I love bestiaries. I don't think I'm alone in that. I buy bestiaries I know I'll never use because I love flipping through them. I think I primarily love the art. Monster Manual had a ton of useful monsters so you pretty much needed it but I never liked most of the art. I appreciate how many beasts were illustrated, but the line weights were too light for my tastes and the cover was a confused mess. The AD&D Fiend Folio gets a lot of grief but the Russ Nicholson art was perfect, it was evocative, it had me using monsters that were otherwise a bit bland or gamey.
Then there is RuneQuest. The game I went to after AD&D. In RuneQuest 2 they only had a small selection of beasts and a lot of them weren't really illustrated. RuneQuest 3 barely tried in their Bestiary. They had the line weight problem and dumped multiple beasts into a single image which was made the book design cleaner but ensured every creature was tiny. The British version had a nice Bestiary but I didn't see that for decades, long after Chaosium and Games Workshop split up.
Beyond nice illustrations I've recently fallen for useful tables that help the GM use the beasts. I fell in love with a post by Tom Fitzgerald at Middenmurk called Bestiary of the Fabled Occident and can't wait until the book is available. Just take a look at one of the samples, nice image of the creature, lots of useful tables. It's just perfect. My only problem is the Header fonts are hard to read but that's a small thing.
I bought Peterson's Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors based on the images alone but the useful little bits and comparisons made the book fun. I've never played Call of Cthulhu but I certainly wanted to use a few of those monsters. Beautiful image, size comparisons, and details on the beast. It's a beauty.The beautiful images and page color of the 5E monster manual apes this style. They have a nice division between mechanics (boxed off) and background that I like, but they don't really have the nice extra tables and info that elevate the info a bit beyond an encyclopedia entry that I'm talking about.
It also annoys me how most bestiaries are sort of cobbled together. I'm talking about older D&D (not sure about 5E) and Pathfinder 1 that seem to put the must have monsters in the first volume, then things get progressively worse as each additional bestiary comes out and they claw around for enough content with a few really solid monsters to ensure sales. I mean AD&D already provided the vast bulk of these monsters, look them over and come up with some organization. Maybe by CR so the books are very useful (yeah that'll cost some of the high end sales but I think they'd find most gamers are completes and would buy the books anyway); maybe by genre (Sword & Sorcery monsters vs Vanilla Fantasy Tolkien vs Earth Mythology).So I came across Skerples Monster Overhaul. He included some of those useful tables. One article led to another and then another then to one called OSR: The Monster Overhaul - Planning
and another called OSR: Sharpening the Axe - How I Plan and Write RPG Books
and I realized I really needed to plan out my Bestiary. I need to merge similar beasts together to reduce the vast numbers and categorize the beasts. Categorizing is important as I believe undead should have a certain feel and it is easier to create that feel when they are all written as a group. Same with Constructs or Chaos or whatever. Then when I'm putting my bestiary together I can chop categories to get the right length and theme to a volume instead of chopping out individual beasts. I think the whole will be better that way. I might even put together an appendix or two of oddball stuff such as Pathfinders Clockwork Golems and Robots which don't really fit in most settings but might make for a really unique setting and/or Barrier Peaks style adventure.
So that's the idea anyway. Go over the Pathfinder beasts as the list there is so super-large and online in a useful way, and decide what I like and don't and group things together.
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