If you’re a Dungeons and Dragons player who also loves the world of Monster Hunter, then boy have we found something for you. Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a supplement devoted to hunting colossal boss monsters and carving them up for bits to make new magic items, and it’s just made the leap from hardback book to DnD Beyond.
What with Monster Hunter Wilds just having dropped, we expect that a lot of DnD groups are finding their Monster Hunter playing members a little unreliable right now.
If anything is going to lure them back to the tabletop, it’s a supplement that promises to deliver the full Monster Hunter gameplay loop: tracking a monster to its lair, gathering information about it, preparing for the fight with appropriate buffs, walloping it in a bone-crunching boss-battle, carving it up for parts, and using those bits to craft even better weapons.
A 600 page long version of Heliana’s Guide is already available in print, but only the first half has been integrated into DnD Beyond so far. That’s still a lot of pages, and the video above states it has everything you need to live out a full Monster Hunter fantasy, plus the virtual handouts, maps, and so on to make an online session run smoothly.
Part one is available on DnD Beyond for $30: if you use a different virtual tabletop, you can get the full book and the virtual assets from DriveThruRPG for $59.99.
So what’s in the book? For a start, it contains recipes to craft every DnD magic item in the System Reference Document from monster bits, plus 150 new magic items unique to the book. You’ll need to hunt different monster types to get different bits and pieces!
In basic DnD, harvesting monster bits is left to DM discretion, but Heliana’s Guide gives it a set of rules which will help you determine what the party actually retrieves from a carcass. The video above gives the example of attempting to harvest the pelt of a yeti after killing it with a fireball: there’s unlikely to be much usable fur left at that point!
There’s also a different take on the DnD crafting system. Crafting requires a skill roll, but failing the roll doesn’t stop you from making the item – it just comes out a little quirky. The video gives examples like an item that you have to attune to even if you wouldn’t ordinarily, an item that makes you gullible, or something that just draws thieves to you like flies to butter.
You can also work to improve an item over time. This both lets you finesse away the problems from an item that came out a little undercooked, or allows you to continually improve a beloved item as your character levels up, instead of discarding it.
But what about the hunting? Well, Heliana’s Guide part one comes with five monster hunt scenarios, each of which can be scaled to three different levels. These should each take around three sessions to complete.
In the first half of the mission, players will find clues that tell them what to expect from the monster as they track it and find evidence of its behaviour – which you’ll get as handouts. They’ll then have the chance to take a long rest, select appropriate spells, stock up on useful equipment, before going into the boss arena.
The boss fights are intended to be memorable. The monsters unlock new abilities midway into the fight, change form, spawn minions, or even teleport themselves and the players to another plane.
Heliana’s guide also has four new subclasses for existing DnD classes. The Hive Oath Druid is a melee-based subclass whose body is absolutely rife with invertebrates. The Oath of the Harvest Paladin is a cook – because what is monster hunting without mouthwatering food? Then there are two new spellcasters that specialise in the brand new Biomancy DnD spells, the Fleshweaving Bard and Biomancy Wizard.
There are eight unique DnD races here, too. The video lists ooze people, chickens, pangolins, and three types of raccoons, the Urban, Possum, and Tanuki variants. If your character dies, they could be overtaken by a parasitic mushroom and resurrect as a fungus infested Mycelian. There’s even a race that starts its life as a caterpillar and metamorphoses into a moth at a higher level.
With the next volume on the DnD release schedule being an adventure book totally devoted to dragons, a supplement all about carving up big monsters and turning them into useful equipment seems like a good fit!
Actually using this book does assume that you can get your DnD group back together while Monster Hunter Wilds is shiny and new. If you can’t pry them out of the game, you could always join them, with help from our friends at PCGamesN. They’ve got a bunch of handy Monster Hunter Wilds guides to get you started:
If you want to play an official Monster Hunter game on the tabletop, there is the Monster Hunter World board game from Steamforged Games. We playtested the sequel, Iceborne, which is still in production, but has a lot in common with the already available Monster Hunter World boardgame – learn more about it in this article.
Source: Wargamer
