[K5pbem] Ken Hite on the Asian Bestiaries

[Michael Surbrook]

One of Hero's new books for the show was the second and final volume in
Michael Surbrook's Asian Bestiary series (136- and 141-page softcovers,
black-and-white, $24.99 each), the first one of which bowed at  
DunDraCon.
Now that I've got both, I can say that they're well worth having,
especially if your current load of monster books reeks a little too
heavily of T.H. White and the rest of the medieval lot. Well over 120
monsters (plus variants, sub-types, and a few cross-references) span the
Mysterious East from Indonesia to Tibet, from India to Japan.  
Although the
art isn't always up to snuff, I didn't find any errors in the  
legendry, or
even any significant omissions. As with most Hero System villain books,
it's going to be most useful by far for Hero System players (those stat
blocks take up a lot of space), but any game with monsters, or Asia,  
will
benefit.

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Michael Surbrook
susano at guisarme . net http://surbrook.devermore.net/index/index.html

"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can  
see nothing but sea."

Sir Francis Bacon