Free League Forbidden Lands: Book of Beasts - Hardcover Expansion RPG Book, Free League Publishing, A Beastiary You Can Play, Murderous Monsters & Lethal Encounters, Role Playing Game

Amazingly written book, with great mechanics, ideas and lore in it. Beautiful art. Extremely useful and straight-to-the-point tables.I wish Free League publishes more books for Forbidden Land following this style in the future.

This has a real old school feel to it with modern streamlined rules. Beautiful book as well as useful in game.

Probably my favorite codex of monsters, great lore, I love the encounters, I would recommend this book regardless of what system you run.

Free league make amazing games

Despite anything I say in this review, just know this book is an excellent expansion to the Forbidden Lands (FL) roleplaying game. If you already know and enjoy the game you can't go wrong here.The art, while excellent and of similar tone to prior FL art, is of a slightly different style than in the core books - more pencil shading and detail, as opposed to the original's higher contrast line-art. Again, it's great art. It's just a bit awkward that the style throughout FL products isn't as consistent as it could be.The included new monsters are quite interesting. They have good variation, yet also have a certain cohesiveness that makes them feel tied to the same world. I haven't tried any in a game yet, but I appreciate how much thought went into their design. Especially nice is how each creature comes with a couple of random encounters that use the beast, though it's a shame these aren't integrated into the random encounter table. That new table and its 36 special random encounters are a great boon, but it was a missed opportunity and great frustration that the new monsters' provided encounters aren't integrated into the table. This seems like a blatant error, and is the primary reason for me removing a star.In fact, not many of the new monsters even appear in the random encounters section at all. But the core GM's Guide didn't have a lot of its monsters in its random encounters table either, so I guess these sections are intended to be a way to simply kick-start a campaign and are not to be overly relied upon.The new Gamemaster Tools chapter is fine, though parts seem underwhelming at first glance. The worst offender is the Traps table with only 12 entries, which is nowhere near enough variety. On the other extreme, the "Books, Ballads, and Grimoires" section seems excessively long with its 73 possible outcomes, especially since most of the text is flavor rather than mechanics. Though, I do appreciate how these tomes add a new degree of variety to treasure and alternatives for character development (they offer a new way for PCs to learn or improve skills and talents).At first I thought the Journeys section was too slim as well, as it's just 6 flavor sentences to describe each terrain or camp site. But I suppose that is a solid 120 lines, and they are meant just as suggestions to kick-start the GM's creativity; I wouldn't actually have wanted any more.The Weather section is similarly fine, despite it fitting on a single page. At first I thought it too simple, and perhaps it is...but then again there's only so much detail you can reasonably handle at the game table. This isn't a simulation! So my only complaint is that weather conditions should have probably been a part of the core rules.The sections on Potions and Poisons are just the right length, providing interesting new options with a useful level of detail that doesn't overstay its welcome. The Artifact's section is a bit bland, as it just provides some random tables to let you create random new artifacts. But I guess it could be useful in a pinch.The Solo rules is a very welcome addition, and was one of the main reasons I got this book. Unfortunately it's rather slim, and solo play will require more flipping through books than I would have liked. The author of this section has said online they were very constricted by page count, however the section contains a lot of white space and multiple tables of dubious utility; I think it could have been handled better. I'm also not a fan of needing a card deck oracle. (For what it's worth, the author of the solo rules has put out an expanded solo document via DriveThruRPG.)One final irksome detail: The words on the spine don't quite line up with those on the core books. The spine font is also slightly larger and more bold than on the core books. I was so hoping the three books would match perfectly...but I suppose in the grand scheme of things it's not too bad.So overall it's an excellent product, and by no means can you go wrong with getting it (as long as you're actually playing the game enough to need this extra content). But it falls short of perfect by having a supplemental section that feels a bit anemic, like it's stuff from the cutting room floor when creating the core books (which isn't to say it's bad, just a bit underdeveloped) and by failing to integrate the monsters' random encounters with the random encounter table.As an aside (in case the publisher or writers read this review), I don't personally care for a huge variety of monsters. I hope they don't do another tome of beasts, nor a slew of new creatures in campaign books. I may be in the minority, but new creatures get dull after a while, making the game too chaotic and unwieldy. Game developers often think that a ton of monsters enriches a world, but I personally think it dilutes it and makes it feel less cohesive. So I would much prefer the FL team's next project be just a big variety of encounters and location sites that use only *existing* monsters. Or, even better, a 2nd edition that simply reorganizes the core books.