Designing Monsters for Tome of Beasts III

Back in my post on My Year in TTRPG Gaming, I said I’d been working on some exciting stuff for Kobold Press which had yet to be announced. Well, the catoblepas is now out of the bag of tricks!  Since May last year I have been hard at work designing monsters for Tome of Beasts III from Kobold Press, which launched on Kickstarter today and was funded in the first 20 minutes!

I don’t think I’m allowed to spill too many beans, but I ended up writing 23 monsters altogether, ranging from CR 1/2 right up to a mighty CR 23. This is the biggest bunch of creatures I’ve worked on since the ENnie award-winning Creature Codex, and I had a lot of fun coming up with deadly, interesting foes for you to pit against your player characters.

Although Tome of Beasts III is not a Midgard-specific book, several of the creatures I designed would fit perfectly into the Southlands, as would the lair I wrote for the Tome of Beasts III Lairs book that is also part of the Kickstarter. There are monsters that would be at home in Empire of the Ghouls too. You can see two of these in the PDF preview on the Kickstarter campaign page. I was also super excited to see that two of the monsters I came up with are being turned into minis 🙂

One of the really fun things about this project was that we had a Discord set up for the freelancers working on the book, so we could bounce ideas off each other. I got to collaborate with fellow designers Ben Eastman, Brian Suskind, and Sebastian Rombach on several related monsters, and to include cool creatures designed by my colleagues in my lair. Freelance game design can feel quite lonely at times so it’s great to be able to chat to others working on the same book.

You can check out Tome of Beasts III now on Kickstarter.

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