Monsters & Magic RPG: The Collectanea Creaturea Kickstarter

It’s now been six months since Mindjammer Press launched my “old school fantasy, new school play” OSR RPG Monsters & Magic, and I’ve not been the only one since then working on new material for the game. Travis Casey and Julian Stanley of Ebon Gryphon Games have this week announced their Kickstarter for the Collectanea Creaturea monster supplement for Monsters & Magic, featuring a wealth of monsters for your Monsters & Magic games.

This looks like it’s going to be awesome. Travis has been a regular over at our Monsters & Magic Google+ community, championing the game and the Effect Engine system which powers it, and it’s great to see him working on this excellent-looking expansion. Monsters & Magic is a game designed to be used with your favourite old school resources – your monster manuals, spellbooks, scenarios, what have you – with little or no conversion, and as such it comes with a selection of monsters and spells in its slim 140 pages, enough to get you started and play through the first 4 levels or so of experience. Beyond that – well, that’s where you can use those online or physical books you know and love.

But, ever since we launched Monsters & Magic back in June this year, people have been asking about new material. In particular, people have wanted new monsters and spells, plus information on higher levels, as well as scenarios and campaign material. Over here at Mindjammer Press we’ve been working on The Horror of Haugling Hall, a scenario for beginning to heroic characters, and the Heroic Adventures Handbook, a book of additional material for characters from 5th to 9th level. But Ebon Gryphon Games have stepped brilliantly up to the plate this week with their Collectanea Creaturea monster book – and the greatest thing is, it’s already written, and ready to go!

The Collectanea Creaturea contains monsters specifically designed for use with Monsters & Magic. That means they come with everything predefined – motivations, actions, special defences, monstrous effects, mental defence and mental hit points precalculated – so you don’t even have to think about that “little or no conversion” when you open your favourite critter book. With the Collectanea Creaturea, it’s already done for you. At the outset, the book has 91 ready-made monsters, plus 6 new player character races, and cool new rules for using familiars in the game. And, as you might expect, there are stretch goals, including a Fate version of the book (and, as you know, I love me some Fate…), plus a ton of additional monsters and other content. As of writing, the Kickstarter has already reached its initial goal, and has already unlocked the Fate version and 15 new monsters, so it’s looking set to be a great supplement, probably approaching or even exceeding the core Monsters & Magic book in size.

So if you’re a Monsters & Magic fan, or just love OSR products or even just monster books, check out the Ebon Gryphon Kickstarter for the Collectanea Creaturea. Just $5 gets you the final PDF; $10 gets you the prerelease PDF and subsequent PDFs; and a mere $25 gets you the physical copy – and there are higher reward tiers too.

I’m very much looking forwards to seeing this – Travis and Julian have been doing great work, and it’s an absolute buzz to see the Monsters & Magic community continuing to thrive and grow.

Happy gaming!

Sarah

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You can buy the Monsters & Magic RPG in PDF version from DriveThruRPG, and in physical version from Chronicle City.
You can find the Collectanea Creaturea Kickstarter here.