Exploring the Book of Beasts

Welcome to the (approximately) end-of-June feature discussion for Revenge of the Firstborn! This month, we’re going to talk about the Book of Beasts.

What exactly is the Book of Beasts? It’s a compendium of knowledge on all of the creatures in the game, but there’s a catch… you have to find and defeat the creature in question in order to make it show up in the Book of Beasts.

There are a few entries that show up by default at the start of the game, but only the races you know everything about already. In order to learn about the more interesting creatures in the game, you’ll have to search them out.

Below you can see a version of the Book as it will appear at the start of the game. It lists all of the creature types, buttons for selecting all or none of the creature types and a checkbox for hiding undiscovered creatures.

Here’s we have a more filled in Book of Beasts showing a kobold. We’ve defeated enough of them to learn details about their challenge rating.Steam post image

Defeat enough enemies and you get information about their immunities such as poison, or sleep, along with damage reduction, spell resistance and, eventually, their special abilities.

The Book of Beasts was primarily envisioned as a fun meta-gameplay element for the Endless Dungeon, where the story is minimal and the goal is to kill as many monsters as possible and make it to level 20 without the party wiping, but it should be a fun way to track progress through the campaign as well. With nearly 150 monsters in the game, it will be a challenge to make your way through the world to find them all!