Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/07/monstrous-mondays-d-4th-ed-monster.html

To begin with, I was and am a fan of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I know it was not everyone's favorite edition, to put it mildly, but there are some really great things about it. For starters, I applaud the design team for daring to try something new and different with the D&D game. Of course, most fans don't want new. They want the same thing, but even for the open-minded D&D 4 was a bridge too far. Secondly, D&D 4 was a masterwork of modular design. You could take out and move around sections of it as you needed. Yes, everything worked together, but many of the pieces could be swapped out for other pieces. This design notion extended to the layout of the books. Nowhere is this better seen than with the Monster Manuals.

To me it seemed that 4th edition took the design elements that had made the Monstrous Compendiums successful; namely one monster per page, and all sorts of information on the monster's habitat, environment, and variations. It is also one of the main reasons I still keep my 4th edition monster books. There is so much information here that I have been using them to inform details in my 5th edition game.

In all cases here, I am considering my hardcover books and the PDFs from DriveThruRPG.

Monster Manual for D&D 4e Hardcover and PDF. Color covers, full-color interior art. 288 pages.

This was the third book published for D&D 4th edition, though that is a mere technicality since all books were published at the same time in June of 2008. I picked mine up as a boxed set at the midnight release.

Much like AD&D second edition, the monsters for D&D 4th edition are presented as one page per monster. More or less. Sometimes the monster runs two or four pages, but always a complete page. Where 3e had monsters built exactly like characters, 4e monsters have their own rules, much like how 1st and 2nd Ed built them.

Fourth Edition was most certainly a "miniatures" game or, as it was hoped, to have a lot of online support and content. That did not materialize in the way Wizards of the Coast wanted and strong sales of Paizo's rival "Pathfinder RPG" kept D&D sales low for the first in the history of RPGS. Make no mistake, D&D still sold well, it just wasn't out selling everything else.

That was too bad really. D&D 4 had a lot about it I liked and still like.

The 4e Monster Manual is 288 pages with over 170 monster entries. Many entries have multiple monsters. For example, there are three different types of Aboleth, six types of kobolds, and seven types of orcs. Along with the stat blocks, we get an idea of the role each monster plays in combat, like Controller, Brutes, Skirmishers, or Leaders, and what tactics they can employ. All the monsters have Lore with appropriate DCs for learning more about them or what a particular die roll will bring up. The monsters also include plot hooks and ideas for using them in adventures.

Some interesting changes happened in 4e. For starters, some major demons, like our cover guy Orcus here, got their own entry outside of the demons category. He also had major henchmen listed with him.

Also, a conscious effort was made to redesign the cosmology of D&D. The effect here was to have Succubi now listed as "Devils" and not "Demons."

This caused some interesting in-game fluff with books like Erin M. Evans' "Brimstone Angels" trying to explain this "in-universe" from the perspective of the Forgotten Realms. This lives on in 5e with succubi as now independent evil outsiders. Other changes were made to various monsters, Daemons/Yugoloths we moved over to the demons, including making them Chaotic Evil. This might have messed with ideas of the Blood War, but there is no reason why there needs to be continuity between editions, it is just nice.

One of the things that irritated some people was not the monsters it had, but the ones it did not have. It particular Demogorgon is nowhere to be found and many of the named devils are also not here.

The layout is such, that like the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Compendiums, the D&D 4th Edition Monster Manuals PDFs can be printed out with just the monsters you want and organized in a binder. The modularity of the design is so well planned out that it really makes me want to print out these PDFs and just make my own Monstrous Compendium style binder for it. Sure the page numbering will be wonky, but that would not matter, everything will be perfectly alphabetized. I could even re-integrate demons like Orcus and Lolth back to where they belong under demons.

The art is amazing really. The visual style of the monsters flows from the 3rd Edition monster books to provide a sense of continuity even if the worlds do feel different.

I am not currently playing D&D 4th Edition, but I find these monster books still so incredibly useful even in my D&D 5th Edition and Basic/Expert edition games. They are also just great-looking books.

Full disclosure: This is the book that turned me away from D&D 4th Edition. Over a decade later, I've given it another chance... and while it's not as bad as I thought at the time and has its merits, it's still the least interesting core monster book D&D has produced.

