Savage Species: Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

[codeGlaze]

Bridge of Sound

I can't find the good gif of him actually walking on notes, though. =/

[Red_Rob]

Actually, you can be a human Slaad brooder... the preqs don't have Slaad in them. Think about it.

Apart from this?

To qualify to become a slaad brooder, a character must fulfill all the following criteria.
Race: Any slaad.

Granted, it can be got around, but it is there.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I want to give a gibbering Mouther levels in the Siren class. That would be hilarious.

[Username17]

The Slaad Brooder was objectively a failure. It doesn't do level appropriate things, and the things it does do are things that no player is liable to care about. But the underlying concept, while being something I currently reject out of hand, was not obviously stupid. I pursued that line of reasoning myself for a time. It is capable of hitting the right notes for individual characters. The problems are significant however.

• These kinds of monster classes are basically just kicking the can. While you can write a class like Blade of Entropy or Tree Speaker to get an unusual character like an Elemental or Dryad into a playable progression, it only stays playable for as many levels as you've written for it. Once you run out of levels of Mind Architect to take, there's nothing level appropriate waiting for you to progress into from there.
• These kinds of monster classes don't provide real choice. While you can make a class like Black Maiden that lets you play a Succubus in a specific role, it still doesn't let you play Succubus Paladin or a Succubus Illusionist. Each writeup is necessarily fairly narrow in concept, which means that you'll never get much breadth no matter how big a classplosion you shovel out.

Ultimately, if you are armed with a robust set of challenge difficulties, you can shovel out patch classes at a pretty impressive clip. And if you have a short list of class roles like unto 4e you can do it even faster. But the content demand is too vast. There are too many monsters and too many things people might want to do as one of them, and the coverage by one of these classes is too small to ever make a meaningful dent in the demand. Sure you can write 10 levels of a Defender class for Wereboars or a 10 progression for Will-o-Wisp Leaders, but then what? What if the Wereboar wants to keep playing? What if they want to be a Striker instead? What if they don't like the direction you took the Defender class, and want to do something based on boar spears?

I don't think Slaad Brooder was a stupid idea. It is representative of what is ultimately a failed design path. A one-way ticket to an endless abyss of required writing that cannot ever be completed even with 4e levels of shovelware text. And the Slaad Brooder itself was poorly designed. But I can totally see greenlighting the Slaad Brooder to be written. Especially at the time.

-Username17

[Red_Rob]

I don't think Slaad Brooder was a stupid idea. It is representative of what is ultimately a failed design path. A one-way ticket to an endless abyss of required writing that cannot ever be completed even with 4e levels of shovelware text. And the Slaad Brooder itself was poorly designed. But I can totally see greenlighting the Slaad Brooder to be written. Especially at the time.

I can kind of see the argument for specific prestige classes for each monster, although I agree it leads to a ridiculous quantity of required classes for what is basically a niche character concept in the first place (the monster character). But my beef is more with the specific classes they chose to include.

Savage Species included 10 monster Prestige classes. They had to be aware that it was a distinct possibility that they would never release another monster prestige class, as indeed was pretty much the case. So, in that case, why did they choose to release these Prestige classes? I mean, they basically fall into three camps; those that would never get played in a normal campaign because of party dynamics, those that could never get played because of ridiculous restrictions and those should never be played because they are so mechanically bad.

The Savant and the Brooder are both horrific character concepts. The brooder implants their live young into people and waits for them to eat their way out whilst their prey are still alive. The Savant consumes the brains of sentient creatures. I'm not sure those are concepts that fit seemlesly into most RPG parties. The Siren on the other hand has indiscriminate area attacks, always a favourite in a party-based game. When the effects include petrification and death at higher levels, that's some serious shit to be handing out to party members for the crime of being able to hear. The Waverider and Scaled Horror both rely on being underwater for chunks of their powers to work. Yuan-Ti cultists 'rarely if ever leave their temples' except on a specific quest to start a new temple, when they are accompanied by many other Yuan-Ti, which is great for a cooperative game where you play a single character. All these classes seem to be designed to only work in specific campaigns designed around them, which massively limits their usefulness to someone picking up Savage Species because one of their players wanted to play a Stone Giant. The Survivor claims to increase survivability but is worse than simply taking levels of Monk, whilst the Emancipated Spawn is a crazy rollercoaster of ability and ECL gain with little correlation between either.

