3 Sci-Fi Bestiary Reviews

For once, I am actually on time and really reliable. Happy All Hallow’s Eve Eve, ye goblins and other, more different goblins.

#1:Unconfirmed Contact Reports

(Tuesday Knight Games, 2023; writing by Izzy Bull, Luke Gearing, Fiona Maeve Geist, Alan Gerding, Tyler Kimball, Wendy Pippin, Donn Stroud, David N. Wilkie)

Friend of the blog semiurge beat me to the punch on this one, and I’m glad he did because his post is why this post got done.

I think UCR is a bad monster book by most standards, and a very bad book by Mothership standards. MoSh thrives on “the monster is the scenario” module design (since the wounds mechanic gives those monsters a built-in structure for encounters that change across multiple stages and it was intentionally designed as such) so throwing a single minimalist statline and some vague flavor blurbs does the whole work a disservice. It’s not got enough mechanical juice to be good MoSh material, and it's not got enough stylistic sauce to be a good riff on Fire on the Velvet Horizon. None of the monsters stick out as noteworthy in my memory, I don’t think I’d use any of them when I can just evoke the same tropes on my own, and I think the framework presented in Wages of Sin is across-the-board better in terms of usability.

**

To present a potential alternative, here's how I split up the Yuki-Onna in a post of yore:

• Statline
• Brief description, with all focus on what it looks like rather than what it is conceptually
• Portents and signs (spoor, sounds, smells, etc)
• Abilities (How it can fuck up your day - basic attack included)
• Two stages of pre-combat buildup (lets call them distant and immanent) where the portents and signs are dropped
• Three combat phases corresponding to the monster’s 3 health pools - Initial, Wounded, and Near-Death
• Each stage triggers a shift in tactics, including how and when certain abilities are used.
• Most monsters aren't going to need more than 3 stages. 
• What happens when it dies and what you can do with the corpse

This was all fairly labor-intensive to put together, but I think it should be: it is the scenario. Incidental combats against wildlife or people don’t need nearly this much of a writeup beyond “at what point do they surrender or run away”. That's nearly always going to be "after getting meaningfully injured".

 

#2 Hideous Creatures

(Kenneth Hite, 2018, w/ additional text from Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Becky Annison, Helen Gould, and Ruth Tillman)

I finally got around to reading this one (after several folks in the comments recommended it) and to no one’s great surprise I think it’s great. It addresses basically everything I’ve griped about on the subject and I’d say it’s easily one of the best monster books I’ve read independent of system (it’s written for Trail of Cthulhu / Gumshoe but would be useful in basically anything). More valuable than mechanics is its use as a model for what a monster book can be.

Each writeup covers the same territory:

• The “canon” depiction of the monster + statblock
• Appearance variants
• Ability variants
• Lore variants
• Analogues in mythology and folklore
• A list of clues keyed to the skill list of Trail of Cthulhu.
• Scenario seeds
• Bibliography of Mythos works featuring the monster
• Printable handout (which I can’t speak to because I don’t like struggling through handwriting fonts)

The focus on variation is the magic ingredient: the options offered are based on what’s conceptually and thematically appropriate to the baseline depiction, but none of them are set in stone or even coherent with each other. Many of the lore variations play with a monster’s relationship to other monsters, which is a good way of buffing up those that are lackluster on their own. Rather than presenting readers with a directionless empty space to fill (as the Malleus so frustratingly does at nearly every turn), Hideous Creatures refuses to hedge anything and hands you a bunch of contradictory statements as equally true and you get to choose what you like best. It’s ideal Lego bin design: the details are specific, succinct, evocative, and even if you don’t like a single option for a given monster you’ll at least have an idea for what direction you want to go instead. I found several good options for monsters I previously didn’t like or care about, and that just feels great as a reader. My hunger for novelty is satisfied.

