Kickstarter backers already have their hands on the pre-eratta, not-quite-final-but-pretty-close version. Last I’d heard, the print on demand proof was on its way to Onyx Path, making it damn close to coming out.
Gods & Monsters is a book of folkloric deities and creatures from around the world, written by people of those cultures. We had a voudoun practitioner writing the loas. An Indigenous American writing Indigenous culture. Being Asian & Pacific Islander, I handled those. Because of that, Gods & Monsters is probably the first major RPG book to include Ryukyuan folklore.
As a taste of the book, here’s an image from my Japanese section, depicting oni, tengu, hulijing, inugami, and tanuki. Art by Ron Spencer.
I used Mandarin names for some animal spirits, like the hulijing/kitsune, to help remind folks that some of the creatures are found across Eastern Asia … and to bitch about Japanese names for animal spirits being mostly unhelpful. Kitsune is Japanese for both foxes AND fox spirits, making the word ambiguous. Ambiguity is pretty common for the Japanese language in general, so Japanese speakers are trained to pick up on context clues. Everyone else is kind of left in the dust, hence my preference for Mandarin names of some yokai/yaoguai.
