Liber Bestarius

Liber Bestarius: the Book of Beasts was Matthew Colville's variant d20/OGL Monster Manual, for Eden Studios in 2002. It had some interesting stuff, albeit uneven as a published product.

It has undead Reavers, here reassembled from dead scraps. Another standout is the Mowz which is a big rat genetically-engineered to cull the stray-cat population. (Based!)

Too many beasties were described as "distant relatives of X and Y"; we say too many because at one point we got a relative of lizards and crocodiles. Your second-grade dinosaur-loving child could tell you that crocodilians belong in a clade closer to birds than to other reptiles. A particular low-point is the "razor demon" which is an expy of the Alien.

If you get past solecisms like this, you'll find, amongst the correlations, monsters for a world likely colonised during its Triassic, assuming the T/J Extinction didn't happen (yet?). Many monsters - likely indigenous - are primitive Mammal Like Reptiles like the Tisyah, or, yeah, crocodiles. And there aren't any birds, in this book anyway. We don't know where Triassic Park has ever been floated elsewhere so we're glad to have this.

As for nonindigenes: here's a link (conjunction?) with the Fay; eg. the skitterwings are spiritual mosquitoes. "Beast Lords" in Kham - sort of a Congo - did experiments to create the usual D&D chimerae along with some new ones mooted here. And a "spider queen" came here in antiquity, melding her arachnoid minions with human bodies.

Better than the average Fiend Folio, we'll conclude.

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