Savage Species and Spelljammer

I don't often post messages like this, but I just wanted to
pass on my thoughts on the new 3e book Savage Species.

For those who don't know, SS is a book on playing monsters
as characters. While 3e already had a degree of support for
this, SS completely fleshes this out, giving level adjustments/
ECLs for just about every creature in the Monster Manual.
Wanna play a troll fighter who leads a band of pirates? No
problem (as long as you are at least 12th level). They also
give level adjustments for all the templates from the MM, plus
a bunch of new templates.

In addition to the straightforward idea of level adjustments,
the book also introduces the idea of monsters as classes.
That is, the monster gains abilities and improvements over
the coarse of levels, until they reach the standard race as
given in the Monster Manual. For example, the troll has 11
monster levels, and gains stat increases, hit dice, regeneration
and abilities like rend over time, until at 11th level they have
everything a troll has in the MM. This allows a person to play
a troll at first level, albeit a young, weaker troll.*

Why am I bringing this up on the SJML? As I read this book
I could not stop thinking about how appropriate this book is
for SJ. In the Complete Spacefarers Guide they made a number of
monsters into races, but had to castrate them in
power to balance them out. An obvious example is the giff.

With SS, you can keep the races intact while still allowing
players access to them, even at first level. If the giff were
theoretically a +4 level adjustment, you could create a monster
class that allows giff at first level, without sacrificing what it is
that makes a gifff a giff, as was done previously.

Given the cosmopolitan nature of SJ, there are many
candidates for the SS approach. giff, mindflayers, minotaurs,
ogres, bugbears, dracon, lizardmen, umber hulks, plasmoids,
rastipede, reigar, and so on. Even more esoteric things, like
space owls.

Another way to use these classes is to weaken monsters in
order to make them an appropriate challenge or lower level
characters. A good example of this is the illithid. They are not
uncommon in SJ, but they are quite powerful, and you can't
really have them directly confronting low level characters,
unless you want your players to die. With the monster class
concept, you can have less powerful mind flayers. You could,
of course, do this before, but SS systemizes this for you.**

The book also has guidelines on racial creation, plus a section
on anthropomorphisizing any of the animals from the MM or
other sources. There are also new feats, new spells, new
equipment, other guidelines and concepts, plus new prestige
classes, including the illithid savant, which oughta be fun for
any SJ campaign.

In all, I think SS is a great book, and anyone who is looking to
do SJ in 3e should take a serious look at it.

* A concept that might be familiar to anyone who played
OD&D, but SS does it quite a bit more elegantly.

** Amusingly, I did something similar a while back. I decided I
wanted mind flayers to be weaker, overall, so I created a CR 4
version of them, then created a prestige class. At 4th level
(CR 8) they would be equal to the standard mind layer. The
class was 10 levels, so it wasn't quite the same thing, but still
uncannily similar.


Leroy Van Camp III
malacoda@????????.net
ICQ #20039817

"You know, not kneeing you in the groin is a constant struggle."
                         MST3K