Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a 600-page supplement designed to enhance 5E games with monster hunts, tracking, harvesting, and crafting. Discover adventures, rules, items, monsters, spells, and player options. It offers new races and subclasses.
Overview of Heliana’s Guide
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting is a comprehensive 600-page supplement designed to enhance 5th Edition D&D campaigns. It introduces mechanics like tracking, harvesting, crafting, and cooking, alongside ten monster hunt adventures. Players can research foes, devise tactics, and engage in multi-phase boss battles.
The guide includes unique twists on classic monsters and offers new player options such as races, subclasses, and the Tamer class. It provides tools for crafting magical items, mundane items, and sumptuous meals from monster parts. Enhanced exploration rules offer spicy scenarios for random encounters, structured tracking, and compelling quest creation. With its modular design, the guide caters to various play styles, ensuring every monster hunt is a unique and thrilling experience.
Core Mechanics
Heliana’s Guide introduces core mechanics like tracking, harvesting, crafting, and cooking. These mechanics allow players to engage deeply with the world, utilizing monster parts to create items and enhance their adventures.
Tracking Monsters
Heliana’s Guide offers enhanced exploration through tracking rules that structure wilderness trials. These rules provide a framework for random encounters and allow DMs to populate biomes with motive, mystery, and monsters. The system sparks curiosity, offers moral incentives, and promises rewards.
The guide’s clue system aids in researching foes. Players can gather clues, track monsters across diverse biomes, and prepare tactics. Successfully tracking a monster is the first step to a thrilling and rewarding hunt.
Tracking rules are intended to give structure to the trials and tribulations of exploring the wilds. Let us do the heavy lifting so you can populate the wilderness with motive, mystery, and murderous monsters using a single dice roll!
Harvesting Components
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting introduces modular rules for harvesting components from fallen foes. This system accounts for all SRD creatures, offering simple or detailed mechanics as desired. The guide details unique components across all creature types, ranging from volatile glands to edible delicacies.
The harvesting rules ensure that monster carcasses never go to waste, and provides a table of harvestable components for each creature type. The goal is to make the most out of every hard-earned kill and allows players to extract magical components from vanquished creatures.
Each boss monster has exclusive components not found elsewhere, and these unique components can enhance weapons and armor with slottable monster parts that grant new abilities.
Crafting Items
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting enriches game worlds with functional crafting mechanics for 5E. This covers manufacturing, forging, and enchanting, allowing players to create magical and mundane items from monster components. The guide includes crafting recipes for all SRD magic items, plus over 100 new, fully illustrated ones.
Players can harness the powers of their enemies by creating incredible new items from their remains, with a brand new ruleset for crafting that covers magical items, mundane items. Players can craft their own gear, and enrich their world with functional crafting for DD 5e.
The system also features rarity variants that allow items to level up alongside characters, weaving a rich story as items grow with quest completion.
Cooking with Monster Parts
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting introduces an adventurous cooking system, allowing players to create unique and flavorful meals using monster parts. Players can delight in the rich flavor of aboleth ramen or stuff their face with a magnetite dragon curry!
The new cooking system in Heliana’s Guide lets you mix different monstrous ingredients into over 20,000 unique combinations of effects, and includes unique recipes for each of the boss monsters in the book; By mixing monstrous ingredients, players can achieve over 20,000 unique effect combinations.
Each boss monster also has unique recipes, adding an extra layer of culinary depth to the game. This system provides a fun and engaging way to utilize harvested components.
Adventures and Monster Hunts
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting features 10 monster hunts, including a bonus hunt, designed for multiple levels of play. Face exotic creatures in epic, three-phase boss battles, slotting easily into existing campaigns.
Structure of Monster Hunt Adventures
Each adventure in Heliana’s Guide presents unique monsters to face off against, designed for multiple player levels. Begin by gathering clues, tracking the monster across diverse biomes, and preparing tactics. Each hunt culminates in a three-phase boss battle, readily integrated into existing campaigns.
