Aquilae: Bestiary of the Realm Abridged, Vol 1 (5E/Fifth Edition)

Aquilae: Bestiary of the Realm is the largest, most comprehensive, most flexible, and most ambitious fantasy roleplaying bestiary ever conceived.  6,400 complete statblocks, comprising 1,600 monsters, each given the Quadded Statblock treatment, enabling them to be used in any campaign setting, with PCs of any level.

Add to this a thoroughly innovative and massively expandable AI system to guide monster behavior, and you have what just might be the most impressive and valuable creature resource ever to hit Pathfinder and 5E.

(Please note that Aquilae: Bestiary of the Realm in its entirety is a six-volume set.  Aquilae: Bestiary of the Realm, Abridged Edition consists of 410 monsters spanning 1,640 statblocks.  This publication is the first of those two Abridged volumes.)

This book is intended to be any or all of the following:

1. An authoritative listing of monsters for use in any campaign setting, for adventuring parties of any size, and any level.
2. A means of using any existing monster with adventures of any level and difficulty.
3. A compendium of newly-created monsters, born of inspiration from existing beasties you may already know and love.
4. A single-source reference and repository, listing every single possible monster in easy-to-reference alphabetical order.

This book is immensely valuable for GMs who want to introduce a truly formidable amount of creatures into their campaign, and to do so in a flexible manner.

• Prep Time: Aquilae: Bestiary of the Realm is a peerless resource for GMs who want to minimize preparation time, or who want to through new, unexpected combinations of monsters at their players.
• Crunch: There is no other work that assembles, generates, and makes available this level of pure crunch, of instantly-usable gaming statistics in an accessible format.
• Single Point of Reference: Each monster entry is designed to be self-contained, as much as possible: in nearly all cases, you should be able to use the creature’s entry on its own, without referencing any other publications or materials.
• Flexibility: If you’ve always been frustrated by the restrictions of a given adventure being appropriate only “for levels 4-6”, then this bestiary is for you!
• Rigor: Each and every one of the statblocks in this tome was constructed using published game mechanics, templates, rules, and resources. Most have been playtested in actual gaming groups, or simulated in extensive combat scenarios across a range of PC compositions, levels, and sizes. Although every single monster is not going to pose the identical challenge to every party—see “Weaknesses”, below—every creature is constructed as best as possible to represent that monster at that level of difficulty.
• Intelligence: FlexAI is a revolutionarily complex, yet accessible, means of simulating dynamic, contextually-appropriate monster behavior in combat encounters. Each and every monster includes full FlexAI rules, including its combat Role and variation, so you know how it is likely to behave in combat. This mechanic and approach takes the place of the somewhat more pedestrian “Combat Behavior” description that most bestiaries include alongside statblocks. This concept is explored in full, with hundreds of additional resources and references, in the FlexAI Guidebook, usable on its own, or as a valuable companion tome to this bestiary.
• Novelty: Of the 6,400 complete statblocks in this bestiary, 4,800 of them are entirely new, forged using existing game mechanics, guidelines, templates, resources, and rules. A full 75% of the creatures described herein were created solely for the purposes of letting GMs use monsters for party levels above, or below, the levels “intended” originally when the monsters were published to begin with. In this sense, this work is not only an assemblage of monsters in a single repository, but also the single largest source of new creatures ever conceived.
• Thoroughness: Every monster. Ever. Assembled in a single place.
• Integration with FlexTale: All Infinium Game Studio adventures and other products use the FlexTale approach to adventure content. This innovative approach attempts to make all adventure content accessible and appropriate to all PC parties, of all levels. Aquilae: Bestiary of the Realm enables FlexTale support for every monster, ever published.
• Making Existing Adventures Dynamic: If you have published adventures that do not use the FlexTale approach, you can use this bestiary to adapt them to parties of any level.
• Construction: Each and every monster has been “built” or “constructed”, rather than simply fabricated. The meaning here is a little obtuse, so in more detail: each monster has been incarnated from its starting statblock, and then modified up and down as appropriate to generate the resulting quartet of statblocks you find herein. Hit dice have been modified, feats granted, and other tricks to produce contextually-appropriate scales of challenge. Statblocks have not simply been “fiddled with”, but rather templates and other tools have been applied to generate the results you see. It would have been easier—SO MUCH easier!—to simply fabricate statblocks and boosts, but this approach results in much richer and more true-to-the-rules mechanics.

Innovation

This product incorporates several innovative and creative tools your gaming group can use to use the content for a party of any size, and any level.

Infinium Game Studio has released several free booklets as rules accessories to help GMs understand (or to help prospective buyers experience) these tools:

Quadded Statblocks for Variable Challenge:

Check it out here.

FlexAI Guidbook Free Sample:

Check it out here.