Introduction
Source: Tome of Beasts 1 (2023 Edition), p. 6
Written primarily for game masters, this book features over 400 new creatures to use in your games. For players, this book features a handful of new familiars and beasts perfect for characters seeking companions or druids seeking new beasts for Wild Shape. If you are a player reading this book, be sure to check with your game master before selecting any of these creatures as familiars or companions or for Wild Shape.
Using this Book
To use the creatures in this book, you’ll need the core rulebooks of the 5th edition of the world’s greatest roleplaying game or the System Reference Document 5.1. Spell, disease, and magic item names that appear in italics without a page or book reference can be found in those rulebooks or in the System Reference Document 5.1. Some creatures in this book contain references to the Midgard Campaign Setting, but that setting isn’t required to use the creatures in this book. The extra setting information exists simply to bring additional flavor or lore to the creatures.
Alignment and Creature Behavior
Each creature in this book lists an alignment to provide a general guideline for that creature’s typical behaviors, often based on its preferred prey or its most commonly observed interactions with other sentient creatures. A creature whose alignment is listed as “unaligned” is either created or controlled by another, such as a construct, or operates on more primal or instinctive behavior, such as a rat or tiger. Not every example of a particular creature exhibits behaviors consistent with the creature’s listed alignment. If you want an evil valkyrie or a lawful kikimora in your world, go for it! Some of the best stories revolve around creatures who break the preconceptions surrounding them, and we encourage you to use the creatures in this book in whatever ways best fit your worlds and the stories you want to tell in them.
Languages
Several creatures in this book know or speak the Umbral or Void Speech languages, which can be substituted for other languages if these languages don’t fit in your world.
Umbral
This is the language of the shadow fey and other denizens of planes of shadow and darkness. It is a corrupted dialect of Elvish, and those who speak it gain a +1 bonus to one Dexterity (Stealth) check each day. If Umbral isn’t a language in your world, you can substitute Umbral with Elvish or Undercommon.
Void Speech
This is the language of the Outer Darkness in the Midgard Campaign Setting. It is spoken by vile things that are malevolent toward humanoids and their allies and by those who seek to bring about the ruinous apocalypse of the dark gods. If Void Speech isn’t a language in your world, you can substitute Void Speech with any ancient language with an evil reputation or with Deep Speech.
Touch of Iron
Several fey creatures in this book have resistance or immunity to attacks from weapons that aren’t made with cold iron. This design choice comes from folklore, where cold-wrought iron was believed to be capable of repelling or harming fairies, ghosts, witches, and other supernatural creatures. In this book, lords and ladies of the fey courts are timeless creatures, inured to many of the world’s threats—except weapons of cold-wrought iron. This metal undoes the very fabric of a fey creature’s life as it blights their ageless flesh.
Cold Iron Weaponry
A cold iron weapon is treated as magical when used against any fey creature, and it is the only weapon with any hope of harming the most powerful fey lords and ladies. However, cold iron weapons are difficult to construct. The skill and material required to produce such a weapon doubles its price or adds 100 gp to the cost, whichever is more. Finding a smith with the skill to make a durable weapon without the aid of fire is always difficult—and finding one with the courage to anger the fey courts may be even harder.
Substitutions for Cold Iron
If cold iron doesn’t exist in your world, you can substitute this resistance or immunity with silver or adamantine, whichever you feel is most appropriate for that creature in your world.
Refreshing a Classic
A quote from Wolfgang Baur Kirkland, WA December, 2022
The world is full of monsters, and tabletop games teach us to face them—and defeat them. There’s a huge satisfaction in cutting a giant down to size or sending a malevolent dragon into a final dive from the heights. But what happens when we run out of monsters and the fear of them leaves us? What happens when the everyday goblins and dragons of our early years become overly familiar? Well, if you are Kobold Press, that’s precisely the time to dream up new monsters.
This new printing of our very first hardcover monster book for 5th Edition provides dungeon vermin and world-shaking villains, and it does so with a small refresh of these monsters and improvement of the volume as a whole. The wisdom of years of play shows we could tighten here and errata there. In some cases, our understanding of both monster rules and monster stats has evolved over time. It was time to address that.
This 2023 edition also adds significant new art to strengthen the look and feel of these creatures, and it corrects several early errors and omissions, including the omission of reference tables of the monsters by Terrain and by Type. The Kobold Press team has also made lore changes; a wyrmling version of the mithral dragon is now available, along with an ancient version of the cave dragon. Other new creatures include the planewatcher, the vengeful spirit, and a couple others for you to discover. To make the makeover complete, we included rules material, like each monster’s proficiency bonus, and we streamlined rules and game mechanics to improve the playability of many creatures.
How did we find room in this compendium for new dragon stats, new tables, and new art? Well, several monsters are in-game gods or demi-gods, and they really don’t belong here as dungeon foes (Boreas and Mammon, for instance). Others that we created in 2016 have since gotten rules and stats from Wizards of the Coast (the Zaratan and Titivullus, for instance). And some simply belong in a very particular world (for instance, the Emperor of the Ghouls is central to the Midgard setting). To avoid confusion, we dropped these creatures. Finally, a few monsters were simply not getting much play, and they have been released back into the wilds. In all cases, the changes strengthen an already powerful volume of monsters, cementing its status as a legendary reference book for 5th Edition games.
Thanks to the continued play of tens of thousands of tabletop gamers, Tome of Beasts is back—and fiercer than ever. So have at thee, beasts. This tome is ready to fuel great games and bring you true horrors and mayhem!
