Monster Manual II Opinions

Recently I had purchased the Monster Manual II for Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition and have mixed feelings about it. Overall, I feel that it is a good addition to my collection, but there are a few things holding it back from being all that it could be.

First, I will start off with the praises. The artwork, as with all of the other 4th edition books, is phenomenal; long gone are the days of blue on white line are and four-legged displacer beasts. There are a number of different specialized humans listed rather than just providing the standard “human fighter”, “human wizard”, etc. This gives more variety in encounters and takes a lot of the burden off of the dungeon master’s shoulders for creating more variations. Also, for fans of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, information on Dagon is provided. The designers also make it extremely easy to find the exact creature that you need. The contents lists each creature in alphabetical order while a table in the back lists each creature by level. Racial traits for new potential PC or NPC races are provided near the end of the manual. And a handy glossary provides in-depth descriptions of terms that may be foreign to new DMs.

Now, on to the negative aspects. I was really excited to see that the metallic dragons were featured in this book; then I was dismayed to learn that the brass and bronze dragons are missing. Hopefully they are in the Monster Manual III or in some future release. My second complaint also relates to the dragon entries. The metallic dragons only seem to have one breath weapon now. I didn’t pay that much attention to the 3rd edition D&D so they may have only had one breath weapon there as well. However, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gave metallic dragons two breath weapons each. I realize that by removing one, the designers level the playing field between chromatic and metallic dragons, but in doing so they also remove one of the major differences.

My last complaint is more of a complaint about the Monster Manual series than this book in particular. It makes it difficult to find any given dragon, demon, devil, giant, etc. when some of them are in one volume and others are in another volume. This is especially true when there are no references in the later releases listing level tables and indices for all volumes released up to that point. If there is a comprehensive index and monster table online, please let me know as this would be immensely useful.

As stated at the beginning, overall this is still a really good book. While there is room for improvement, the information is useful to any campaign and laid out well. The artwork is superb and, unlike some of the books in prior editions of D&D and AD&D, really is worth a thousand words. In fact, I get a much clearer impression of what a monster looks like from the picture than I do from reading the descriptive text; sadly, this was not always the case. The few issues that I have with this book are relatively minor, and I highly recommend this manual for anyone who DMs regularly.