Cryptid Field Guide, Volume One: Twenty American Cryptids for Fifth Edition

TWENTY AMERICAN CRYPTIDS FOR FIFTH EDITION

On the night of August 21, 1955, eleven people locked themselves inside a farmhouse outside Kelly, Kentucky and shot at something in the yard until a quarter to five in the morning. They said the buckshot sounded like it was hitting a metal bucket. Each time they fired, the thing floated backward into the dark. Then it came again.

Then they drove to the police station in Hopkinsville and filed a report.

The report exists. This book gives the thing in the yard an armor class.

Cryptid Field Guide, Volume One is twenty creatures out of documented American folklore, newspaper morgues, sworn statements, sheriff's logs, reimagined for fifth edition. Every entry opens with a Sighting Record: first report, location, the witnesses by name, what happened. Think of them as citations, not "flavor text".

THE ABILITIES COME OUT OF THE REPORTS

Nothing in here is a reskinned owlbear. Each creature's traits are built from what the witnesses actually described, including the inconvenient parts.

• Sasquatch has Never Photographed Clearly. Every image of it comes out blurred or ambiguous regardless of the equipment, and ranged attacks against it are at disadvantage. Nobody in the fiction can explain this. Neither can I.
• Mothman has Omen. It shows up where a disaster is coming. The GM secretly picks one within 1d12 days. Mothman does not cause it, will not explain it, and will not be there when it happens.
• The Enfield Horror has Tries the Door and Does Not Stay Shot. Henry McDaniel emptied a pistol into it from a few feet away in 1973 and it crossed his yard in three jumps.
• The Hopkinsville Goblin does not attack. It has Never Presses. It comes up to the house and looks in the windows, and that is the entire encounter unless the party turns it into something else.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• Twenty creatures, CR 1/4 to CR 14. Ordered by Challenge Rating, so the book works as a campaign spine and not just a reference shelf. Run it front to back and you have twenty encounters from about level 1 to about level 16, no two alike.
• Built on SRD 5.2.1 — the 2024 ruleset, Creative Commons. Current stat block format: initiative line, mod/save table, the new attack and save syntax.
• The math is generated, not typed. Proficiency bonus, XP, saving throws, hit points, attack bonuses and damage all derive from each creature's own statistics and get checked before the file prints. No stat block in here has a save that disagrees with its own Constitution.
• Sixty adventure hooks. Three per creature. Each one runnable tonight.
• Lair and legendary actions on the entries that earn them.
• Appendices. Cryptids by Challenge Rating, cryptids by region, and a short piece on running a sighting as something other than a fight.

CRYPTIDS ARE NOT DRAGONS

Almost nothing in this book wants a fight. Read enough sighting reports and you notice they're nearly all the same shape: somebody sees it, no explaination, then it leaves. Several of these creatures have traits that make, or help them leave swiftly.

Your players will hate that the first time. Six months later they will still be arguing about what it was, which is the entire point of a cryptid.

A NOTE ON WHAT'S NOT HERE

Creatures drawn from living Indigenous religious traditions; among them the wendigo of Algonquian belief and the Diné yee naaldlooshii. Are not folklore in the sense this book uses the word. They are held sacred by people who have asked, publicly and repeatedly, that they not be turned into monsters for entertainment. They are not in this book. They will not be in the series.

THE SERIES

Volume One is the greatest hits: the ones people already know. Later volumes will be, well I havent decided yet. 

Route 9 Games makes tabletop games about ordinary people in places that don't quite fit. If this book is to your liking, try Odd Hours — a game about the night shift at a gas station that shouldn't really exist.

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