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Friday, May 30
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Edition: 2014 Edition
Features
- Fill your Dungeons & Dragons games with pesky goblins and mighty dragons for players to battle or beguile, outwit or outrun
- Over 150 ready-to-play D&D monsters
- Over 400 stat blockswith all the info a Dungeon Master needs to run encounters
- Detailed descriptions and beautiful illustrations
- 1 of 3 D&D Core Rulebooks for 5th editionthe Players Handbook (rules for playing the game), the Dungeon Masters Guide (how to run the game), and Monster Manual (creatures to encounter in your game)
Description
A menagerie of deadly monsters for the world's greatest roleplaying game. The Monster Manual presents a horde of classic Dungeons & Dragons creatures, including dragons, giants, mind flayers, and beholders a monstrous feast for Dungeon Masters ready to challenge their players and populate their adventures. The monsters contained herein are culled from the D&D game's illustrious history, with easy-to-use game statistics and thrilling stories to feed your imagination.
Product Dimensions: 8.54 x 0.86 x 11.14 inches
Item Weight: 0.042 ounces
Country of Origin: China
Item model number: A92180000
Manufacturer recommended age: 14 years and up
Is Discontinued By Manufacturer: No
Release date: September 30, 2014
Language: English
Manufacturer: Wizards of the Coast
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Top Amazon Reviews
Edition: 2014 Edition
A neuronphaser.com review. CONTENT (4/5) With 153 entries, and many featuring multiple statblocks per entry (goblins have the Goblin and the Goblin Boss; Dragons have all of the chromatic and metallic dragons at four different ages) you get an awful lot of monsters in this book. I’m not great at the mathz (English major and all) but I count something like 432 individual stablocks. That’s like 1/10 of the number of times I’ve played D&D, probably, but that’s still significant. Outside of statblocks, most monsters take up multiple pages, which means you get a pretty in-depth look at how the creature exists in the D&D world (always pretty setting-agnostic, but occasionally with a slipped-in reference to the Forgotten Realms), as well as story hooks and lair information. That’s a lot of content. Monster Ecologies Taking a deeper-dive into the information, one finds that there’s a few traits that don’t show up in the statblocks: these are the more “story-oriented” details, and there’s nothing in the statblocks that sum up any organizational ecology notes like in the Monster Manuals and Monstrous Manuals and Monster Compendiums of yesteryear. While I could complain about nostalgia and all that, take a look at the HackMaster: Hacklopedia of Beasts (2011). Not only is it gorgeous, but you also get: *A picture of the creature’s tracks, *It’s typical homelands/ranging grounds, *A size comparison to humans (i.e. adventurers A.K.A. prey) and *Not one but TWO ecology-type blocks of info. The Yield is especially cool for a monster-hunting campaign. Just sayin’. All that info can be way too specific for some people, but when you have the legacy of D&D behind you, it’s not like this information hasn’t already been detailed somewhere before (raise your hands if you read one of the thirty-thousand Monster Ecology articles in DRAGON/DUNGEON mags or on the D&D website over the past 30-odd years), requires zero rules-mechanics updates or conversion work, and can be formatted to fit in a small area of the page if you do some layout wizardry. Compare to a typical Monster Manual entry: Don’t get the wrong impression here: the monster entries look great! The concept art tells you volumes about the creature through art. The statblock is tight and contained. The descriptive text, though short, is both concise and frankly GOOD; it makes you want to go find one of these suckers and see if you can murder it and take its stuff! I’m just saying that they could’ve done a little more with some of that white-space and added a little extra world-building at little cost. Building Monsters Okay, so there’s a teensy-eensy missing, but overall the thing looks great. End of review? Hardly. Let’s actually look at some monster stats, and compare them to the rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide to see how things stack up if you want to build monsters that fit with the designer’s own rules and regulations. The Goblin is a Challenge 1/4 creature. Doing out the math from the DMG (p. 274-ish), I came up with Defensive Challenge of 1: 7 hit points, but bumped up due to a higher-than-average AC of 15, and then