Messy Review: The Illustrated Cairn Bestiary
Rating: 🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
This is perhaps less a review as I’ll be doing for most of this series, and more a thought on bestiaries as a product class, but I do really love the Illustrated Cairn Bestiary released by Gourdin Konbo Club with gorgeous illustrations by Oozejar. Best of all is that the illustrations are released under a Creative Commons license and are an incredible resource for anyone using these monsters.
While the monster stats aren’t new and have been available on the Cairn website for a long time, it’s packaging them up with the amazing illustrations that really made me realize how valuable something like this is.
There seems to have been a movement away from stand-alone bestiaries in most non-D&D games, with monsters simply being included in the core book or other source books, but there’s something magical about a book to just flip through and dream about the creatures inhabiting the world that you just don’t get from anything else. What really sold me on it was that my five year old has now taken an interest in pulling my D&D 5E Monster Manual off the shelf and asking me about each illustrated monster. And now, I’ve got an even better book to show her with this illustrated bestiary!
This is, of course, not the only game in town, with the Folklore Bestiary, Monster Overhaul, and Monstrome, among others, providing excellent resources. And I’m really happy to see what feels like a revival in this space.
TL;DR: Every game should have a good bestiary.