Pathfinder: "Bonus Bestiary" [RPG]

Is it sheer coincidence or proof of cosmic synchronicity that my personal rotation of reading has scheduled me to review Paizo's 2009 Free RPG Day offering on the same day as 2019's Free RPG Day?  We'll let the metaphysicians chew that one over, but in the meantime, I'll discuss the Bonus Bestiary.

This sixteen-page, full-color, softcover product served as something of a preview of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, as it was released just several weeks before the Core Rulebook debuted. It introduces the overall look of monster stat blocks in the game and (I assume) gave players some monsters to work with prior to the release of the first Bestiary.  The twelve monsters it includes weren't included in that book, so it had some value even past the first year of the game's existence (it looks like most of these were included in Bestiary 3 in 2011).  You can judge the cool cover art yourself (I didn't realize water nagas were so scary!), but here's a description of the contents.

The inside front cover is a listing of the 300+ monsters that were to appear in the Bestiary so readers could get a sense of what to look forward to.  The inside back cover is the classic: "3.5 Survives! 3.5 Thrives!" advertisement for PF1.  I should really get a poster of that advertisement for display somewhere.

After a credits/table of contents page, the next two pages discuss a couple of rules developed uniquely for Pathfinder: the concepts of Combat Maneuver Bonus and Combat Maneuver Defense.  These were elegant simplifications on how to resolve things like trips, disarms, grapples, etc., without having separate formulas for each type.  There's also an explanation of how diseases and poisons are formatted.  The rest of this introductory material explains Pathfinder's approach to Universal Monster Rules, and gives some samples.  It all shows the designers spent a lot of time thinking about how to do monster stat blocks in an intelligent and user-friendly manner.

Now, on to the monsters.  A high-DC Perception check will notice some very minor differences in how the stat blocks in the Bonus Bestiary are formatted compared to the actual Bestiary: the CR/XP entry is slightly different, and there's a fixed gold piece "treasure value" instead of a reference to treasure categories like "Standard", etc..  I might actually prefer the explicit gold piece value, approach, but that's neither here nor there now, not to mention a decade's time travel away.  Each of the twelve monster entries is illustrated, though the artwork styles are a bit more inconsistent than later Paizo books.

1. Allip:  Super creepy undead resulting from the death of the mad or suicidal.  Their special abilities fit well.

2.  Ant Lion, Giant:  Never actually seen these in a game, but I like their little sand trap ability.

3. Ascomoid: Never heard of this--some kind of giant puffball fungus.  Frankly pretty goofy, and really more a supernatural hazard than a monster.

4. Axe Beak: If you have bird phobia, watch out!  Good to see training and animal companion rules--a reminder of another thing the Pathfinder team did well.

5. Caryatid Column: Essentially lesser stone golems, but their "shatter weapons" ability could be really nasty.  If I were a mean GM, I'd toss these in any time a melee character got on my nerves.

6.  Dragon, Faerie: These sorts of creatures aren't really my thing, as they verge more on the cartoonish.  Still, I have to admit the artwork is really colourful and they might be fun to have as a familiar.

7.  Dragonne: Kind of a bland lion/dragon mix.  Rules for mounts (using Leadership) and animal companions.

8. Hag, Annis: The artwork here is great, capturing the size and hunch-backed nature perfectly (though perhaps making them look like undead).

9. Huecuva: Heretical undead clerics; an interesting concept but they need a power boost to really work well.

10. Lammasu: I guess this is a lion/eagle mix.  I think maybe some of these entries were omitted from the first Bestiary for a reason.

11.  Naga, Water: Cooler on the cover than here.

12.  Nixie: Okay, I guess.

13.  Shadow Mastiff:  Cool artwork and "shadow blend" makes them fearsome foes for their CR.

Overall, there's a good mix in the book of different monster types: undead, constructs, magical beasts, regular animals, etc.  I did notice there aren't any high-CR threats, with the CR 8 Lammasu as the highest.

Paizo took the same approach with its Free RPG Day 2017 product when getting ready to debut Starfinder.  I'd actually rather have more of a grab-bag preview--maybe one class, a few skills, a few feats, and then a couple of monsters to get a feel for the game as a whole.  Anyway, the Bonus Bestiary is still available for purchase as a print product from Paizo (for just $ 1!) or as a free PDF download.  Today, the product is really nothing more than a curiosity, but it's a mildly interesting one nonetheless.