another two bumps from the Nimble Escape ability, or so the table on p. 280 would have me believe. Goblins have an Offensive Challenge of 1 as well, since they deal out the lowly amount of 5 damage on average, but receive two bumps from Nimble Escape, again. Well, that averages out to a Challenge of 1, not 1/4. Not 1/2, but 1. Hmmm. What’s the Earth Elemental got going on? Well, he gets a Defensive Challenge boost from multiple Damage Resistances (bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks), so you multiply hit points by 1.5 (assuming a target Challenge of 5) and you get an effective Defensive Challenge of 8. His Offensive Challenge is strictly made up of his attacks, so that’s a rating of 5. Do the math and you get 6.5, but the Earth Elemental has a Challenge rating of 5. Hmmm, again. Fine, let’s go ultimate-whackadoodle, as I like to say, and check out the Tarrasque, one of the scariest French-looking words I know. He’s got a ridiculous amount of immunities, Legendary Resistance, Magic Resistance…by my calculations, the Tarrasque operates at an effective 935 hit points and AC 27. That’s WAAAY off the charts, by nearly 100 hit points and 8 points of Armor Class. Offensively, we’re looking at a Challenge of 28 (deals about 224 damage/round if you use Swallow in place of Bite, and the +19 to hit bumps it up from 25 to 28). So I guess Challenge 30 makes sense (you’d get 29 mathematically, but considering how far past the charts for Challenge 30 the Tarrasque is in terms of defense, I think 30’s fair). On the one hand, we aren’t quite meeting expectations with the Challenge rating calculations in the DMG. But on the other hand, we’re not exactly far off on any of these: goblins are worse by 2, earth elementals are worse by 1, and the Tarrasque is about as close to dead-on as we can expect. The DMG tells us that this is as much art as science, and when you look at just how low a goblin’s hit points are, that seems fine, and the earth elemental is — if nothing else — a little bland in terms of combat, and extremely stupid. Let’s just say the stats are like a B+: they admitted the faults inherent in this system, and while it can be easily broken to a horrible degree, you’d have to pretty much intend to abuse the advice and ignore all existing monsters in order to muck things up too badly. D&D’s New Sexiness The new sexy in this edition of the game comes in the form of three things that you absolutely need to keep your eyes on and revisit time and time again as a reminder of how to make 5th edition D&D more tactical, more set-piece battle-ready, more “fantastical” in terms of environments and situations, and generally, just the best of all previous editions. Here they are. The Introduction The intro to the book does a fantastic job of providing excellent story hooks and encounter locations for monsters. It’s such a short section, but literally every sentence in there is jam-packed with “Hey DM! D&D may have a legacy so long it seems like ‘generic fantasy’ but here’s a bazillion ideas on what makes D&D adventure-ready, mysterious, and most of all, fun!” You get locales, lairs, and some very evocative ideas. Lair Actions Several creatures known for being territorial and carving out nasty lairs get a set of actions called Lair Actions. These show up in the descriptive part of the monster’s entry, because they are made up of three parts: A description of the types of places that the creature lairs in, usually with enough ideas to develop your own maps. A set of Lair Actions that occur on initiative count 20 (losing ties) and don’t eat into the creature’s normal actions. The Lair Actions are crazy terrain-based effects, or additional magical abilities that the creature can access due to how their nature suffuses the location of the lair. A set of Regional Effects that usually cause far-ranging, thematically pertinent changes to the natural terrain and landscape surrounding the creature’s lair. Aboleths, beholders, dragons, kraken, liches, vampires and more all get lair write-ups, Lair Actions, and Regional Effects. That’s a lot of world-building material that immediately turns into adventuring possibilities, and whether you plan out your campaigns or settings long in advance, or if you go week-to-week, it’s not hard to use this information to really show off the mood and feel of certain powerful creatures. Moreover, you can use these sorts of ideas to beef up individualized NPCs or custom monsters, giving them that extra oomph. Legendary Actions Many of the most powerful creatures gain Legendary Actions, which is usually three extra actions the creature can take at the end of