Bonfire Bestiary: Tools to Bring Your Monsters to Life

All Pledges Will Be Honored

Even if the Kickstarter doesn't fund; if you reach out after via Discord or private message, I will honor your pledge.

What is this Bestiary About?

Attacks are likewise formatted to be divided by situations. In this way, monster tactics during combat can be treated as a flow chart. Does the monster meet the conditions for a specific attack? Can it act or move to meet the conditions? Once you say 'yes', you’re ready to go.

Combat Example

Let's see dynamic tactics in action. In this example, we’ll look at a player vs a Mercenary Rascal (Shock) and a Mercenary Second (Duelist). Their respective combat blocks are shown below:

Each monster is created by considering their intelligence and survival. Every monster has a role, and each role favors certain situations. Intelligent enemies have more options than their less bright fellows. 

So let's run though the same example but swap out Mercenary Second with a Mercenary Light (Skirmisher) to see how the flow changes.

We actually only need one round to see how drastically the player's choices change.

Again, monster combat blocks are shown below:

As shown in the two examples above, all the choices and tactics are built into the stat block. This allows you to create ever evolving, tactical combats that are unique to the enemies, and true to your world, without you having to do anything extra. 

Think about what would change in these scenarios if the player went first or if they changed what weapon they’re using. For example, a great sword, dealing more damage, would be more likely to deal enough damage to the Rascal to make them Defensive while a short sword would mean that going after the Second or the Light would be more effective, highlighting target priority as yet another layer of tactical depth.

As a GM, your prep just involves picking the enemies; the Bestiary takes care of the rest.

What other tools do you get?

The combat stat block is only the beginning. The bestiary also provides a Palette to flesh out your monsters’ logistics, Random Encounter Generator, Strategies and Limits to determine how monsters respond to player character actions outside of and leading up to combat, and Social Stats for non-combat encounters. 

The Palette is a tool that you can pull from while prepping a monster. What are the goblins trying to accomplish and how do they go about attempting to complete their schemes? 

The Palette does the grunt work so you have the energy to add your personal touch to the monsters. Included in the Palette are a monster’s motivations, such as Drives and Needs, their in-world logistics including defenses, method of interacting with adventurers, allies and group dynamics, and how they interact with groups outside their own (or make money). By detailing all this, you are left with the energy to detail cool things like culture and design.

Turn a boring “monsters attack” encounter into a vignette that shows the monster living in the world. With unique Signs the players can come across, providing in-world evidence of a monster’s presence, you can foreshadow the threat and with the “Verb - Noun”, describing what the monsters are doing, you can add a bit of color.

The Sign, the Number Appearing, the Verb - Noun, and Reaction sections are all tailored to the monster, rooting each “random” encounter in the monster's personality.

It also gives guidelines on treasure rewards for the monster based on the size of the group.

Quick notation on a monster’s complexity, unique loot generation; a light-weight skill Framework and skill-based monsters, allowing you to expand your encounters to more than just combat; robust search tools that allow you to randomly select monsters from the list; Lesser, Veteran, Champion, Officer, Tyrant, and Solo monster Role variants that give you more flexibility; procedures for quickly designing unique combats, skill challenges, and social encounters; at least 2 adventure hooks for each monster; ability to print out the statblocks you need; treasure hoards to quickly draw up loot; CR Modification to beef up monsters on the fly.

Check it out now!

The initial site has 62 entries, with 208 Role-based variants, focusing on simpler, meat-and-potatoes monsters. See the Future Plans section below for a glimpse into what’s already in the works.

If you want to see for yourself, the Bestiary is already live. You can find it here.

It includes free entries where you can see things for yourself.

What is this Kickstarter for?

System Compatibility

Pledge Levels

Stretch Goal

The basic goal covers one piece of art for all the currently released monsters so there’s only 1 Stretch Goal:

All the Roles for every currently released monster will get its own piece of art. Realistically, any funds above the initial goal is going towards unique Role art so this Stretch Goal actually represents the point where the cost of all that art is covered.

Beyond this stretch goal, any additional money will be set aside for the art of later releases.

Timeline

The site is currently up and running so you can use it right now!

This isn’t AI art, and I’m using one artist, so it may take a bit of time: somewhere between a year and a year and a half (assuming no delays and no time off) but the art will be released as each piece is finished so the updates will be consistent.

Future Plans

Is there going to be a physical book?

Eventually, but it’s not part of this Kickstarter. I don’t feel like I have the skills, nor the crew, to deliver a high quality product, in a timely manner, while also not breaking the bank.

Once the art is done, I’ll start looking into producing a PDF that will be released, for free, to users. From there, I can start thinking about doing a print run.

In the meantime, the Bestiary does allow you to print out stat blocks for monsters you need, either on an individual or collective basis.

Are you going to support X system?

Not right now. I only plan on supporting games that I regularly play to assure the quality and usefulness of my work.

So there may come a time where I play another system enough to support it but that’s not in the foreseeable future.

Future monster releases

AI Disclosure

Since Kickstarter’s AI Disclosure section is unformatted, here is a readable version:

As part of learning AI for my work as a software engineer, I have used Cursor to implement some of the features on the site, starting 2 months ago.

This DOES NOT include any of the artwork, any of the writing, any of the math, the bulk of coding, the testing, nor does any code go out without me editing it and it doesn't have access to the production Database.

For any idea of the scope:

• Total lines on for the site: 48,153
• Lines by Cursor: 1,588
• = 3.3% of the current codebase

I have no intentions on using AI to do any of the writing (because I find it generic, uninspired, and part of the fun for me is making monsters themselves) and I certainly don't intend it to replace my artist, that I've been working with for half a decade (because it is uninspired, with no view point, little style, and is not a person whereas he is brilliant, collaborative, has a voice, and is a person).

I disclose this because people might (rightfully) object to any use of AI in a project: I understand and respect the position.