This is a great book.
And why play Palladium? The fans are some of the most die-hard and best around. People that don't like it, don't play it (but they complain about it a lot). Those that are left are there for the game. I ran with the Aftermath system as our house rules for nearly 10 years for sci-fi, fantasy, and modern games. Palladium and Rifts feel like throwback B/X games in comparison, and plus I played TNMT and Rifts back in the day and loved them.
The attack roll and the defender having a chance to react are very cool, cinematic, and tense rules for combat. Do they drag out combat? Yes. Are they worth it? Even more so! Very few games can you outclass an opponent in so many ways that make a difference, and a good defense is a viable combat option.
Back to the book.
Let's take a step back from our journey through Palladium FRPG, let's open the monster book and check things out. Over 160 pages of illustrated monsters, followed by a further 80 pages of illustrated animals?
Not to mention the dozens of additional possible player races presented here. Since orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, troglodytes, kobolds, and trolls are main-book player races (yes, amazingly true) we get even more fae and humanoids in this book including brownies, fairies, leprechauns, mermaids, nymphs, satyrs, sprites, fae, pixies, evil toads, treant-like will-o-the-wisps, and more as possible player races.
Palladium FRPG was one of the first "play as a monster" fantasy games (outside of Tunnels and Trolls), and they continued to support and kept adding options every time they added creatures to the game. A lot of fantasy games feel stingy when it comes to player race options, or include these "product identity" options that force you into a piece of copyrighted content as your player identity (and of course, they control it and you lose that part of your character should you ever want to publish a book about them).
Also, remember that demons, elementals, dragons, and undead are mostly covered in other books. Humanoids are the main book characters, so if you need an orc or goblin, spin one up with a class. PFRPG does not do the typical "orc entry in the Monster Manual" thing. For one, it diminishes the entire race as a 1 HD monster. And another, PFRPG is built off the assumption that every monster in the game is created and played using the same system, has levels if there is a class, and plays and fights as hard as the heroes - using the same rules.
More? We Got More!
Do you want more options for player races? Get the After the Bomb game and create unlimited types of mutated animals as player characters. Play a parakeet paladin. Play a cattle thief (an actual cow, as a thief). A noble chicken. A diabolist goat. Remember in the After the Bomb game you have these sliding scales of size, mutations, and how human they are. That parakeet could be a 12-foot tall brute. You can give them animal-specific powers too, like tunneling, flight, swimming, or other special abilities.
Get Heroes Unlimited and design a "whatever you want" sort of character. A lost android. An alien. An intelligent tree. An intelligent energy cloud. Or really any other idea you could take from a comic book.
The options of player races and forms in the Palladium FRPG are endless, and things get even crazier if you assume that random Rifts pull in aliens, humans, creatures, and others from across time and the universe into this fantasy world - just no Rifts stuff or MDC weapons, please. The idea of a "reverse Rifts" fantasy world with Palladium FRPG as the base world and the rest of the "normal PF universe" as those rifted into this reality seems very cool to me and would feel like a lower power-level version of the Rifts game but based in fantasy.
But Fewer Monsters is More
Not in the quantity of them in the book, but this is one thing I noticed reading your typical B/X adventure versus a Palladium FRPG one. In B/X, you will often get these 40x40 rooms with the entry, "And 30 kobolds in the room." Blam, fireball target, I know. Because B/X runs numerically simple, you can throw a Gauntlet videogame number of creatures in a room and still be able to fight them all in a night's setting.
We did a number of conversions of B/X modules to Aftermath back in the day, and we hated these rooms. First off, in a combat system with some meat and bones on it, and that gritty one-on-one feeling, you do not need 30 kobolds to challenge a group of players. Six is a huge group, and I suspect in Palladium FRPG this is also true. Reduce the monsters in number since they will be tougher than the typical d4 hp, +0 AT, and AC 7 [12] "all you need to know" of the typical B/X kobold.
Kobolds in PFRPG will have parries, SDC, hp, attacks, and all sorts of other meaningful play stats. Give a few special weapons, dispositions, and tactics. Maybe one will charge while a few others hold back and take cover with short-bows. Maybe one fights with a shield and short spear. Maybe another hurls insults and only attacks those who get near.
If you have fewer, varied, and more interesting foes that use the terrain of the area the entire fight is better for it. Whenever you convert an adventure up to a more gritty and detailed combat system, reduce the number of enemies and individualize them. B/X is so simple it can get away with these cut-and-paste enemies with a few meaningful stats. With more detailed and grittier combat systems that emphasize blow-by-blow fights, you need fewer foes - but with more detail and variety.
