DCC: Cyclopedia of Common Animals

This new book for Dungeon Crawl Classics is a bestiary featuring common animals, dinosaurs, and even fairy animals. It is a massive tome of 252 pages, and amazingly comprehensive and complete. There are stats for everything, along with knowledgeable notes on almost every animal.

Best, there are story hooks in here related to the animals! How to involve them in stories, how to make them feel special, how to handle them in spellcasting, what parts are valuable on each, and a bunch of information is given to make the 'background animals' in the world add to the depth and storytelling of the world. We even get details like how to harvest frog poison and what that does, so even thieves and assassins can benefit from a lot of the information here.

There are tips for making special animals memorable, not overdoing it, and breaking immersion. Suppose every deer is a six-legged moss-brook deer. In that case, the world becomes too fantastic; everything becomes a monster, and having nothing normal takes players out of the world, losing opportunities for storytelling.

We get dinosaurs and fairy animals, too! Encounter tables, animals by terrain and climate, and a bunch of other information on how to make an area of the world believable by choosing the creatures that live there.

This book is elevating my DCC experience and raising the immersion of my worlds to a point where DCC will eclipse worlds made with first edition rules, which is currently the king of immersion for me. This is a great book that goes into detail about my worlds, giving me a palette of animals to paint into the background of the world and make everything feel grounded and real.

Primitive worlds are all about their animals! I see a lot of D&D art, and not one animal is present. People here in the modern world have little contact with animals outside the domesticated few we have in our homes. In an actual fantasy world, there will be many more animals in the environment. It's as if the artists behind these games are too invested in Uber and Starbucks, forgetting the holistic, country, and pastoral aspects of life in these worlds.

Highest recommendation, this book is an invaluable resource for creating a believable, grounded, realistic world with a world of creatures playing background roles, parts of the story, and as monsters themselves.