Essentially a Monster Manual but for D&D rather than AD&D, it kind of feels strange that it only shows up so many years into the existence of D&D itself as an independent game. However, if we look back at the D&D publications we can see that there really was no “creature compendium” up until now. Each box set of rules had a bestiary section, and each adventure module also had its own monsters in the back, but there was no place dedicated to putting monsters together in one volume.

This would have, then, been extremely useful for any DM trying to make their own adventure, with monsters divided by “type” rather than alphabetically, this would also make it easy to know where to find the right monster for the right situation. 

Indispensable for any D&D DM, this includes not only all the monsters previously published in official rules manuals and modules, but also 80 new monsters. The volume also has some great illustrations of monsters, and better yet full page illustrations for each monster type. I’ll show you some in the next post!