Track monsters, hunt them down, and craft with their resources with Loot Tavern's Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One. This supplement brings epic monster-hunting adventures to your table along with new subclasses, species, spells, feats, and systems to expand your game.

String your bow, sharpen your knives, and light your cooking fires because it's time to dive into what Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One has to offer!

• Experience the Thrill of the Hunt with New Character Options
• New Mechanics For Monster Hunting
• 5 Ready-to-Run Hunts

Start Your Monster-Hunting Adventure Today!

Get Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One on D&D Beyond and make prep and play easier with powerful tools at your fingertips:

• Build monster-slaying heroes with the Character Builder, featuring the new 4 subclasses, 8 species options, 13 feats, and 29 spells included in the supplement.
• No heavy books to carry while you track your quarry through the underbrush of a jungle—just your digital tools and a thirst for the hunt!
• Master Tier subscribers can use the Maps VTT to prep and run tactical encounters using the 9 maps and 54 monsters included.

Experience the Thrill of the Hunt with New Character Options

`You'll need fresh and exciting character options to face off against the dangerous array of creatures lurking in the hunts featured in the book. These options will give your adventurers new features when it comes time to track, battle, and overcome these formidable beasts.

4 New Subclasses

These new subclasses offer unique ways to approach your adventures:

• College of Fleshweaving Bard: These Bards turn wounds into works of art, using biomantic rituals to reshape flesh into beauty and function. A College of Fleshweaving Bard might find work as a battlefield surgeon or rise to prominence as a royal facemaker, altering visages with magic and deft needlework.
• Circle of the Hive Druid: Druids of the Circle of the Hive form a symbiotic bond with insects, arachnids, or other arthropods that inhabit their bodies, creating a living ecosystem. These creatures provide new spells, allow you to Wild Shape into swarms of creatures, and enhance your offensive and defensive capabilities, along with your senses.
• Oath of the Harvest Paladin: The Oath of the Harvest calls to Paladins who seek to heal, nourish, and protect, favoring aid over violence unless necessary to prevent greater suffering; their tenets and abilities emphasize care, sustenance, and healing, bestowing them with protective boons they can provide allies.
• Biomancy Wizard: Biomancers continuously alter their bodies through biomantic magic, gaining traits like scales, extra limbs, or enhanced senses. They can achieve a certain number of improvements at a time, which increases as they level up. Their modifications extend to combat, with abilities like Spell Splitter, which lets them target themselves and an additional creature with single-target spells, and Endocrine Overload, which grants temporary superhuman strength or agility at the cost of a level of Exhaustion.

5 New Species and 3 Subspecies

You'll find a collection of unique species that can help you create characters from different walks of life, whether you're a cnidaran who calls coral reefs home or a golynn who dwells within subterranean tunnels.

• Cnidaran: Emerging from living coral reefs that serve as both home and ancestral record, cnidarans are amphibious humanoids with a bipartite lifecycle, shifting between an instinct-driven polyp stage and an intelligent, humanoid medusozoa form, with subspecies adapted for combat or diplomacy.
• Cyclopian: Cyclopians are knowledge-driven, one-eyed humanoids with a compulsive thirst for secrets, an innate ability to metabolize information for sustenance, and a cultural tradition of embarking on a Pilgrimage of Huge Discovery (PHD) to expand their personal and communal libraries.
• Gobboc: Gobbocs are small, feathered survivalists who revere birds, commonly flee at the first sign of danger, and possess an uncanny ability to communicate with avian creatures. They can Disengage as a Bonus Action after hitting an enemy and Polymorph themselves into a Tiny Chicken, making these chicken-like creatures excel in a variety of combat and exploration scenarios.
• Golynn: A nomadic, earth-dwelling species known for their shovel-like claws, scaly skin, and an affinity for rhythm and exploration. With natural armor and burrowing abilities, golynn are resilient survivors, thriving in fertile soil and often raised by non-golynn families. They are strong, hardy, and capable of detecting vibrations through Tremorsense.
• Rakin: A small, nimble species with a knack for trickery and survival, rakin are known for their playful nature and affinity for mischief, with three subspecies—urkin, posskin, and tanukin—each offering unique traits such as streetwise skills, the ability to play dead, resistance to Poison damage, and illusion magic.

New Feats and Spells

With 13 feats and 29 spells, Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One arms you with the tools to track elusive prey, harness the essence of formidable beasts, and gain abilities fit for a master hunter.

