Preface and Primer

Preface & Primer

FAQ

Are the beast-people awakened animals?

No. In the Beast World creation myth, a deity changes her favorite animals into people. In the Beast World, the walking animal-like people are called “beasts” and non-sentient animals are called “animals,” and sometimes “quiet-minded beasts.” They are considered wholly separate.

Do normal animals exist with the walking beasts?

Yes. Beasts ride horses, they have pet dogs, and they raise livestock. Animal horses pull wagons.

Are all wolves carnivores, etc.?

No. All sapient beasts eat like humans do. Some choose not to eat meat, but all of them have the ability to. Meat-eating beasts are not considered strange, but eating a sentient beast is considered cannibalism.

Do beasts have animal-like mannerisms?

Sometimes! Canonically, some beasts have quirks like tail wagging or howling at the moon. The out-of-fiction reason is to justify doing whatever you think is fun.

Do beasts have paws or hands/feet?

The 5e game system requires hands, so we assume beasts have hands. Canonically, some beasts have footpaws and digitigrade legs, some beasts have human legs and feet. Out of character, what goes on in your character’s shoes is your business.

What creature type are the beasts: Humanoid or Beast?

All the species in the Beast World are Humanoids, except jackals and dragons. Jackals are Fae and dragons are Dragons.

How long do beasts live?

With a few special exceptions (jackals & dragons), all species have human-like lifespans.

Can a wolf and a horse have children?

Yes. All the species can procreate with each other (including humans). The resulting offspring has a 50/50 chance to inherit the species of either parent. Exceptions: Jackals and dragons always beget jackals. A jackal or dragon with another species always begets the other species. Goblins can only procreate with goblins.

What happens if you sail past the edge of the map?

No one has. The Beast World is not confirmed to exist on a round planet.

Were there monsters before the Dungeon?

Yes, but they were rare. For example, wizards knew spells to contact fey in the Dreaming.

Is the Broken World a post-apocalyptic Earth?

No.

What kinds of cats are grandi or chikitu?

Generally, small cats are chikitu and big cats are grandi. The species are flexible, even in canon. For instance, dogs are very varied.

Are Beast World wolves werewolves?

No. Only humans can be lycanthropes.

Beast World Primer

Setting

In the Beast World, adventuring is a trade and its workers are called “delving crews.”
Monsters and dungeons aren’t everywhere all the time, but there are thousands of delvers in the world.

Delvers travel in wagons, and in caravans.
Crews of around four delvers travel in house wagons, grouped up to look for adventures.

“The Dungeon” makes dungeons.
A mysterious phenomenon causes mazes and ruins to appear out of nowhere, all around the world. They call this “The Dungeon.” A specific one is “a dungeon” or “an entrance to the Dungeon.”

Monsters come from the Dungeon. They aren’t sapient.
Delvers kill monsters, but this isn’t considered murder. Monsters can be intelligent, but they act on instinct and don’t change their worldview based on experience. These traits are defined as being a “willful creature”, and it’s also what separates two-legged “beasts” from four-legged “animals.”

Murder is uncommon.
The average person isn’t desperately poor. Killing shopkeepers will get one quickly imprisoned or worse. There aren’t bandits cutting throats on the side of every road. Most people have what they need to get by .

Common is a magic language.
The language of “Common” is a background magic immune to antimagic field. Cultures also have languages, but virtually everyone speaks Common. It can be used in hand signs, with a few months of training.

Science rule-of-thumb: Renaissance + a little more.
Most technology in the Beast World could have existed in the 16th century. There are a few things that exist in the Beast World, but weren’t around in the Renaissance (such as rubber and simple electric circuits).

Cosmology

Planar travel is different.
The Beast World has its own cosmology. It usually uses “World” in place of “Plane.”

The “Beast World” is the material plane.
It’s the name of the setting and also what people in it call its material plane.

Ethereal plane, Shadowfell, and Astral plane are a single plane: the “Astral Sea.”
The Astral Sea shares space with the material plane. Spells like etherealness and astral projection lead to the same plane.

No one knows what happens after death.
In the rare case where someone is resurrected, they don’t remember anything after they died.

There are only a few gods.
Don’t worry, this won’t be on the quiz. Most people revere Pirhoua (good); beasts believe that Pirhoua gave them sapience. There are a few others: Dramphine (justice), The Seelie (dreams), Yttrus (knowledge), Varasta (chaos), Aubade (the sun), Veronette (evil).

The gods aren’t people.
Deities are personifications of concepts, not people with free will. They can only act according to their domain.

Homelands & History

Humans are from another world.
The humans of the Beast World (also called “brethren”) are from a plane called the Broken World. They are newcomers; all humans over 12 years old were born in the Broken World.

The world is young.
At the moment of the book, Beast World history starts 1365 years ago. The jackal species are long-lived enough that some of them remember the world’s first day.

A world war happened 15 years ago.
The first humans who arrived in the Beast World started a war. Adults remember it, but most folks don’t hold a grudge about the war or hate humans.

There are five major “homelands.”
They are Allemance, Vinyot, Arneria, Al’ar, and Oria.

Species

Dragons & Goblins have history and are different.
Dragons and goblins come from an alternate material plane called the Ancestral Homeland. Dragons are bipeds. There aren’t vanilla 5e dragons in the Beast World.

