Customer Reviews

Monstrous Compendium Annual, Vol. 1 (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition)

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This review is about seventeen years late, I suppose, but I thought I'd drop a little information for the next rare and random person looking at this. First of all, the book has more than 100 new monsters, from various sources, such as alternate campaign settings and magazine articles. It's a pretty interesting collection of creatures. I'm already getting ideas for implementing some of them, like the Hammer Golem, a dwarven creation used to battle their underground foes, the Al-Jahar (Dazzle), a creature that feeds on strong emotions, and the Xaver, a monster that looks like a sword. One other important thing to note: most of the creatures in here are pretty strong, with only a few appropriate for beginning adventurers.

The artwork is all by Tony DiTerlizzi, who did a sizable chunk of the original Monstrous Manual. I find his work relatively primitive, but it is serviceable enough to convey the weirdness of some of these things. There are some editing problems as well, but nothing that will make the creatures unusable, and the pages aren't numbered, but it's small enough that you shouldn't have trouble finding anything. Overall, this is a nice variety of new creatures to freshen up your encounters. I'm pretty pleased with it, and am going to consider checking out the other Annuals.

As far as I am concerned, this is one of the best "monster books" in existense in the AD&D game. The art is fresh and vibrant ( unlike the washed-out art of Planescape appendixes), the creatures are creative and each and every one of them is capable of having an entire adventure centered on it and it alone. A few things - the spelling is horrible; the binding is simple glue spread - the book falls apart easily with time; also, the text isn't as enchanting as it used to be...

This is one of the best, and I consider it a near must-have.