Having picked up the Tome of Beasts trio and having been impressed with the content and quality of those products I made the decision to grab the Creature Codex and add it to my collection of 5e books. It's a beast of a monster book, easily twice the thickness of most of my other books. This thing is a fatty. There's something like 400 creatures in this codex, including new varieties of angels, demons, dragons, dinosaurs, and golems. There are entries for a bunch of leader type creatures found in the Monster Manual, like centaurs, goblins, and a more. And a bunch of new undead that will be handy for the Adventure: Tombs of Cathedra setting. The back of the book includes sorted lists of the creatures by type, challenge rating, and terrain. It's everything you would expect from a monster book. There's some text about Midgard, the Kobold Press world setting, but you can use that or ignore it without any real impact. It's all flavor. You might even be inspired by some o...

Too much to process... What have I done to myself? What was I thinking? I went out and had The Gamer's Warf get me all three of the Tome of Beasts books. I received a little performance bonus from work and this is what I've done with it. Now I'm suffering from an overabundance of monsters. What we're looking at here is 10 lbs. of beastly goodness. These three tomes come in at 1,260 pages of monster hunting possibilities. That's something like 1200 beasts, give or take, I'm not going to actually count them up. I haven't done much beyond flip through these three big books. They're each over 400 pages of beasts. The pages are glossy, the books well made, the art is good, and the monsters are plentiful. I'm not going to go through each entry and critique what I like and what I don't. There's too much. Too many things to look at. I image that these books are going to be a source of content for my games that will slip in slowly and over time as I ...

I was surprised to find this on hoopla, but I think it's great that stuff like this is getting out there with the increased popularity of D&D. I own the first book and so I was excited to listen to this one. The problem being, between writing and gaming. I've been doing this for 40 years and most of the advice I've heard before, in one form or another. It's good stuff and I recommend anybody interested in world building give it a listen. I just didn't get as much out of it as I hoped. Hoopla Digital - Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2 2023 Blackstone Publishing Audiobook 4h 22m by Gail Simone, Keith Baker, Veronica Roth, Jeff Grubb read by Ray Greenley The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, Volume 2, features fifteen stars of tabletop roleplaying games and fantasy fiction, such as Gail Simone, Keith Baker, Veronica Roth, Ken Liu, Kate Elliott, Mike Shea, Tobias S. Buckell, Shanna Germain, Gabe Hicks, the Dungeon Dudes (Monty Marti...

The essential elements for building a world? I hesitated in using a $12 credit to buy this one. It’s short. Really short. Audible says, 4 hours and 42 minutes, and I tend to not spend my audible credits on anything less than 10-hours long. But I fell for their marketing and took the creative leap towards creating dazzling worlds of my own. I shouldn’t have used my audible credit for this book.   maybe the PDF is a better choice First, let’s talk positives. Everyone contributing to this book has serious RPG cred. There are essays by Keith Baker, Wolfgang Baur, David "Zeb" Cook, Monte Cook, Jeff Grubb, Scott Hungerford, Chris Pramas, Jonathan Roberts, Janna Silverstein, Michael A. Stackpole, and Steve Winter. The essays are good and offer solid, but rather vague advice. I think beginners will get more out of this than experienced world builders and game masters. Ray Greenley does a good job with the narration, but still comes off sounding like the friend with the pleasant voice...