Help Me Write the Jolrhos Bestiary!

[Christopher R Taylor]

I am hard at work writing up and polishing up the Jolrhos Bestiary, a collection of monsters and creatures unique to or unusual to my campaign setting.  So no orcs, dragons, or zombies, but lots of other oddities.

 

I'm close to finishing up the writing but I'm curious about something and you the reader here can help me out!  I have the basics of a "body loot" chart so that when a creature is defeated it can be 'harvested' for lack of a better word for scales, teeth, special organs, etc, and the GM knows exactly what's going to be found and how to get it, what its worth, and what it may be useful for.

 

Now, I won't be going into detailed specifics in this volume on making things out of these raw materials such as alchemy ingredients or chitin, but this would at least give players the ability to get good stuff off creatures other than coins or other loot. And players of computer games are going to be pretty familiar with the concept.  There's no junk loot (what merchant really wants a spleen from a bear anyway?) just usable stuff or things that reasonably would sell.

 

Now, I'm not sure this is worth the effort to include in the book, but it seems like a natural fit.

 

So what say you, is this something you'd care to have in the bestiary or is it just fluff you wouldn't care about as a GM or player?  

 

Should it be in or out?

[BlueCloud2k2]

I think body loot is a good idea, IMO.

[mikeward2534]

I also like the idea.

[Lucius]

 

The drawback to including specific "body loot" is that it then becomes available and possibly common knowledge to the players, but the characters wouldn't necessarily know. Maybe throw in a line to the effect that such parts can only be harvested if one of the characters has, or makes a roll on, some appropriate skill such as "KS: Alchemy" or "Analzye: Treasure."

 

Lucius Alexander

 

After all, you don't automatically know what a palindromedary is good for do you?

[Christopher R Taylor]

I'll have to include some notes on that, yeah.  It makes sense to me as a GM, if a character has skinning, say, to do a roll for them on that to spot that the target has a useful pelt, or remember that it can be used for example.  That way the characters can start to clue in that the creatures are 'harvestable.'

[DShomshak]

I think it's a good idea, too. Not everything should have "body loot," but maybe that just means alchemists have not yet found what something is good for, hmm?

 

(Pet peeve: Fantasy settings in which *everything* is already known, and PCs have no chance of discovering/inventing anything new. It's rarely stated explicitly, but often seems implicit in the setting.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[BlueCloud2k2]

I think it's a good idea, too. Not everything should have "body loot," but maybe that just means alchemists have not yet found what something is good for, hmm?

 

(Pet peeve: Fantasy settings in which *everything* is already known, and PCs have no chance of discovering/inventing anything new. It's rarely stated explicitly, but often seems implicit in the setting.)

 

Dean Shomshak

 

I once solved this problem by having the players discover the source of all magic.

 

Be warned: I was fifteen when I ran this particular scenario:

 

 

As it turns out, it was literally the stuff of dreams (Beings that would view the Gods as mere ants have dreams, and those dreams manifest as reality -- this is where Chaos Magic originates; Chaos magic gave birth to the universe and the residual dream-stuff that was left over pooled into ley-lines allowing those with the mental know how (wizards) or strength of faith (priests) to bend these forces to their will.

 

In discovering the dream-stuff (that was the actual name for it) they decided to awaken the sleepers (they never told me why). Somehow they managed to convince the sleepers to grant them power (because as one player put it "no one makes good decisions when they are awoken from a dead sleep") and then proceeded to reboot the Multiverse in their own image.

 

At which point in time I told them, "fine, you wanna play god- YOU be the DM."

 

Their rebuttal: "Do we look like Masochists?"

 

Somehow they managed to convince me to run a campaign world using their specs. I feel I should point out one of them is now a lawyer and could sell an ice-maker to Eskimos.

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Thanks to everyone who helped me with this idea, it made it into the final Jolrhos Bestiary product!