These adventures emphasize curiosity, moral compensation, and rewarding outcomes, enticing players to engage. Research the beast to find weaknesses, then unleash fury with new spells and weapons. The guide provides easy-to-run adventures playable at various levels. Heliana offers a catalogue of creatures needing slaying.
Multi-Phase Boss Battles
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting features epic, multi-phase boss battles at the climax of each monster hunt adventure. Designed for three different levels of play, these encounters test players’ mettle against ferocious and enigmatic creatures. Adaptable to existing campaigns, these battles require strategic planning and resource management.
Each phase presents unique challenges, forcing adventurers to adjust their tactics. Exclusive components from boss monsters enhance weapons and armor with new abilities. Unique recipes for each boss monster allow players to cook sumptuous meals from their remains. These battles offer a thrilling, dynamic experience.
Player Options
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting provides diverse player options⁚ new races like oozekin and rakin, nine subclasses such as College of Cuisine bard, and 69 spells like acid rain. The Tamer class lets you tame monsters.
New Races
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting introduces ten new playable races, broadening character creation possibilities. Among these are the oozekin, bizarre beings formed from oozes, and the rakin, raccoon-like humanoids known for their dexterity and scavenging skills. These races offer unique traits, abilities, and backgrounds, enriching the role-playing experience.
Each new race presents distinct advantages and disadvantages, encouraging players to explore diverse character concepts. The oozekin might possess inherent resistances to certain damage types, while the rakin could excel in stealth and perception. These racial options allow players to craft characters with specialized skill sets and compelling narratives;
By incorporating these new races, Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting enhances character customization, enabling players to create truly unique and memorable adventurers. The oozekin and rakin add a touch of the exotic and unconventional to any campaign.
New Subclasses
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting enriches character options with nine new subclasses, offering fresh takes on classic archetypes. Among these is the College of Cuisine bard, who wields culinary magic to inspire allies and debilitate foes, and the School of Biomancy wizard, manipulating life energy.
These subclasses introduce innovative abilities and playstyles, enhancing character versatility. The College of Cuisine bard might create enchanted dishes that grant temporary buffs, while the School of Biomancy wizard could mend wounds or inflict diseases. Each subclass offers unique mechanics and role-playing opportunities.
By adding these new subclasses, Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting expands character customization, enabling players to craft specialized characters. Whether it’s the culinary bard or the biomancy wizard, these options provide exciting new ways to approach combat, exploration, and social interaction.
The subclasses offer a range of flavorful and mechanically distinct options.
Tamer Class
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting introduces the Tamer class, enabling players to capture and train monsters. Tamers build menageries of fuzzy companions or armies of behemoths. This class specializes in forming bonds with creatures, turning them into allies.
The Tamer class features unique mechanics, allowing players to capture monsters and customize them. Each captured monster becomes a loyal companion, gaining new abilities and strengths. Tamers can create bespoke familiars from boss monsters, with improvement trees.
The Tamer class provides a new way to engage with the game’s monster hunting aspect. Instead of simply slaying monsters, players can recruit them. This opens up new strategic options, utilizing monster abilities in combat and exploration.
With the Tamer class, players can become the very best, taming monsters and building lasting bonds. The Tamer class offers deep customization.
It is an exciting addition, expanding character options in the game.
Additional Content
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting expands gameplay with new spells, enhancing character options. Players can command arcane might and explore novel magical abilities, adding depth to combat and exploration.
New Spells
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting introduces 69 new spells, enriching the arcane arsenal for spellcasters. These spells, like acid rain and arcanomagnetic storm, offer diverse tactical options during combat and exploration. The guide enhances magical gameplay with creative and potent spells, making spellcasters more versatile and formidable.
Explore new magical horizons with spells designed to complement monster hunting. Whether conjuring elemental storms or manipulating magnetic fields, these spells provide unique advantages when facing monstrous foes. The addition of these spells ensures a richer and more engaging experience for players who love to wield arcane power. With nearly seventy new ways to manipulate the Weave, players can tailor their characters to be expert monster slayers.