another character’s round, and they regenerate each round. It’s kind of like extra reactions, but they are usually more devastating than an opportunity attack, or involve additional means for the creature to gain a significant tactical benefit before taking their turn. For example, a vampire can make a move, or perform a couple different types of attacks (biting is one, and kinda makes a lot of sense for a dude with long canine teeth, I’d say). In every case, the creature’s Legendary Actions have to be mixed up; you can’t use the same Legendary Action twice in a row. This forces the DM to mix things up and use the variety of actions — not all of which are going to be damaging attacks — to create more tactical combat encounters and feature more movement across the battlefield. And then there's Buffagoat. What? A short sidebar on page 317 explains how to re-skin statistics to represent a variety of new monsters. It’s great advice, but one of the examples is getting buffalo by way of using the stats for a Giant Goat. Yeah, a Giant Goat. Awesome. FORM (5/5) 5th Edition hit the deck running with some lovely hardcover books that are filled to the brim with artwork, and has some seriously professional binding. The Monster Manual is the biggest of the three core rulebooks (at least, I’m fairly certain it is), and looks great. Layout and all that is clean, it’s easy to find stuff at a glance — which is hugely important with monster statblocks — and the individual pieces of artwork themselves are phenomenal. One of my biggest complaints about most RPGs is the lack of “pictures for everything,” and that complaint is absolutely NOT here: there’s a picture for everything. Every monster gets its main profile pic in full, glorious color, and there’s always neat concept-style artwork, plus there’s the occasional half-page or 3/4 page set-piece showing monsters in weird settings, or a kuo-toa summoning what looks like a a dapperly dressed Cthulhu, and so on. I could go on and on — there’s silly sketches, awesome little “here’s how this thing moves” sketches — but the point is that D&D came back with a crazy art budget, slapped it all together in a gorgeous format, and matched it with ideas and rules that scream ADVENTURE! and FUN! when it comes to building evocative, dangerous monster encounters.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2016 by Tim Bannock
Edition: 2014 Edition
This is a solid core book for DM's. It's expensive compared to the cost of earlier monster manuals, but traditionally the first Monster Manual in an edition is a solid value and I think that's true here. The 5E stat blocks are pretty compact and monster entries don't take up much space and the page count is high with 352 pages. There are over 430 monsters and NPCs which makes the price per monster pretty good. This is a pretty book with slick glossy pages. Personally, I not a huge fan of the slick pages as I've seen other books with the same type of pages have binding problems. A core book like this will get a lot of use so durability is always a concern. The binding on my copy seems done well enough. Monsters: there seem to be a good assortment of them. I didn't notice many monster's I'd never seen before in the index, but I've been playing since the '70s. The three ones I didn't immediately recognize were the Aarakocra, Magmin and Yugoloths. The Aarakocra were a good monster that became an evil one in 4E. The magmin where low level fire elemental thingys in the SRD. The Yugoloths are like the 3rd, 4th?, incarnation of the old Daemons from the AD&D Fiend Folio and back to their original NE from CE in 4E. I have not read the book from cover to cover so I don't know if there are some whole new monsters under one of the old name's listing, though I didn't immediately notice any. The major thing missing from the book is a listing of monsters by CR. That's suppose to be in the DMG, but still. WotC did release a free downloadable PDF has the CR listing, to address this, so props to them. The Monster Manual has both a table of content and index that are almost the same, so why they couldn't have gotten rid of the back one and printed a Monster by CR list instead, I don't know. It would have been nice to have monster random encounter tables as well. I'm less concerned about those since they always go out of date the moment a new monster source is revealed. Overall this is a very solid core book DM's are going to want to get. I'll give it 4 1/2 stars, taking off a half star for the lack of CR by level. For Amazon I'll round up the score up to 5 stars.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2014 by W. Johnson