Forty-six creatures and no way to look at them. They live in content.mjs, which is
source code, and in the compendium, which shows one actor at a time behind two clicks.
A GM prepping a case can browse neither, so in practice the bestiary was whatever the
GM happened to remember writing.
docs/BESTIARY.md is generated, never hand-written, for the reason the rules journal is
generated from rules.mjs: a reference that can disagree with the thing it references is
worse than no reference. It opens with a one-page table sorted by how much of a party
each creature puts on the floor - the part that gets printed - then an entry each with
characteristics, attack, the POWER line pulled out of the tactics, and the measured
figure read straight from the lethality baseline. Every number is derived, so the
document cannot drift, and check-lethality already refuses the build if the measurements
move.
IT FOUND SOMETHING IN ITS FIRST RUN. The generic heavy natural attack is keyed `grasp`
and was NAMED "Vesh grasp limb". Twenty-two creatures carry it and five are Vesh, so the
at-a-glance table cheerfully printed "Vesh grasp limb" against a black dog, a kelpie, a
church grim and an apple tree. Renamed to "Grasping limb"; the key is untouched, so
every kit reference and every built pack still resolves. That defect was invisible for
as long as nobody could see the bestiary in one place, which is the argument for the
document.
The caveats are given more room than the numbers, deliberately. The measured column is
SOLO against ONE frozen party, and the document says so three times: encounter lethality
moves with how many there are and, much harder, with who the players brought - the same
fight runs 0% to 100% across party choice. It points at --spread rather than pretending
a single figure is an answer.
Also records the real remaining gap: 21 creatures fight with nothing but their own
bodies and still carry human anatomy, so the barghest can be shot in the left arm. The
machinery to fix that is built and measured; what is missing is anatomy tables for the
shapes they actually are - a quadruped, an immobile object, a swarm.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
