Fire on the Velvet Horizon is an amazing monster manual for high-concept monsters. That is, the monsters in it are mostly unique for reasons that go beyond (but often also include) having unique ways of fighting. Great art by Scrap Princess, incredibly evocative writing by Patrick Stuart.
It's been criticized for requiring a lot of work from the referee to use, in a few different ways.
First, the monsters don't have stats. I think this is actually a pretty minor hurdle– you can whip up some stats in a minute or two, and the monsters are written in such a way that the concepts don't rest on the exact number of hit dice or damage dealt.
Second, there are a lot of stated or implied relationships between different entries, but they're not really collected in one place. The index lists a small fraction of them.
Third, treasure isn't listed. Monsters have to have treasure, right?
Fourth, plot hooks aren't explicitly provided for the monsters, although again many are at least implied.
Fifth, once you fall in love with this book, it's very easy to think that you'll only ever use a few of the monsters in it. A lot of them seem like they'd be hard to work into a campaign, or like making them random encounters simply wouldn't do them justice.
Scrap Princess has been tackling number four by providing six plot hooks per entry, two entries at a time, on her blog.
I'm not tackling number one, but I'm working on a chart that helps with the other four things, by cataloging the relationships with monsters, and stated or implied treasure, in an easily cross-referenced spreadsheet form.
Here's the spreadsheet. It's about 10% done, at most. I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing.
So, explanations. Every cell other than the middle diagonal shows the relationship, if any, between two monsters. i.e. Bog Elves and Potemkimen are at war, Swamp Drunks trade Sanguine Crane feathers, etc.
These cells are color-coded: red for hostile relationships, blue for friendly ones, black if it's mixed, neutral or unclear. I started color-coding a ways into this so there might be a few that are black but should be blue or red.
A few of these are speculative; not just things that could possibly happen (any two monsters could fight under some circumstances,) but ones that seem likely. Like, if two monsters are attracted to lightning, they're likely to be found near each other.
The bottom row for "others" is where I list any friends or enemies a monster might have that aren't other entires in the list, like how Aeskithetes like artists.
Note that I'm not bothering with things that could be said for literally anything, like that the Blathering Bird could give you information on any other monster. That just clutters up the chart and makes actually unique entries harder to pick out.
The middle row, the one that's all gold and shows a monster's "relationship" with itself, is for treasure. If the monster is clearly stated to have treasure, great. If not I try to come up with something– either ways the monster's body could be used, or the monster itself could be employed when alive, or other potential benefits to killing it. Sometimes I also list other very probable and noteworthy consequences for killing said monster.
One nice thing about a chart like this is it makes it easy to see how, once you put one or two monsters into your game, you could use that to introduce or seed plot hooks for more of them. Like you kill a Sanguine Crane and sell its feathers to some Swamp Drunks, who get attacked by a Snapkeg which causes their caged Fruit Hound to escape and then they trade you the services of some Hex Dragoons who ride Atrocious Crows in return for chasing down the Fruit Hound and re-capturing it, but then you run into a Catastrophe Tree....
The plain-text version of the book has been invaluable here since I can ctrl-f it (but definitely get the hardcover, reading this kind of book is a whole experience), but a lot of this requires reading and re-reading entries and can't be boiled down to keyword searches. You can also see exactly how far along I got before I realized I could copy-paste all the entry names from this book (and figured out how transpose paste works)
I'll keep working on this and probably post it again when it's...well not done because this is the kind of project that's never really done, but like 90% done.
Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions about how to improve the format, I'm all ears.
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