And this is Palladium FRPG, there are books full of strange melee weapons, so bust out those spontoons, oncin picks, runkas, meat cleavers, frying pans, cudgels, pry bars, ice picks, spades, shears, and talwars. Giving them all short swords is so B/X; part of the fun of this game is opening up your weapons book and pointing at a picture, and saying, "this."
This happened to me at a middle-school lunch once. We were recounting our Palladium adventure, and one of my players said, "and one attacked me with a quaddara, I blocked with my kukri, while the other threw a mongwanga at us!" And all the D&D kids at the other table turned and stared.
One of them stated, "There are only three types of swords."
We laughed.
Never so proud to be called nerds by them at that moment.
Monster Have Horror Factors
One of the cool things about Palladium FRPG is some of the monsters have horror factors. If you are walking along and all of a sudden a giant grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs right next to you, yeah, you are saving against a horror factor to avoid being temporarily stunned. Critically fail this and I just may rule you are affected by temporary random insanity or fail by a huge margin and you may run in flight.
Yes, the game has the Call of Cthulhu-style horror mechanics, and they even apply to a few fearsome predators, all undead, and every supernatural creature. It is great stuff, and it helps keep the monsters from becoming a "ho-hum, another beholder" style of familiarity.
Undead?
Undead in the Palladium RPG are a special case. You will find most of those in the book Land of the Damned Two: Eternal Torment. Skeletons and other animated dead raised by spells are at best temporary creatures without that undead "soul" keeping them alive. And of course, if you want Zombies, check out the Dead Reign game and go to town with hundreds of different types of zombies.
There are ghosts, specters, mummies, and entities like poltergeists in this book. Just none of the B/X standards like skeletons, zombies, ghasts, or wights. It probably would not be too hard to convert a B/X monster in since you could start at a 3d6 human attribute and SDC base, set hp to PE, and add +1d6 hp per HD. For SDC I would say HD x 10. For attack bonus, use the base PP bonus, and give them an HTH combat style and WP, count their HD as their level to calculate all of the other combat bonuses. For AR use the closest armor.
Ghouls? Main rulebook, page 318, counted as a demon - so not technically undead. It makes sense since they "eat flesh" and undead don't need to eat anything. Wraiths are also greater deevils. So there are some things that are different here than your standard B/X assumptions.
Remember, every monster should be different and you can have variations - I am still of the mind monsters should be unique and scary creations, and lists of them are less important. When in doubt, grab something from the book like what you want, change a few abilities, and play. Or generate a quick character and modify the numbers up or down based on threat, set a level, add some more hp and SDC if you need to, and play.
Undead aren't really a "primary" monster type as they are in D&D. They are more of a story monster linked to a specific area of the Palladium FRPG world. I get the same feeling with demons and deevils, and I kind of like not having every monster type roaming everywhere in a fantasy world. Of course, I am free to change that and put them wherever I want, but to stick to the game's lore, if you have undead in an area, that is a really cursed area close to the realm of the dead and there is a good reason for them being there.
D&D has this lore where undead exists everywhere, lying around, and hiding out in crypts. In the Palladium FRPG they only exist in cursed places, likely close to the realm (or a place of) great death. It is an interesting difference between games and the assumed lore of the settings, and worth noting.
Different, but Cool
I like this book. It does its own thing and sets you up thinking differently about monsters than your standard B/X bestiary. Sometimes we can repeat the same monsters so many times they become boring, and I like what they did in games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics by letting you come up with whatever monster, whatever powers, whatever attacks & defenses, and whatever stats.
Yes, this is way harder for the GM, but it is so much more fun at the table.
I am prone to do that here since this game is so close to Rifts anything could be out there and crawling around, and the players should never really have a firm grasp on what they are fighting and how it reacts. To me, the monsters given here are not as important as using their stats and coming up with my own. I can use my quick system to invent a couple, stat them out, and just let them rip. It doesn't matter much if the next ones have the same exact stats, since everything should be a little different.
So in a way, using this book as a "monster bible" is not what I see it as. This is more a baseline for the standard abilities of creatures in a couple different classes and gives me base templates to modify and create my own monstrosities from. I may use some as-is, and I may not.
This is a highly recommended book. Very nicely done and a useful resource for the game.
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