Launch!

Excited to share with you the Keystone Bestiary, a little "toolbox" game book that I've been puttering away at in the background of larger projects.  This is intended as a general resource for animals, beasts, and monsters in just about any Cortex game but most especially Keystone Fantasy games, where those beasts and monsters and companions and noble steeds are all an essential part of the experience.

The core of the book is 100 creature distinctions and SFX, which can be mixed and matched to produce over 160,000 different creatures. I'm pretty sure that qualifies the Keystone Bestiary as the biggest RPG bestiary ever produced—and it rings in at only 32 pages.  How's that for high-octane game design?

The Big List of Creature Distinctions is accompanied by rules for combining those distinctions into creature trait blocks and using animals as threats, obstacles, companions, mounts, and more.  There's rules for jousting and rodeos and all sorts of fun stuff.

Because I'm distributing through itch.io, I'm also able to package the static PDF with a little web app that animates those creature creation rules and does the (slight) amount of bookkeeping from that process.  All of which means it'll whip up new creatures with a single click, and you can also create customized oracles for wherever your game takes you.  You can play with the demo version on the itch.io site and download the full version along with the PDF.

I think that's about it, now I'll go sit in a corner and try to not refresh the page every ten minutes.  Happy launch day, everybody!  Hope you get a bunch of fun out of the Bestiary!