Bats are also from another world.
The bat species are native to the Astral Sea, a parallel world to the Beast World. They get an extra-planar space in their wings.

Magic

It’s a “high magic” setting.
Magic in the Beast World is common. People who grow up in a city might have met a 20th-level character. Almost everyone knows someone who can cast a cantrip. Most people have used at least one common magic item.

Teleportation is rare.
Anything that allows instant long-range travel is rare, word of recall and teleport aren’t spells one can prepare.

Undead & Fiends are always evil.
In the Beast World, the power that creates undead comes from Veronette, a very evil deity. Fiends are from a place where nothing exists, and exist only to destroy creation. Regular folks will call for help if they see the use of almost any necromancy. Paladins apprehend or kill known necromancers.

Vampires are Fiends, not Undead.
They have the Fiend type in the Beast World and their stat block looks a little different (see page 224).

Some spells aren’t readily available.
In the canonical Beast World, the following spells cannot be prepared normally: guidance, create or destroy water, goodberry, remove curse, fabricate, awaken, teleportation circle, word of recall, plane shift, teleport, regenerate, gate, raise dead, reincarnate, resurrection, true resurrection. If you play a character that have class features with the listed spells, you can consult your DM on how to go about it.

An Introduction

The Beast Mother

The goddess Pirhoua’s eternal project is to find new ways to express her love for life. A millennium ago, this led her from the misty regions beyond to a vast and untamed wilderness. Pirhoua’s idea was to give the gift of reason to her favorite animals and teach them to see their world with new eyes. Pirhoua took on the divine image of a bovine and introduced herself to them as the Beast Mother. Her favorites were uplifted out of ignorance and invited to realize their individuality. Intelligence blossomed in this first generation of her children. With hands to craft and straight backs to look out over their world, Pirhoua’s beautiful experiment began: the first beasts.

The World

A millennium passed. Culture took root, and Pirhoua’s young children taught themselves the hard lessons of intelligent life by building a civilization. Through exploration, the two dozen uplifted species met at the world’s crossroads and mixed throughout. Cities grew, borders were drawn, and roads were cut from sea to sea. Five cultural homelands emerged, each with its own ideals and set of common native species.
The beast Homelands stretch from the icy northern mountains of Oria, with her broad-shouldered elk, to the rainforest islands of Al’ar in the western ocean, with their flotillas of tiger fishers. To the south lies Vinyot, a land of golden beaches and savvy foxes. Far to the east, the proud and industrious mouse peoples’ Causeway of Arneria meanders hundreds of miles through jungle and desert. In the center of all the others is the wolf kingdom Allemance, the fertile royal crossroads of the world.

The Brethren

In 1350, the young world faced grave danger from another place. Black ships carrying mysterious invaders arrived on the southern shores. These full-helmed armies of conquerors threatened the peace and comfort the beasts had earned through centuries of effort. The largest cities in the world fell in days. A violent world war raged for three years, with the unprepared beast militaries fighting for their lives against a well-trained and overwhelming force.
It wasn’t long before the beasts discovered that these Invaders were an altogether foreign species: human. The newcomers came to the Beast World from their own decaying reality to find a new home for their people’s last remnants. Monstrous and secretive puppet masters used lies and secrets to bring them, promising a fertile new land if they could bring its endemic ‘wildlife’ to heel.
The humans learned the truth before long. Their will to fight began to unravel after a single commander refused to make conquest the foundation of a new home for her people. Defection spread, and in time allowed the beasts to reclaim their homes and bring the Invaders to a rout. With their armies in custody, the humans’ cause seemed lost. The soil of the Broken World they left behind was fast failing; their families were doomed. The beasts faced a pivotal decision: what would be done with these criminals?
Mercy and forgiveness for the Invader army prevailed, in the end. With their decision made, so came an event known afterwards as the Pilgrimage. This would be the profoundest miracle of Pirhoua. Huddled in their own world’s last standing city with whatever they carried from their abandoned homes, the humans were jerked from viper fangs of certain death. The Beast Mother cut the entire city of Patrie from the Broken World at its bedrock and dropped it in the Beast World’s lonely Bluebell Valley. In an instant, the full population of humans appeared— eleven million new people. They scattered across the Beast World’s nations to find a place for themselves, with the help of the walking, talking animals who lived there. Humans came to be known as ‘brethren’ by the natives who invited them in. With a decade of profound cooperation and effort, the beasts’ societies welcomed the brethren and used this spike in population to settle new and wild lands everywhere.

The Dungeon

The Invader War’s end was a new dawn for the world, but it cast a shadow on its underside. Pirhoua stretched the Absolute Veil between worlds to allow the city of Patrie to fall through pinprick holes in its fabric. Something old and faceless slipped through undetected. Stowed away in the soil beneath the human city, this entity escaped its Broken World prison. It spread like the stringy roots of a weed under the soil and stone of the entire world. Fully grown, its ten thousand fingertips drove shafts up to the surface and let the sunlight in. These entrances overflowed with new monsters and rumors of untold riches. This crossworld dungeon sent an invitation to the adventurous hearts of the world: ‘explore me’. It would devour these hearts to sustain its body of stone mazes and mind of wicked traps.

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