Finally finished reading beast the primordial and the whole thing feels like a misfire, as though someone missed the entire point of beuty and the beast's Gaston vs Beast as a clever subversion of the cosmetic aspect of heroes vs monsters, completly failing to not that if you ignore the cosmetic Beast is obviously the protagonist on the road back to humanity/heroism and gaston the monster
It really does feel like their should have been a book about Heroes in the classical sense as a mythical heroes with a onyx path spin with the beasts being the antagonist and this shitty book is the supplementy antagonist book. Which would have been a far more interesting venue for exploration than CoD/WoD 'inhuman predator as protagonist' has already explored multiple times. At the very least the beasts should be spawned by the heroes due to some sort of failure on the heroes behalf-a beowulf type creating a Tyrant dragon when he aquires and abuses his secular power, Batman spawning the Ravenger Joker due to his neglect of everything but his war Which would ad a far more tragic undercurrent to the proceedings especially if the monster was once a loved one. Imagine the pain generated by a lover turned devil or a child turned fiend. You could even takes this a step further as the heroes negative traits build up he becomes more a villain than the villain while the beast gradually assumes more and more noble traits, perhaps reaching the point after some titanic struggle where the Beast usurps the role of hero and the Hero assumes the mantle of the beast he once created by accident- aformentioned Gaston and the beast being the obvious example. Angels Daniel Holtz vs the now redemed protagonist for another.
It also doesnt help pretty much everything the beasts do is done elsewhere. These damned things bring nothing new to the table.
The real problem with Beast is that it had two seemingly contradictory design goals and desires working with it. One was to make a crossover friendly game, the other was to make a game about nightmare creatures who exist and need to feed and in doing so make their own worst nightmares. They succeeded at neither. Changing Heroes from 'They're made by Beasts doing horrible things to someone" to "they're born and are mostly ego-maniacal jerks who are here to stamp on your fun" is a sign of the biggest flaw of the game: there's no reason to follow the lessons. Especially if you're in a group of Beasts.
Lessons were added late in the development cycle and boy oh boy does it show. The idea of lessons as the thing Beasts base their society on isn't a bad one... if they had a society. The game never provides a reason for teaching good lessons because heroes will be attracted to you anyway over time, so teaching good lessons really doesn't matter if you consider Beasts in a vacuum. There's no guidance for what's a good lesson, or what's going too far, or any of that shit in the core book. The Gaston vs the Beast really doesn't work when Gaston or the Beast is irredeemably evil through no real fault of their own. It doesn't ball the fuck up and admit "We're both horrible twisted individuals" when it comes to Heroes, it doesn't make Heroes something sympathetic and cyclical with Beasts (The Beast going wild attracts the Hero who slays the Beast or the Beast kills the Heroes again and again until one finally gets them, you need to break out of this cycle somehow) and it doesn't make Beasts have a reason to ever truly give a damn about a Hero.
This is a problem. Heroes aren't like the Strix or Indgam, both of which are utterly inhuman and barely comprehensible monsters with grudges and motivations stretching back millennia, Heroes are humans. Heroes are just twisted, fucked up individuals that the game says are irredeemable and are basically all serial killers because that's what Heroes are. Even the new Night Horrors doesn't really give more depth to heroes. There's examples of a few higher morality Heroes, or Heroes that don't focus entirely on killing beasts, but most are just low morality serial killers that happen to focus on Beasts. Hell, the enemy introduced in that Night Horrors book, the Insatiable,
are better Beast antagonists than heroes are. They're like horrific all consuming monstrosities without any desire but feeding and want to eat Beasts to make themselves whole again... well some of them. There's the other problem with Beasts antagonists, they aren't consistent or well thought out in terms of motivation or characterization.
Beast's flaws and late reworks have left a relatively solid concept (The Monster who rejects humanity and makes everything worse) totally off the rails and obviously now in the hands of their B-team judging by the Night Horrors book. Most splats have their 'Us but slightly different and antagonistic' enemy in the core book. Beast shouldn't need this sort of monster, not when it has Heroes.
