Here Be Monsters 3: From Beyond the Stars stats

One of the things the Swords for Hire crew really enjoys about running contests is seeing what kind of entries we'll get. While the first Here Be Monsters had a more wide-open theme (contestants were asked to pick a monster from a fan wish list for the not-yet-published Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Bestiary 5 on the Paizo forums), the second (Hell Breaks Loose) and third contests have had a more unifying theme. That's seen competitors tend to focus on similar areas in their designs, though there's still plenty of variation.

Creature types

Of the 26 monsters submitted for From Beyond the Stars, nearly half (11) were aberrations (which probably isn't surprising as the theme almost screams aberration). Outsiders (5) took up the No. 2 position, while we also had a scattering of constructs (3), monstrous humanoids (2) and oozes (2). A single fey, humanoid and undead were also submitted, but we received no animals, dragons, magical beasts, plants, or vermin.

The subtypes were pretty limited; one of the constructs had the robot subtype, a couple of the outsiders carried the phantom subtype, and we had one incorporeal and a couple shapechanger monsters, but there were no swarms or troops in this year's submissions. Edited to add: I realized as I was going through the entries again that there was in fact a swarm; my apologies.

Challenge rating

The (mean) average CR of the submitted monsters was 8.15, while the median average is 7 (I think; I don't have much call to do math anymore, so I'm operating from memory here, folks).

The lowest CR we received was 3, while our high submission was 18.

Alignments

Seven of the nine possible alignments were represented, with the consensus apparently being that space creatures are neither chaotic good nor lawful neutral.

Twelve of the monsters were evil, with three of those chaotic evil, one lawful evil and the rest (8) neutral evil.

Two monsters were good, one of them lawful good, the other neutral good.

The remaining monsters were neutral, three of them chaotic neutral, and nine of them true neutral.

For those of you who, like Mikko, prefer to see your alignments in tables, here are the same statistics:

	Lawful	Neutral	Chaotic
Good	1	1	--
Neutral	--	9	3
Evil	1	8	3

Sizes

Kiel asked in the comments about the sizes of the entries: They were all 590-610 words, as required in the rules. Wait, what? Oh, wrong type of size. (See, I like bad jokes...)

The monsters ranged from Fine to Huge, though most of them (11) were Medium. Six creatures were Small, while five were Huge, four were Large, and one was Fine.

And, yes, for those of you who note the oddity in that set of statistics, those numbers are in fact doublechecked and are correct.


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We'll have some more details on the contest entries in the next couple days, taking a fun look at some of the areas we saw some parallel design from our competitors.