Asian Monsters: 90+ magnificent monsters for DnD 5E!

A new record!
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Jul 05, 2021 at 05:35:38 PM

We are excitedly watching the final hours tick away, and with 28 hours yet left to go we've just set a new record for Legendary Games! Thanks to Viktor H. (backer 1500), Javier C. (backer 1600), and just now Billy N. (backer 1644), you've made Asian Monsters our most-backed Kickstarter ever (knocking off Sea Monsters at 1,643)! Our all-time dollar amounts are very much within reach, and we are excited to see if we can set a new record there as well, but we just wanted to thank each and every one of you for becoming a part of this project! 

***YOU are truly what makes us Legendary!***

Just two days left!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 02, 2021 at 08:43:07 AM

As always, we begin with hearty thanks to each and every one of you for supporting this project and bringing it to ever-higher heights, especially backer 1300 Curtis H. and backer 1400 Jessie S.! We are looking forward to a fantastic final two days as we get ready to finish off the Asian Monstersproject in style! 

In the end, the way the pages fell to hit our signature number of 112 pages, we actually had room to add *three* extra monsters, bringing the total up to I believe 96! We added two varieties of the aswang from the Philippines (the balbal and wakwak) plus the yurei from Japan, which takes over the spot as the very last monster in the book! There are a lot of ways we could have gone with the aswang as D&D monsters, given the dense folklore around them, but since that we already had the manananggal as undead, we statted up the aswangs as living shapechangers, working in a lot of cool folkloric details about them. We hope you enjoy what we've done with them and the rest of this book when you receive your PDFs Friday night! 

Meanwhile, by all means please share the love and recommend this project to any of your friends who might be interested! More to come soon on Latin American Monsters and Boricubos: The Lost Isles!

One Week to Go and So Many Cool Projects Out There!
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 02:26:37 PM

Thanks to each and every one of you for your amazing support! With exactly one week left, we've already surpassed Mythos Monsters as the second-highest backer total ever for LG (with a special thanks to backer #1100 Jay S. and #1200 Cameron R.)! We are delighted and excited to have you all on board and hope you are jazzed that one week from today you'll be holding an amazing pile of electrons in your virtual hands with nearly 100 incredible Asian Monsters in it! 

We continue to be hard at work on Latin American Monsters and the companion campaign setting, Boricubos: The Lost Isles, so we thought we'd send you a preview of one of the amazing new creatures you'll be meeting in our next monster book! 

Everything looks like it should be on track for a Kickstarter launch for that project in late July or early August, with versions available not just for D&D 5E but also for Pathfinder 1E and 2E! 

There are a ton of terrific projects going on out there all the time, and while we love and appreciate your support for LG we also work with other great companies doing incredible work and we always want to support each other. 

• We shared earlier Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting, and they are having a spectacular success with a very cool book on old-school monster hunting and questing for mysterious elements and components, along with *TEN* adventures featuring those rules. 
• We've also worked with the folks at Nord Games, and the delightfully named Mr. Tarrasque has launched a new project really embracing the spectacular themed bestiaries that Nord puts out with Isle of the Dreaded Accursed! You know I love me some monsters and Nord gives a great in-depth treatment for the creatures in their Ultimate Bestiary line of books and cards, and this adventure really shows them off!
• Last but not least, some projects aren't even games, they're just cool fantasy stuff. I suffered through a lot of schlocky fantasy growing up in the 70s and 80s, and I was excited to see the Hex Studios team putting together an honest-to-goodness full-on fantasy film called Dragon Knight! There's something kind of amazing about seeing fans moving on to creating terrific professional stuff that can inspire the next generation of fantasy fans. You don't have to a giant zillion-dollar publishing house or movie studio to make stuff that really shines. 

We hope you give some of our friends out there in a creator-sphere a look and we'll see all of you (and many more) next Friday! 

A little something extra: The Aswang!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 01:37:41 PM

Hi all and thanks so much for your continued support! You are truly delightful and so very appreciated by us for making this monster book project happen! As always, a quick special thanks to Julian Schmid (backer #500) and Jacob (backer #600), but we love everyone from x01-x99 too! :)

I wanted to let you know that we finalized the base layout for the book on Thursday night, but as it happens we condensed a couple of entries, which left us with a couple of blank pages. Offset print runs for books are done in "signatures" - basically giant sheets that are printed all at once and then folded and cut to assemble the final book - and the standard signatures for printing are 16 pages (sometimes 8 and 32 are used as well). This book at 112 pages is 7 signatures long, so blank pages means they have to get filled with something. We could just put some ads or announcements or thank yous in there, but I noticed several people in the comments mentioned the aswang from Filipino folklore as a creature they wished was part of the book, so I said to myself, "Self, maybe we should add some aswang to the book!"

So I am!

I'm writing up a 2-page spread with either 2 or 3 aswang stat blocks (we'll how they come out word count-wise). Keeping it at exactly 2 pages means that it maintains the integrity and left/right page layout of the remaining pages. We'll just insert it in between asura and atuikakura! The layout artist can adjust the layout when he returns from his trip later this month and finalizes the books. 

Since there are a number of related creatures in the mythology that all might be considered a type of aswang, we are setting it up as a type of creature with some things in common, like their shapechanging and thirst for blood, but also unique abilities of their own. A quick preview of some of the abilities common to all aswangs is below!

• Aswang Scent. Aswangs have advantage on scent-based Wisdom (Perception) checks, and their sense for blood is so keen that they can perceive any creature at 0 hit points and any creature that has taken piercing, slashing, or necrotic damage within the previous round as if they had blindsight 60 ft.
• Sensory Sensitivity. Aswangs are sensitive to bright light and loud noise. When an aswang takes radiant or thunder damage, they must succeed on a DC 11 Wisdom saving throw or become frightened for 1 round. In addition, they have disadvantage on saving throws against effects that cause deafness due to loud noise or blindness due to bright light, and Charisma (Intimidation) checks against them have advantage if the aswang is in an area of bright light or in a noisy area (GM’s discretion).

One week in and doing great!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 01:37:32 PM

Hi all,

I just wanted to check in and thank each and every one of you for your support (including Chris Kiefer, backer #800)! After 7 days Asian Monsters is over 32x our initial funding goal and up to almost 900 backers, and we look forward to many more folks coming aboard in the remaining 16 days! 

I just got back from a several-day camping trip with the lovely and talented Mrs. Legendary Games, and while we were mostly focused on enjoying the great outdoors I did finish off the two new aswang stat blocks for the book, featuring the balbal and the wakwak! These sinister shapechangers should be a delightful addition to the book. There were a lot of cool options across the aswang legendarium and we may revisit them as a creature type in future books, but these two are about all we'll have room to slide into this book. Still, that brings us to a total of 95 monsters in the book! I'm sending out the art order for this new creature today so it'll be in hand soon and we'll add these pages to the book once our layout artist gets back from their family trip around the end of next week. 

Meanwhile, another art preview for you from the very last monster in the book (alphabetically, anyway)!