I would have expected if you were making Monster prestige classes you'd have gone for more generally useable ones. Or at least ones based on monsters people actually wanted to play.

[Prak]

I think possibly the biggest failure of the Slaad Brooder is the fact that it is about as useful as using disease in combat, as a player. You really don't care about what happens to your enemies a week from now, or really even a day from now, at least not until you get the ability to spawn in dead bodies, but then you're carting around corpses. The SB had some good concepts (implant multiple pellets, do energy damage with pellets, choice of slaad spawned), and it made slaad egg implantation something you'd care about more as a player, but the gestation still takes a day.

Ideally a class based around egg implantation would be a minion summoner with a quirky sfx., with a gestation delay of, at most, a round, and getting mini-slaad.

[hyzmarca]

The Savant consumes the brains of sentient creatures. I'm not sure those are concepts that fit seemlesly into most RPG parties.

The Savant is perfectly alright. There's little difference between killing a guy and taking his stuff and killing a guy, eating his brain, and taking his stuff. The brain eating is merely thought-looting.

It doesn't even have to be immoral, either, because there is absolutely nothing stopping you from resurrecting a person whose brain has been eaten. There are probably people who would volunteer for the experience.

It gets totally broken once your cleric gets access to True Resurrection, at which point you can just repeatedly eat your entire party's brains until you have all of their class features and skills, and there is a decent chance that they will agree to this.

And then, of course, they all transform themselves into Mind Flayers and take a level of Savant and repeatedly eat your brain and each-others brains until everyone has all skills and class features, which won't take long. This is especially true since Planar Binding effectively gives you an arbitrary number of Scrolls of True Resurrection, as does Candle of Invocation abuse (Did that exist in 3.0?).

So, essentially, as soon as planar binding comes online everyone is omnidisciplinarian at the cost of one class level. You can really cheese out your skills, too.

This is why Illthid Savant is bad, not because it's gross but because it's absurdly overpowered.

[Ancient History]

These prestige classes are all MC-bait, is what it is. You will never have a PC Slaad Brooder, but I bet you some PCs faced an NPC Slaad Brooder at some point. If you think of these things (except for the Illithid Savant) as the equivalent to NPC classes like "Fighter" and "Noble," they make more sense.

[K]

It gets totally broken once your cleric gets access to True Resurrection, at which point you can just repeatedly eat your entire party's brains until you have all of their class features and skills, and there is a decent chance that they will agree to this.

Well, you can't do that because levels in Illithid Savant limit how many class features you can take. For example, a Illithid Savant 10 only has three stolen class features, so stealing another Illithid Savant's Aquire class feature only gets you that one and not all the features it has stolen (even if it did, the limit would be nine class features because you only get the actual class features stolen and not open slots to put new class features into since they don't work that way).

It's only potentially overpowered because you could eat the brains of a monster or character with class levels who is much more powerful than you, but there is no infinite power gain. You really can eat the brain of an epic dragon and run around with a +87 Diplomacy or eat the brain of the Tarrasque and get virtual immortality, but getting "all the class features" would require hundreds of Illithid Savant levels (There is an Epic progression, in case you were wondering).

It's even underpowered if you limit it PCs who specifically have to go on adventures to have the potential to pick new powers. An ECL 17 Illithid Savant gets his first class feature and there is nothing he can chose that is going to make up for the fact that he paid 15 character levels to be an Illithid.

