Whenever I start reading monster collections, I start…well, thinking about how roleplaying is just such an interesting salmagundi. You get mythologies of every historical stripe hodgepodged with H.P. Lovecraft and Lewis Carroll, urban legends and extinct creatures rubbing shoulders with robots and monsters created just to match up with a toy that Gary Gygax bought in a bargain bin. Just such a crazy intersection. The fact that then someone goes through and gives them statistics? Tries to judge if a “genie, djinn” is tougher than a “rhinoceros, wooly” or a “golem, alchemical”? Even better. They are lists of “might be” stories, in their way; like everything in gaming, they are an exploded narrative, pieces of shrapnel and gears. Just fragments in a “Build Your Own Adventure” novel. Pathfinder’s Bestiary 3 was so good that I had to go and give the first two a spin, and wouldn’t you know it, they are fantastic, too.
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