Welcome back to Wilderfeast Restaurant! Our tasting menu offers a series of insights into the lore of the One Land and various aspects of the game mechanisms. In this fifth course, we will serve a second course of braised venison accompanied by ethological salad: we’re talking about Monsters!
Monsters are the heart of Wilderfeast. Some, especially those afflicted by the frenzy, serve as Ingredients for your cooking. Others fill out the dynamic, intertwined ecosystems of the One Land. And still more are characters you’ll come to know and love during your adventures.
Just like wilders, monsters have Styles, Skills, and Traits. These attributes link wilders and monsters together, and they’re what wilders inherit from the monsters they eat. Unlike wilders, monsters are so big they also have Parts: anatomical features like a shell or wings, which give them special abilities but which become critical weak points when broken. In addition, monsters aren’t as strategic as humans, and so each species has a set of instincts guiding how and who they prefer to fight. All these features combine to make each monster a unique puzzle, full of individual personality, during the hunt.
But monsters also have lives outside of battle! So alongside their combat stats, they have ecological attributes, like habitat and diet. That last one is particularly relevant for wilders, because to rehabilitate a monster, you have to know what to feed it. By paying attention to monsters, where you find them, and what Ingredients grow or live there, you’ll discover the links binding all life in the One Land together.
When it comes to the concepts behind each monster, we’ve emphasized grounding their designs in the real world. Every monster has clear inspirations from Earth’s own animal kingdom, so through narration alone, the whole table can easily imagine how the monster looks, moves, and sounds. Of course, to assist you, the bestiary is full of gorgeous, detailed illustrations; you can see some examples of these already in the Wilderfeast Quickstart, done by the talented Zeno Colangelo and Lonnie Bao!
Our plan is for the core book to contain over 30 huntable monsters, each belonging to one of the eight Lineages: Baker, Butcher, Fisher, Gardener, Roaster, Roundsman, Saucier, and Stockkeeper. These Lineages correspond to the ancestral heroes of the greenkings, a society of giants who bred monsters as livestocks, pets, and beasts of burden.
The breeders of the Lineages each prioritized different traits. For example, the monsters of the Roaster’s Line all breathe, produce, or manipulate fire. But since the greenkings fell, their monsters have mutated and adapted in ways that don’t fit into these neat categories. Like any taxonomy, the Lineages help us understand the natural world — but they can never capture it entirely, in all its complexity and mess.
We’re so excited to share the monsters of the One Land with you, and what’s more, we can’t wait to give you the tools to create your own. With all their quirks and constant change, there’s always something more to learn about monsters. But one thing’s for sure: if you become a wilder, their fate is in your hands.
We hope you enjoyed the taste of this fifth course of our Wilderfeast tasting menu. Next time we will serve you a platter of charcuterie and cheese, with flavors as varied as the personalities people may have: our next topic is Wilders!
If you want to share your Wilderfeast experience with other players, don’t hesitate to join our Discord server! We want to hear your thoughts!
If you didn’t play the Wilderfeast™ Quickstart yet, instead… wait no further! Here’s the link, just in case you missed it the first time around.
Remember, Wilderfeast™ is launching on Kickstarter on September 5!
Follow the projecton Kickstarter to be notified when it will go live!
Wilderfeast™ is a game by KC Shi, writer for tabletop RPGs such as Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, the Uncaged anthology, BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, and One More Quest. Cover art by Xulia Vicente.
That’s all for today! Don’t forget to join our community on Discord and Facebook to meet fellow players and share your gaming experiences!
Until next time!