First, the positives. There are a massive quantity of monsters in the book, one of the largest of any edition. Granted, many of these are variants of individual monsters, but this is still a strength: nearly every monster has at least two "flavors" you can choose from across various levels or themes. The monsters also span a wide variety of levels and environments, providing a monster for just about any situation.

Every monster is designed to have mechanically interesting abilities for use in tactical combat, and each comes with specific battle tactics and pre-made encounter groups (complete with XP totals), making it very easy to construct battles. I also liked that each monster came with tables of lore skill checks, broken out by skill and difficulty class, so you know what to tell players when they ask what they might know about a given creature.

The book ends with a section on "Racial Traits", which provide rules for NPC or PC versions of a number of monsters, adding value for players as well. (This listing includes gnomes, which were infamously just monsters at the start of 4E.)

Unfortunately, most of these positives have negatives that balance them out. Most of the variants are only differentiated by statistics and names, with many not even getting a thin explanation for why or how they differ from the base monster. (This can be particularly frustrating when a monster or variant looks or sounds really cool, and you learn barely anything else about them.)

It's obvious that much more time was spent on the statblocks and combat than on flavor; at best, one suspects they thought catchy names for powers were usually flavor enough (they're not). Even the lore tables, as neat an idea as they are, tend to provide very little in terms of story ideas, and most monsters only get a few sentences beyond that. This makes much of the book a fairly dry read, if you aren't a big fan of combat rules and statistics.

And sometimes even the mechanics aren't that interesting: a number of variants are little more than a bigger, meaner version, or a version with slightly adjusted powers.

Meanwhile, the racial traits are pretty bare-bones, and seem split between interestingly flavorful powers and ones that seem like tactically minded filler - and even the latter sometimes have very limited utility (looking at you, goblin and kobold).

There are other oddities as well. Illustrations don't always tell you which monster is which variant. They also don't provide encounter groups for every variant. The book appears to lack any good monsters, with even traditionally heroic creatures like angels and unicorns being "any" alignment or just "unaligned." (It's been suggested that the designers wanted to make sure every monster in the book could be a viable target.) Some monsters are based on templates, but they only provide examples here, pointing you instead to the 4E DMG for the template rules. They shy away from providing stat blocks for mundane animals, with most only listing fantastical variants; reading between the lines, I guess they thought stats for mundane animals would be pointless. They even rename dinosaurs to "behemoths" for some reason.

Fortunately for 4E, they fixed many of the above issues in the Monster Vault. Some of this book's positives were lost, but the lore especially is much better. I would strongly recommend the later book over this book. (Unfortunately for 4E, the Monster Vault was too late to help save it.)

In conclusion - while I appreciate the strengths of the 4E Monster Manual now, more than I did back when it was new, there are still too many drawbacks for it to be among the greatest D&D monster books. Even in 4E, it was outdone by its successor, the Monster Vault. Still, it may have some value for especially creative DMs who are willing to fill in the lightweight lore, or those who want a wide variety of tactically deep monsters to spice up their combat. But if you're trying to sell someone on D&D, this is not the book I'd start with... (Originally posted on Goodreads)

None of the images are showing up for me, which makes it hard to enjoy.

High quality content and graphics.

This product's scan quality is also superior, as opposed to some of the older D&D modules and sourcebooks I have purchased from DriveThru RPG in the past; the latter may have excellent content, but they are obvious scans of adequate quality.

I hope to see the same scan quality in future purchases, as i have seen in the D&D (4th) Monster Manual.

Even if you own the Hard Cover of this book and GM should have this copy on there computer. The bookmarks take half of the work away.

If magic could be said to be the heart of fantasy role-playing, then monsters are surely some other, similarly-vital, organ. Perhaps the lungs, since evocative descriptions of fierce and terrible creatures breathe fun and vitality into the game world. Sure, you can have a game where you just fight other human(oid) NPCs, but does going up against the local Bandit King really compare to facing down a mighty demon, or a fearsome dragon? Monsters are an integral part of the game, and the new Monster Manual for Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons aims to deliver that aspect of the world’s favorite RPG.

From a technical standpoint, the PDF of the MM does very well for itself. The book has been given full bookmarks to each individual monster entry, though not for sub-entries (e.g. you’ll be able to go straight to “Angel,” but not “Angel of Valor,”), with the bookmarks being nested for convenience. The table of contents is not hyperlinked, but interestingly several hyperlinks do turn up throughout the book, almost always as entries that are “see page XX.”

