Pyramid Review
Hero System Bestiary (for Hero System 5th Edition)
Written by Steven S. Long
Interior Illustration by Andrew Cremeans, Keith Curtis ,Tristan Miller, Eric Rademaker, Mitch Byrd, and Greg Smith
238-page b&w softcover; $24.99
It's a rare game campaign that can't use stats for animals and creatures, either mundane or fantastic. Indeed, many games make it a priority to create a book of critters as one of its first releases after the main book. The Hero System 5th Edition has taken this approach, with the release of the Hero System Bestiary shortly after its system's new edition. This weighty tome seeks both to flesh out animals in the Hero System and provide basic information on how to incorporate animals into the campaign.
The book opens with a chapter on "Creatures in Your Game." This section is meaty with information, both in general about animals and specifically how they relate to the Hero System. Early on it provides an overview for using creatures in the game, such as animal companions, animals as obstacles, and so on. Although brief, this section is still useful. The next part of this chapter deals with the Hero System-specific aspects of animals: what Characteristics mean to animals, what Skills an animal might possess, and so on. This section also details skills and abilities that might affect animals; for example, it points out that Streetwise can be used to traffic in illegal animals. It also gives a number of specific disadvantages an animal might have, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 21, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.