Some favorites:

• Bholes: “A nest of shoggoths, imprisoned long enough underground, merge in order to escape as a burrowing bhole.”
• Dark Young: ‘The Romans called the Dark Young the juvenes nigritiae, the “young creatures of blackness.” After the Muslim conquest of Sicily, the resulting hybrid magical culture dubbed the Dark Young al-shabab al-nigrith (al-shabab means “the young ones”).”
• Deep Ones: “Dolphins are actually the mature form of Deep Ones, the third stage of their evolution after human and batrachian.”
• Flying Polyps: “The polyps are a myth; the Yithians created the story to terrify mind-swapped prisoners and keep them in line.”
• Lloigor: “All of England is fundamentally lloigor-tainted, hence its medieval Welsh name Lloiger or Lloegyr (cognate with the Arthurian “Logres”)”

Might as well have been written to pander directly to me.

There are a few issues with the book - I would have liked more monsters (no one ever remembers the gigs), though that’s a solvable problem. The colored+textured background can be an eye strain on e-readers, especially with the three-column layout and small font (please stop doing this). There are some repeated blurbs leftover as an artifact of all these writeups originally starting as standalone docs, and I can’t help but feel that the art does a slight disservice to the conceit by falling firmly in line with expectations. (As an aside I can’t manage to fit in anywhere else: the Mythos has a very dull color scheme, and that’s a shackle that ought to be shed.)

But overall it’s an extremely easy recommend over everything else in the Mythos gaming space.
 

#3 All Errors Are My Own

(Andrew Doull, 2023)

This 60 Years in Space supplement (and the forthcoming All Terrors) isn't technically a bestiary, which is why I think it works better than basically every sci-fi bestiary on the market; there are no monsters or animals on the encounter table, but there are a lot of people who have goals and motivations and the ability to act on them.

Every faction in All Errors gets:

• A species type, which provides the available tech level and sets their stats (if you need stats for individuals, which is unlikely)
• A MISSCON value broadly representing their use of force
• 1d6 doctrines to represent majority and minority subfactions. Sometimes you might get ideologically-monolithic groups, but they’re not the standard.
• Origin stories (rolling 1 for each doctrine)
• 6 upgrades that PCs can get through Impacts or completing missions.
• A list of faction ranks
• A brief description of how they group is typically encountered
• Late-game groups are at large enough scale that they also have a set of social impacts that can affect the whole setting.

It shares the Hideous Creatures conceit of "here are some potential facts, decide what's true", though is more procedural about it. There's very little in the way of mechanical influence on the rest of the game beyond some upgrades, Doctrines and Origins do a lot of heavy lifting for flavor, and looking at the group as a gestalt allows you to easily determine how friendly they're going to be to your own crew & the like. Again like Hideous Creatures, its usefulness extends well beyond the game it was written for. At bare minimum it will inspire some weird, weird

To serve as an example, I've picked General Hexapods (a generic version of an American robotics company a la Boston Dynamics) from the colonist table for fleshing out.

• Name  (1d6 for Part 1, Majority Doctrine for Part 2): Baltimore Robotics
• Species: Baseline or modified human w/ attending robots
• MISSCON: 5 (Self-defense)
• Majority Doctrine: Robotics
• "Wheels, tracks and other use case specific locomotion methods are superior to a more
  generalized design." 
• Majority Origin: American Exceptionalism
• "US-based technology hubs continue to attract the best and brightest from around the globe, buoyed by strong public investment in basic research and a prestigious university education system. This company is merely the latest example emerging from one of these hubs." 
• Minority Doctrine: Hexapods
• "The hexapod gait has advantages in stability, fault tolerance, turning ability, and terrain adaptability over wheels and other gaits." 
• Minority Origin: Deregulated Robber Barons
• "The latest bubble in US technology investments is spurred on by cutting red tape, blatant tax exploits and accepting investment from criminal actors and authoritarian regimes. This company’s products began as vapourware, except where they were at least ten safety violations in a robotic shell."
• Upgrades: Robot licenses Class I - VI; 0/6 unlocked by PCs 
• Example Colony Encounter / NPC Rank (3d6): Partner

Bada-bing bada-boom. For a pretty vanilla faction there's plenty of stuff you could do with these guys. nice and shiny on the surface, rotten core. 

The usual 60 Years caveats apply to All Errors, of course: the formatting is wonky, the layout can get weird, the margins are big and the text is small, there's a good deal of repeated text. Doesn't matter, best bang for buck in this field, I says.