From combat-centric feats that let you weave deadly flurries with Twinblades, claws, and Nunchucks to crafting and harvesting feats that sharpen your ability to forge enchanted gear and extract rare components, Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One helps you expand your character's repertoire.

You can also stock your spell book with an array of exciting options, including new biomancy spells that manipulate organic matter, giving you and your party beneficial buffs or imposing detrimental effects on enemies. For instance, you can bestow yourself or an ally with Chameleon Skin, which help you blend into your environment.

New Mechanics For Monster Hunting

If you want to stalk your prey, extract their essence, and imbue your gear with special abilities, Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One is the supplement for you! Included within its pages are rules for tracking, harvesting, and crafting to make you feel like a true monster hunter:

Tracking

Scour a variety of terrains for your prey! Using this system, you can make finding a monster as much of an adventure as facing off against the monster itself. If your party gets turned around, they may encounter dangerous situations or monsters they didn't intend to challenge.

From frigid arctic biomes to stinking swamps, this system has a plethora of narrative and hostile encounters–so no matter where they're traveling, you'll have unexpected surprises in your back pocket.

Harvesting

The harvesting system in Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One turns the aftermath of a battle into a rewarding race against time. This system allows characters to extract magical and mundane components from slain creatures, which can be used to craft powerful items or cook meals.

Harvesters can work together, combining their skills in assessment and carving. The process involves strategy, as the order of components affects the difficulty of harvesting them before their magical potency fades, and an element of luck because the Harvesting checks determine how successful your attempt is.

Plus, there are unique rules for different creature types and special components for boss monsters, so this system creates engaging experiences for every hunt!

Crafting

This system brings together three distinct processes—manufacturing, enchanting, and forging—offering comprehensive crafting rules for every magic item in the SRD and the 85 new magic items included in the supplement.

As your characters venture out, they'll collect rare and magical materials from the creatures they defeat, then use them to forge new gear and enchant your mundane gear. For instance, to turn your Longsword into a Flame Tongue Longsword, you'll need a dragon's breath sac, among other gathered materials. So roll up your sleeves and get hunting!

Manufacturing is the process of forging mundane items from raw materials using your trusty tools and spending the requisite amount of time. Enchanting can then transform your mundane items into magical wonders by imbuing them with power extracted from monster components and rare essences. The more potent the essence, the more powerful the item—though it requires a spellcaster's skill.

Forging, on the other hand, allows even non-spellcasters to craft magical items by combining raw materials with extracted monster components to create extraordinary gear.

Cooking

A subsection of the crafting system, cooking adds a flavorful downtime activity by allowing player characters to craft 20,000 permutations of magical meals using monster components.

Cooking requires characters to gather edible monster components (like blood, liver, heart, and eyes) and use them to prepare magical meals. Each component contributes unique magical effects based on the type and the creature it came from. The complexity of the recipe also increases with the number of ingredients.

Once prepared, these magical meals have lasting effects—lasting up to 8 hours or until dispelled—allowing characters to prepare for upcoming conflicts. A character can only benefit from one magical meal at a time, so they'll need to ensure their meal is cooked just right; you are what you eat, after all!

5 Ready-to-Run Hunts

This supplement brings 5 hunts where the party must track, study, and defeat reimagined takes on classic monsters in multi-wave boss battles. These foes range from the treasure-munching Icosahedrooze to the superconducting Magnetite Dragon and a supporting cast of 54 new creatures.

Whether your players' characters are seasoned hunters or fresh adventurers, each unique hunt is fully adaptable for three different character levels, making it easy to scale encounters for different party strengths.

Get Your Copy of Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One

On D&D Beyond, Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One is more than just a book—it's fully integrated into the digital toolset to make your monster-hunting adventures easier to prep.

You can easily build characters using the new subclasses, species, spells, and feats in the Character Builder. The tracking, harvesting, and crafting systems are at your fingertips in the compendium, allowing you to seamlessly incorporate them into your game without flipping through pages.

Need to craft a magic item? Find all the necessary components and rules in an instant. Want to prepare a magical meal? The cooking system is just a few clicks away. Plus, the five ready-to-run hunts and dozens of creatures are easy to navigate and ready to run in D&D Beyond's Maps VTT, ensuring your players can play tactically together.

With Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting - Part One on D&D Beyond, you'll spend less time searching and more time slaying, crafting, and feasting. Get your copy today and take your monster-hunting adventures to the next level!

Mike Bernier is the founder of Arcane Eye, a site focused on providing useful tips and tricks to all those involved in the world of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time playing games, hiking with his partner, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants that have invaded his house.