[hyzmarca]

Well, you can't do that because levels in Illithid Savant limit how many class features you can take. For example, a Illithid Savant 10 only has three stolen class features, so stealing another Illithid Savant's Aquire class feature only gets you that one and not all the features it has stolen (even if it did, the limit would be nine class features because you only get the actual class features stolen and not open slots to put new class features into).

I always read it as up to three class features per brain eaten. Only three class features total is a lot less overpowered.

[Prak]

Well, you can't do that because levels in Illithid Savant limit how many class features you can take. For example, a Illithid Savant 10 only has three stolen class features, so stealing another Illithid Savant's Aquire class feature only gets you that one and not all the features it has stolen (even if it did, the limit would be nine class features because you only get the actual class features stolen and not open slots to put new class features into since they don't work that way).

Also there's no way you're going to get a group who are not a part of this community to agree to this. Seriously, neither of my D&D groups would agree to this, because they'd think in character, rather than metagame.

[hyzmarca]

I high level Sensate would do it, just to feel the sensation of having his brain eaten. Plenty of people would want to try that at least once, assuming that there was a guarantee of immediate resurrection.

[Avoraciopoctules]

A mortal might also like the idea of their knowledge gaining a kind of immortality. I could see an aging archmage specifically letting a brain eater consume them on the condition that it spend time training a new generation of mages.

And maybe then the archmage wakes up in a sub-dimensional clone and goes on vacation.

[Ted the Flayer]

Chapter 8: Campaigns

There is literally nothing to say about this chapter. It's two pages. I am not shitting you, it is two fucking pages. It has some awesome pencil artwork on the first page (art in this book has been top-notch, I can't deny it), but the chapter is fapping over alignment and how it needs to dictate your campaign. NEXT.

Chapter 9: Advancing a Monster

Nothing here that's of interest, it's the same stuff from the Monster Manual, except expanded a little bit. Another short chapter. NEXT.

Chapter 10: Templates[/b]

Alright, a GOOD chapter to review. This chapter has a few bombs, a few gems. I've used a good bit out of this chapter, and man of the templates here were reprinted in later books.

Sidebar Fun: The sidebar suggest you can use templates to create entirely new monsters, just change their physical description. Useful advice, I hadn't thought of that before then, but use it a lot these days.

Feral Creature: Ever want to represent beings raised by wolves in the wild? This is your closest bet. An interesting template in that it grants abilities that improve as you gain levels. I remember WotC throwing fits back in the day about how overpowered this was, but other than that +6 natural armor at 1st level could potentially put you off the RNG for a few levels I don't see the big deal. I would also consider Minotaurs to already be pretty feral and I'm not sure why they used one as the template (and why there was a run on feral halflings after this book came out).

Gelatinous Creature: Reminds me of a popular thread on the WotC boards when this came out. Someone took all the templates in this book and took them away from Monster Manual monsters that they came from. One of them was the Cube (taking the benefits of the Gelatinous Creature template from a Gelatinous cube). I think I actually used Cube in a game...

Anyway, it's kind of an over-priced template. It grants you resistance to critical hits and sneak attacks, gives you an acidic slam attack, and a con bonus, but it makes you slow, clumsy, stupid, and easy to hit. I am not fond of the template.

Ghost Brute: As I mentioned in Libris Mortis, I don't think there's a compelling reason to have made the ghost template not be applicable to things with a charisma of less than 6. This template wouldn't be needed, they should have folded it into the Ghost template with the 3.5 Monster Manual.

Incarnate Construct: You don't want to be this. You can turn a humanoid construct into an actual flesh and blood creature. Except they still have crappy construct base attack, they lose their slam attacks and all abilities, and most damning of all they don't get any skills or feats for their hit dice. You know how WotC is crazy about screwing you over with high LA? The LA for this template is -2. If you want more hit dice than character levels for some reason, this might work. I'm sure three seconds after I post this someone will have a build where that's awesome.

