This book was everything I like about an OSR monster book and more!

**CONTENT WARNINGS**: Wretched Bestiary contains NSFW/ NC-17 Art, AI artwork, demons, devils, insects, snakes, spiders, and real world cryptid and extraterrestrial accounts. (*All my ET experiencer friends can relate to the potential trauma, for real.) Please purchase this book at your own peril if you are sensitive to these topics.

Wretched Bestiary by Michael Straus (aka The OG GM) with Miguel Ribeiro.
The PDF can be found on The Red Room. Print on Demand can be found on LULU.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Wretched Bestiary.

This is actually kind of a tough review for me for a number of reasons. I watch the OG GM on YouTube almost every day. My wife and kids even know him by voice at this point. I’m trying not to be biased.

I don’t tend to get along with Miguel and Silvia Ribeiro very well following a dust up on social media. Another friend of mine is embroiled in a longstanding sociopolitical feud with them, and we just don’t see eye-to-eye on some things. However, Michael Straus is a friend and even if we don’t 100% agree about everything all the time, we can discuss it and still be cool. Again, I’m trying not to be biased.

I went and bought the PDF with my own money and gave it a pretty good read before I sat down to do the review. I found myself downloading the Wretched Universe Core Rules for free on the Red Room site just to get a better understanding of the system and compatibility with OSR games. I won’t be reviewing it here, but it might be handy as a reference if you pick up Wretched Bestiary.

Overall well thought-out and researched.

I was impressed by the commitment to realism in some of the entries in Wretched Bestiary along with the depth of detail in some of the purely fictional creatures such as dragons and slimes. The Wretched game settings lend themselves more to horror, supers, and post apocalypse. Fantasy isn’t really a Wretched Universe thing, but the monsters in this book could definitely convert very easily to Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Mutant Crawl Classics or Shadowdark.

I learned a lot about real world lizards, various US cryptids, insects, and animals I did not know just from reading through this book. It really shows that Straus and Ribeiro did their homework on the more true-to-life entries. Not many game designers comb the Library of Congress to make sure all of the details are correct in their monster books.

Note: I’ve never seen a dragon in Iowa. Bigfoot, yes. I’ve also seen some pretty sketchy looking bats and one really enormous turkey vulture. UFOs are a regular thing around the state. I take local paranormal, cryptid, and extraterrestrial sightings very seriously. If you know me outside of the Game Box, you know I’m not kidding.

I enjoyed the more fantastic elements of this book, too.

If the realistic elements were outstanding, the more fantastic elements were built to keep up. There’s even a Build Your Own Monster section toward the beginning if you just want to throw something together on the fly to challenge your players. There are also tables for some of the other random beasties throughout. (Make Your Own Mutant, Slime, etc.)  

The Fairies, Dragons, Slimes and various creatures from the apocalypse are all extremely cool. Princess Pudding and King Slime cracked me up. Even the art for King Slime is hilarious. Extra points for the Kaiju reference, too.

I’m a big fan of Undead in any sourcebook and Wretched Bestiary did not disappoint. Brain in a Jar was a reference I found quite amusing because I was once in a Deadlands: Hell on Earth game where that was the running joke. I even wrote a song to the tune of “Whiskey in the Jar” about it. I found Wretched Bestiary’s Astynomian, Metallic Crustacean, and the Dullahan to be quite fascinating. It’s pretty obvious to me that someone both did their homework and has quite a vivid imagination.

I have a few minor improvement notes.

AI Art is the topic of many articles in the TTRPG sphere right now. (Coming to a Game Box article near you again soon.) I understand why it was used in Wretched Bestiary, but a live human artist was also employed to do the cover and some interior sketches. There’s plenty of stock art for the real world stuff and the various cryptids, demons, devils, dragons, etc. I think it could have been approached without AI.

Other than the AI art  a couple of minor changes stood out to me. The first is the organization of the book. I prefer the more traditional alphabetical order used in other game books or maybe having the chapters in alphabetical order. The other thing, albeit minor, that had me gnashing my teeth was the color tables. If the book is going to be black and white, please save on the physical printing cost and do the tables in grayscale as well. Color front covers are between authors and printers, but please keep the interior consistent.

Some observant readers might notice some minor spelling and grammatical errors in this book. Michael has said on multiple videos that he suffers from dyslexia, which makes his spell checker a bit difficult to use. I think Miguel is used to Portuguese, so I overlooked any grammar issues automatically. It’s the age of the Internet, and as long as I can figure out what’s being said, we’re fine.

Conclusion.

Wretched is very professionally done as a game all around and the Bestiary fits right into the game as a whole. I will be converting/using some of these monsters in my Shadowdark RPG sessions because they sound incredibly compelling to use. There are a good number of creatures in Wretched Bestiary that don’t appear in the dozens of other monster books out there for other RPGs. At the low price of $12, it’s a bargain compared to many other 5E and OSR monster books.

Thank you for being here today with me. I appreciate you. Please embrace the things that bring you the most joy.