Gaming Supplement OGE2 - 1977 Bestiary

If you’re looking for universal and directly compatible old school materials to bridge the original game editions created by Arneson and Gygax (1974-1985), Holmes (1977), Moldvay and Cook (1981), Mentzer (1983-1986), and other luminaries of TSR (1974-1989), you’ve come to the right place. Players of Fifth Edition will also discover much of resourceful interest here, because these historically-informed systems are rules-light and concept-heavy, ready for quick conversion to the ruleset of your choice.

This is the first supplement in the requested 1977 Bestiary sequence, a comprehensive page-by-page revision and full expansion of the game’s 1977 monstrous bestiary, the famous hardcover tome wherein E. Gary Gygax first bridged the Basic and Advanced editions long ago. In this book you will find over 130 OGL-compliant monsters (beginning with the letter A) for your campaigns and projects, including iconic beasties such as aerial servants, anhkhegs, ants and beetles, bugbear variants, bulettes, demon lords, the horrific Evil Eyes of Yog-Sothoth, and much more. The primary goal of the 1977 Bestiary project is to unify the Basic, Expert, and Advanced games with a universally compatible monster resource. The second goal is to bring classic Gygaxian monsters into your Basic campaigns, with clarified stat templates of many Advanced monsters that never crossed into Basic territory.

Thirdly, if you’re well-versed in the Advanced game, you will note that this book addresses hundreds of vagaries and ambiguities in the 1977 bestiary, bringing forth many implied or half-developed subtypes of monsters alluded to in the original tome, such as chieftains, sub-adults and young, large and huge creatures, orders (such as clerical, magical, and sacred couatls), Balor tiers, evil eye hierarchies, and much more. Chronic issues such as ambiguity in proportional treasure assignment, the exact meaning of the term “lair” (and its implications for treasure generation), incidental treasure, inconsistent numbers appearing, humanoid weapon selections, psionics, unstated morale levels, varying XP values for subtypes (such as varying-power anhkhegs of 3 to 8 hit dice), and other nettlesome technicalities have been corrected and clarified in this tome, and these improvements will carry their way throughout the 1977 Bestiary series.

All monsters are presented with clean and updated stat blocks (check out the preview), with an easy-to-use quick reference format that is perfect for use at the game table. The improved and profusely illustrated monster stat blocks will also give you immediate details on rarity, monster type (elemental, undead, etc.), average hit points, attack accuracy, average damage, vulnerabilities, clarified special abilities (such as demonic gating), clearer special attack mechanics (for charges, catoblepas gazes, evil eye rays, etc.), average treasure type values, and many other pieces of information that the original books never fully provided, all in a single master resource. Whatever your interest in old school monsters, you will find much to love herein.