Insectile Creature: It's a cheap +1 CR template that gives a creature extra limbs, bonus to natural armor, dexterity and wisdom bonuses, and tremorsense. I'm applying the template to bears and wolves and stuff for one of the other planets in the campaign world where arthropods became the dominant species type and occupy every niche. Useful.

Monstrous Beast: It's another cheap +1 La template that gives animals and vermin new abilities. To be honest, this one never leaped off the page at me (probably because of the shit art). The abilities are all over the place, which means you're likely to pick one or two that are just what you're looking for, so tjeck it out.

Multi-Headed Template: What this template does is grant extra head-based attacks (bites, breath weapons, etc.), plus extra hit dice and constitution bonuses per head. The template can also make someone regenerate like a hydra or breath fire/ice. It's a pretty good template that's fun for all ages. Combine with the feat that lets you cast verbal-only spells with each head for extra cheeze.

Mummified Creature: Can be nasty, mummies are strong and their gaze attack is pretty boss.

Reptilian Creature: Similar to the Insectile creature in most ways. Good for faking new monsters by adding it to existing ones.

Spectral Creature: Turns a monster into a spectre. Seriously, fuck those guys.

-Note: Continued tomorrow, I just remembered I have to be up in 6 hours to go to work, will continue with this chapter afterwards.-

[K]

Feral was awesome for the Fast Healing. The whole game changes if the meatshield has Fast Healing because the 5-min workday suddenly gets extended by a lot.

[Kaelik]

People have a lot of random builds that use Incarnate Construct to offset the LA from templates.

SO you can be a Phrenic Warforged Incarnate Construct, and you get all the Phrenic stuff for free.

[Meikle641]

Phrenic is a pretty boss template, better than Celestial for sure. Char level + 10 spell resistance and a bunch of psi-likes is handy. There are really no downsides to that at all for that build, are there?

[K]

People have a lot of random builds that use Incarnate Construct to offset the LA from templates.

SO you can be a Phrenic Warforged Incarnate Construct, and you get all the Phrenic stuff for free.

Incarnate Construct is only LA -2 and is strips your SA and SQs, and floors NA to +3.

So you get some minor stat boosts and everything else gets stripped. What's the endgame?

[Username17]

People have a lot of random builds that use Incarnate Construct to offset the LA from templates.

SO you can be a Phrenic Warforged Incarnate Construct, and you get all the Phrenic stuff for free.

Incarnate Construct is only LA -2 and is strips your SA and SQs, and floors NA to +3.

So you get some minor stat boosts and everything else gets stripped. What's the endgame?

The endgame is that you apply a second template after that, in essence trading your bullshit construct abilities for some abilities or stat bonuses off a template that you like better. And it all ends up costing low or no LA, so you can still go on to playing a caster and not suck monkey ass. It's not a good endgame, but it shows up in bullshit charop discussions fairly frequently.

-Username17

[K]

People have a lot of random builds that use Incarnate Construct to offset the LA from templates.

SO you can be a Phrenic Warforged Incarnate Construct, and you get all the Phrenic stuff for free.

Incarnate Construct is only LA -2 and is strips your SA and SQs, and floors NA to +3.

So you get some minor stat boosts and everything else gets stripped. What's the endgame?

The endgame is that you apply a second template after that, in essence trading your bullshit construct abilities for some abilities or stat bonuses off a template that you like better. And it all ends up costing low or no LA, so you can still go on to playing a caster and not suck monkey ass. It's not a good endgame, but it shows up in bullshit charop discussions fairly frequently.

-Username17

That's pretty unimpressive for something convoluted enough for your DM to insta-ban.

[Koumei]

These prestige classes are all MC-bait, is what it is. You will never have a PC Slaad Brooder, but I bet you some PCs faced an NPC Slaad Brooder at some point. If you think of these things (except for the Illithid Savant) as the equivalent to NPC classes like "Fighter" and "Noble," they make more sense.

