Dungeons & Dragons RPG: Monster Manual – 2024 edition by Maria Lima, Robert E. Howard and others
The biggest D&D monster manual ever – with over 500 total and 85+ brand new monsters to choose from.
The Ultimate Fantasy Bestiary.
This revised and expanded Monster Manual contains a horde of creatures for the fifth edition DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game—a monstrous menagerie of familiar favorites like dragons, giants, and mind flayers, plus a host of new monsters like the arch-hag, the blob of annihilation, and the vampire nightbringer.
By Mike
Attention masters!
Just like the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook (PHB) and Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) got revised in 2024 based on a decade of community feedback, so has the 2014 Monster Manual.
So, first of all, this one adds a lot of monsters (85) to the previous selection from some expansion books and puts everything in alphabetical order (so all your dragons and demons will be strewn across the book).
Secondly, and this is a big one for DM’s who enjoy running complex combat encounters, the statblocks are streamlined in terms of language, and for me, the biggest and best change is that spellcasting creatures no longer have their usual spell lists and slots.
Spells are often listed as either an inherent action or as having a certain amount of uses per day, or just flatout “at will” for spells that generally (if my logic tracks, maybe I’m wrong) won’t run out of spell slots in one combat encounter or if it befits a high level creature to just spam a certain spell as if it were a cantrip.
Many creatures have received more and better spells as well. At the top of each statblock now sits a bar that states in what kind of environment or plane a creature is generally found and what type of loot they could carry.
Another big change is that some common creature types that were also playable as races or were often non-player characters (NPC’s) are no longer included, like orcs or drow. Instead, in the back of the book you can find a table that shows which former statblocks can now instead be used as flavour for a new statblock like the new priests, cultists, tough types etc. This is probably in the vein of preventing racist dynamics creeping into the role-play, as the playable species or NPC’s would otherwise always have one offshoot ‘dark’ race that is demonized and categorized as ‘monstrous’.
For those who prefer all their creature types in one place and not have all their dear devils all across the book, you can rest easy; monster lists by creature type, habitat, CR etc. can be found in the back, so with some clever tagging you can still easily group creatures.
A significant change that experienced DM’s will notice is the lore. It has been drastically reduced into more general descriptions, providing less detail on motivations and origins.
To me this change feels in line with recent publications by Wizards Of The Coast that seem to leave more up to the DM to fill in and/or flavour. For homebrewing DM’s like myself, this is no problem and sometimes even quite welcome as it leaves a lot to the imagination and might make lore less restrictive. But, and this is a big but, it might leave new DM’s or those with less interest in homebrewing at a loss for narrative inspiration.
To conclude: this new Monster Manual is a great improvement over the 2014 version in that it makes running combat a lot easier and lowers the threshold to making combat more complex. There is more variety, but this seems to come at quite a cost to the lore.
