Savage Species

by David Eckelberry, Rich Redman, Jennifer Clarke Wilkes

Explains how to use a monster as a player or a nonplayer character; profiles fifty monster classes, including elementals, giants, satyrs, and trolls; and provides monster templates, feats, spells, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786926481
• ISBN13: 9780786926480
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.6" x 11.1"

Customer Reviews

Monster PC's ahoy!

There is no better book for integrating monster PC's into a regular campaign, or for making a group of monsters into protagonists. Crafty GM's will also find great material for making unique and memorable monsters that add variety and flavor to their campaigns. There are excellent suggestions for making monster NPC's that the characters can interact with, and level progressions for scaling monsters exactly to PC's of their level for whatever reason. The book is reasonably easy to adapt to Pathfinder. If you're a GM and you love making your own monsters, or if the idea of playing a monster PC in D & D or Pathfinder sounds fun to you, then I recommend you get this book.

Gets the imagination flowing

One might think that it is common sense to take monster stats, scale them back and then balance them along the same power levels as PC's...and they would be right. The thing is, i never thought of it myself, and Savage Species takes several hundred pages with full examples to show some ways it might be done. The book is not perfect, such as mistakes and a complete lack of creature background, history, culture, etc...everyting that the 2nd ed. book had. Still, this is much better than the earlier book (which wouldn't even let you play a troll as it was too powerful; not anymore). It has lots of monstrous feats, some better than others, great magic items with art, wonderful illustrations, some good templates and some so-so templates, but mostly just text that gets you thinking, "hey, i want to make my own special class." The rules are set down, the options are there, and if anyone wants to take the time to craft their own beasties it's not too difficult. Plus, it lets a DM scale down monsters for lower level parties, and easily boost them for higher level. Ideally, if a DM were starting his own campaign in a monster-dominated world, you can't do without this book. SCrap the standard races of humans and elves and leave in the minotaurs and troglodytes, celestials and djinn. Lastly, the book says that a monster class should be taken completely from 1st level to whatever level it maxes out at before one can add on regular character classes. The reasoning is that someone can take the powers of a 1st level monster and tack on character levels from there on out. I'm bending this rule myself; if players wanted to take several levels of mindflayer and go rogue the rest of the way, fine, but they can never go back to mind flayer. Besides, a mind flayer at 3rd level would not have the abilities of say, a 3rd level dwarf cleric, and far from the lethal mindblast talent. A great resource, it just takes some determined reading to fully implement the usefulness.

Great Book

I have been playing D & D for 13 years, and when third edition came out I was very reluctant to try it. But once I did it grew on me very quickly. This book is one of the better third edition books out yet. If you are interested in playing a monster or allowing them into your campaign I would strongly recommend this book. It was informative, and well put together. Some of the prestige classes I did not care for but over all great book. It took a lot of the guess work out of using monsters as PC. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wanted to play a monster, or runs a game with players who wish to do so. I gave it 4 stars because it is good but not perfect!

Rrrargh! Umber Hulk SMASH!!!

And that's something you'll never, ever have heard a PC utter before, but you might now.Savage Species is, as the notes say, the D & D 3e sourcebook on playing monster characters. Not necessarily hideously evil psychopaths (that's where Book of Vile Darkness comes in), but non-standard races...anything from the bugbear up to a stone giant.Monster PCs have two things to concern themselves about...hit dice (i.e. how many hit dice they naturally start with) and level adjustment (having abilities that are worth a class level or two on their own). For example, our umber hulk friend has eight hit dice and a level adjustment of +6, for an ECL of 14...so an umber hulk is theoretically equivalent to a 14th-level Player's Handbook character.So, the authors go through and list a chart of almost every existing monster in the game that has an ECL of 20 or below, along with official level adjustments for templates (lycanthrope, celestial, half-dragon, etc.) They also discuss letting a player start as a first-level monster, which must get to its base statistics before multiclassing...there's no using a minotaur's base stats at 1 HD, because they don't get them until they reach their final hit die. There's a 52-page appendix of sample monsters' ECL broken out into class levels, which is fairly nice.You'll also find feats suited to monsters, new prestige classes, new gear, a lot of new templates (my favorite's Gelatinous...a semi-ooze creature), and new and/or reprinted creatures, including a long list of anthropomorphic races, such as dog-men and wolverine-people, the desmodu and loxo from MM2, and the half-ogre starting race. There are also rules for transforming characters between races and adding templates.Something like this has been needed for a long time. Not only does it follow in the footsteps of AD & D2's Complete Book of Humanoids, but it answers rules questions that have popped up ever since the first PC got infected by lycanthropy. Some creatures will be less-playable than others, simply because their level adjustment is so high that they won't have the hit points to survive combat at their ECL. And there are a few questions, too...for dragons, do they require XP to gain hit dice, since they grow by aging? After all, 10 years can go by in a game fairly quickly, and that young dragon can become a juvenile and get stat and HD bonuses...This is a great supplement, and I highly recommend it. It's probably most useful if you're going to start a new game, but it'll be useful for everybody at some point.

Delivers exactly what it promises.

I picked Savage Species up the first day it hit the shelves of my local bookstore. I've been wanting to throw monster characters into my campaign but all the PCs are under level 5 so my options for PC monsters are kind of limited. This book has provided a way for me to throw a child to that fire elemental they just killed without a thought---a mere innocent---into the game as an NPC that they somehow have to deal with. (Hopefully not by killing it) More importantly, if they so choose, they can adventure alongside a fire elemental as it grows into its powers.The book itself is well organized and has a little of everything and a lot of some things. For DMs who don't want to go through the work of interpolating an ECL 15 Mind Flayer into fifteen separate levels, each acquired at standard experience point intervals, or even *determine* the ECL for a Mind Flayer, you don't have to. Many monster races have entire monster class levels separated for you. For those that don't, there are guidelines both for determining level adjustments and breaking up effective levels into actual levels, i.e. "W00t, I'm now a level six Drider! I get spell resistance!"There's a lot of stuff in this book. New spells (some good for non-monster PCs, too), new equipment (Including the Gloves of Man, so your paws/tentacles can grip those pesky crossbows or lock picks), new feats (Area Attack lets your colossal Mountain Giant smack a whole bunch of PCs when he swings a stone column), new prestige classes (Illithid Savant, for...well...eating brains for self-improvement), new templates (The illustration for the example Gelatinous Bear is great) and, of course, more.A lot of people are highly interested in the artwork in Dungeons & Dragons books, and if that's what they want out of the book, they'll be disappointed. I personally don't need illustrations to accompany descriptions for how an Ogre Mage advances to ECL 12 because I already know what they look like. This book is almost devoid of reprinted material, but much of it is being presented in ways far and beyond what Monster Manual I (or II) ever planned. This small paradox makes a great number of illustrations unnecessary relative to most books with so much new material. Drawings of all the weird weapons and equipment are comparable to those in the Player's Guide and other books. It's really pretty irrelevant, though, because if you took the pictures out of the second half of the book it would still be wonderful, if rather drab.One of the more reassuring touches is a tiny list at the beginning of the book that mentions a few changes from Monster Manual I that are/will also be in the revised Monster Manual I. No one wants a book that will be obsolete in just a few months.Savage Species is a great book, and has almost everything you could possibly want in it. What it doesn't have, it offers guidelines for working out on your own. Dungeon Masters who spend fifteen hours planning sessions will be able to do anyth