Really what they should have done is say "These are specifically examples of stuff we came up with to fit specific concepts. If people play monsters, you have to make prestige classes for them that they can enter basically straight from finishing their bullshit monster progression".

Basically, the Savage Prestige Classes should all be Elothars, and that section should exist just to give some examples of how a mer-knight would work in your aquatic campaign, or what to do when a Slaad wants to be an Archer or whatever.

[Red_Rob]

These prestige classes are all MC-bait, is what it is. You will never have a PC Slaad Brooder, but I bet you some PCs faced an NPC Slaad Brooder at some point. If you think of these things (except for the Illithid Savant) as the equivalent to NPC classes like "Fighter" and "Noble," they make more sense.

Except they are about 10 times more complicated than those classes.

NPC's don't need Prestige classes to make them more unique, they get Templates. Statting 3e monsters is already too much work when you are just adding extra HD, going through all this bullshit is insane.

Really what they should have done is say "These are specifically examples of stuff we came up with to fit specific concepts. If people play monsters, you have to make prestige classes for them that they can enter basically straight from finishing their bullshit monster progression".

Basically, the Savage Prestige Classes should all be Elothars, and that section should exist just to give some examples of how a mer-knight would work in your aquatic campaign, or what to do when a Slaad wants to be an Archer or whatever.

Well, firstly that would have meant writing some decent class creation guidelines, which we know WotC wasn't capable of putting out given the crap in this very book. And secondly, look at some of the crazy homebrew shit people pump out. Not everyone is you or Frank, would you really trust some random DM to write your class for you?

[Username17]

Not everyone is you or Frank, would you really trust some random DM to write your class for you?

Well, that was exactly the 3e Prestige Class concept. You were never expected to play a Dwarven Defender or a Tempest, you were expected to play an Elothar Warrior of Bladereach. The printed Prestige Classes were just examples. Weirdly specific prestige classes weren't considered a problem, because the DM was supposed to custom craft a Prestige Class for you to play.

This system didn't really work, because while such a dynamic could approximate full concept coverage by getting everyone a special snowflake class specific to their campaign - most DMs and most players weren't really willing to do that. By 3.5 the authors pretty much acknowledged that getting DMs to custom craft a PrC for every player in every game was a non-starter, but rather than admit that the plan had failed and go back to the drawing board they just doubled down and tried to shovel out enough prestige classes to keep everyone happy. Which of course, you cannot ever do.

People want to play Gnomish engineers who ride clockwork spiders. There needs to be a Prestige Class for that, and there fucking isn't. That means that the entire Prestige Class system does not and cannot work. But within the framework that 3e was trying to work under, a small number of ridiculously specific PrCs was actually fine. The argument against is that Emancipated Spawn was an offense against God and Man, not that there shouldn't have been a character class for newly escaped Ghoul Spawn to get their class features back within the paradigm that 3e was written under.

-Username17

[Prak]

Technically, a gnome artificer who took Craft Construct at level 6 would satisfy the need for clockwork spider riding gnome engineers. They can make effigies (because apparently there is no real actual point to the Effigy Master PrC), and effigies seem to be intended to be mechamagical replications of other creatures.

[Slade]

Multi-Headed Template: What this template does is grant extra head-based attacks (bites, breath weapons, etc.), plus extra hit dice and constitution bonuses per head. The template can also make someone regenerate like a hydra or breath fire/ice. It's a pretty good template that's fun for all ages. Combine with the feat that lets you cast verbal-only spells with each head for extra cheeze.
.-

Combine with Lumi (MM3) for an immortal creature. Noithing kills you but disintegrate (as it is the only listed spell in the remplate that can).
No damage applies since you have no neck to sunder.
"You are the prince of the universe, you have no rivals, no man to be your equal!" Highlander theme.
Sadly, it just makes a good non-caster.
Still vulnerable to imprison as that doesn't kill you.