It’s worth mentioning that the book’s artwork is quite eye-catching. While some illustrations are of “okay” quality, several are truly stellar in depicting a monster. All of the artwork is in full color, which is a good point, but it’s worth noting that that might be a barrier towards printing. Unfortunately, no printer-friendly option is included, so you might want to simply purchase the print book if you want to print large sections of the PDF and are worried about ink consumption.

The book presents a large number of monsters, most of which will be familiar to longtime fans of the D&D game. You’ll find classics such as the Tarrasque and the beholder here, along with older monsters that were forgotten in previous editions of the game, such as the berbalang and the galeb duhr. There are also several new critters making their debut, such as the balhannoth and the kruthik. Unfortunately, canny-eyed readers will also note that there are some monsters that would normally be a shoe-in for the Monster Manual that didn’t seem to make the cut this time around. If you’re a fan of metallic dragons, or frost and stone giants, then this book will disappoint you.

The rules for the monsters are fairly slick in what’s presented. The rules for things such as monster types, combat roles, and special attacks make the monsters streamlined and easy to use; it’s also fairly simple to improve monsters, or create your own now, though it will still take some intuition to design creatures that work well in their chosen role. Many of the monster entries here have different versions of the same creature, giving you several different options right from the start. It’s also worth noting that there is a little more fluff text than what a lot of people seem to be saying, mostly because the fluff text has been “crunchified” by placing it under the Lore sections for each monster, meaning characters must make a skill check, with higher DCs revealing more information about the monster. That said, this is still the least amount of fluff we’ve ever seen for most monsters, so DMs who want to flesh these creatures out more are largely going to be on their own.

Ultimately, this book does a good job in bringing the monsters of D&D up to speed with the new edition. The creatures are easy to use and design for, but a lot of baggage that you might have otherwise enjoyed has been thrown out in the process. The PDF itself has most, but not all, of the bells and whistles you’d expect a high-class PDF book to have. The work here, mechanically, artistically, and technically, is not without flaws, but these imperfections pale in the face of what it does right. The book stands up very well as one of the Core Rulebooks for the new edition of the archetypal fantasy role-playing game.

An RPG Resource Review:

The aim of this Monster Manual, as with previous editions, is to provide an array of interesting opponents for your characters. It is evident from the very start that a lot of thought has been put into the layout of the entries and the way in which information is presented. This makes it very easy both to select suitable monsters as you design encounters and to run actual combat with the details you need presented handily.

Mechanically, as a catalogue of combat opposition, it's excellent. However, if you like to present an alternate reality in which the monsters live, you are going to have to draw on other resources such as 'monster ecology' books and articles from earlier editions, just using 4e statistics rather than those in your other books when a fight breaks out. One nice touch is that for each monster there is a list of the likely knowledge a well-read adventurer might know about, say, a balhannoth, even before he has the bad luck to meet one. Nothing, however, to suggest how without your Jane's Book of Monsters to hand you know that it IS a balannoth in the first place!

Most of the main monster types have several varieties. Some are stronger than others but the really interesting thing is that each variety has a combat role assigned to it, making building a war party of that particular monster type quite straightforward. Or of course you can pick monsters of appropriate role and level from throughout the book if you want a really mixed group. To facilitate this, guidelines for likely 'encounter groups' are provided, suggesting a likely mix of monsters for different levels of encounter.

The pictures are good, showing each monster in the sort of pose that might be the first - or if they're unlucky in the ensuing brawl, the last - view the characters have of them. If you like to say "You see this!" rather than "You see a beholder" these images will translate well to being held up, although most are in the middle of the text rather than on their own.

After the alphabetical listing of monsters, there's a section on Racial Traits, which can be used if you want to use selected monsters as characters (or fully-developed NPCs). The selection is quite limited, and there are others in the book which are sentient but not here, however if you fancy being a goblin or a minotaur the resources are available. Next is followed by a glossary of the terms used in describing the monsters, so there's no doubt about what, for example, a monster which can burrow is capable of doing. Finally, there are listings of the monsters sorted by level and by combat role, again to facilitate building that war party."

Overall, as a collection of monsters to fight, this is an excellent start. But if you want more rounded monsters rather than combat-fodder, you will have to add material of your own or modify that published for earlier editions.