters I've used so far seem pretty solid. As others have said, every monster has unique abilities; nothing seems to be a bag of HP and two attacks. I do have two issues with it, though.

First, there are a lot of typos. Nothing gamebreaking, more slightly annoying. There's a monster listed in the table of contents twice, some weird copy-paste issues with resistances and immunities, and a few references to Fortitude saves. You can tell that some of these were copied over from their Pathfinder stuff; some terms must have slipped through.

Second, a lot of the monsters feel the same thematically. There's maybe 6 or 7 seductive lake women monsters, and tons of tiny fey tricksters.

All in all though, it's really good! While it does have some issues, it's nothing deal breaking for me. With over 400 monsters with unique story seeds and intresting combat mechanics, it's definately worth its price. I might consider doing a Let's Read of it if anyone's interested.