Blackdirge’s Dungeon Denizens

As I read through Dungeon Denizens, I’m struck by how many more ‘classic’ or old school monsters I’m reading. I’m a sucker for these old beasties. Mind you, it’s not just old school monsters. There are a lot of monsters from Goodman Games catalog as well. I recognize many of them from the Underdark Adventurer Guide. Some of them are from the 4e adventurers as well. If you haven’t been collecting the new books but want the new monsters, they’re here.

In that, I’m a little disappointed. It’s not that seeing some of the stuff from the adventurers is bothersome. Adventurers are generally a smaller market than sourcebooks. It’s that a lot of the monsters from the recent Dragonborn handbook, the Dragonborn Atavist, show up here.

The hardcover weighs in at 144 black and white pages but once you take out cover and rear cover, the author credit page, the regular credit page, and then two pages of introductions, one by Blackdirge, one by Goodman, and then the pages of advertisements, it’s still a respectable 135 pages of goodness.

Art is all over the place. Now let me say that the cover is awesome. The cover looks better than the official Monster Manual cover with Orcus doing whatever arm exercise he’s needing. Wayne’s a great artist but tends to do things similar in body positioning far too often. Here though, once you get past that awesome cover, there are way too many artists to list and a lot of it appears to be from previous products.

I’m not crazy about this pattern when Wizards of the Coast does it in their core rules like the Monster Manual and not fond of it here. It gives the book a bit of a slapped together feel as there are so many art types that it doesn’t have a cohesive feel, the exact opposite of their Forgotten Heroes book. It also includes some illustrations that are just plain out there like the Darksea Squid. It looks like a gangster squid asking about some money owed it. That wasn’t a good picture the first time it popped up. Time hasn’t done it any favors. On the other hand, there are some great illustrations like the dragonborn paladin homage to the old 1st Edition AD&D Player’s Handbook Paladin illustration of a Paladin in Hell (although this illustration too is from another book.)

Monsters range in level from 1st all the way to 30th. Monsters start off with a brief description of the heading monster. For example, under monstrous frogs, it talks about monstrous frogs in general. Then there’s some lore with various DC checks to provide more information. Tactics follow the stat blocks. Each grouping of monsters ends with suggested encounter groups. The design style of 4e monster write ups tends to promote more white space. Easier on the eyes but a tree killer.

There’s a pretty good mix of types but the one thing that’s low here is minions. I know I’m always interested in what minions lurk but here we only have a few like the Klaklin Drone, a 4th level minion (probably from the old Underdark book if I’m not mistaken) or the 2nd level Zain-Kin, an ancient race of ape-men who made an appearance earlier this year in Goodman’s new style adventure modules.

Monsters come with everything you need to run them. For example, Malotoch, an entity known as the Crow Witch, has leader solo stats at 27th level, an elite skirmisher aspect at 18th level, two types of cultists, and two new diseases.

For players, there’s not a lot but there are racial traits for three races; aphyss (variant serpent folk), thornblood (plan like humanoids), and zain-kin (damn filthy apes!). These provide standard game information in terms of ability score modifiers and racial ability.

In terms of what I’d consider ‘old school’, we have the fey based barghast, several types of monstrous bats (slashwing, sonic, static, and swarms), beetles (brimstone, swarm, blister, Couatl, frogs (giant, dire, swarm), raven (giant, swarm), scorpions (dune, greater dune, enormous dune, flying swarm), spiders (bristleback, dungeonweb, trapdoor), and vargouille. Not every monster under these categories is a direct match for an older edition beastie, but I like having the ‘normal’ monsters available again. Damn shame a game with classics like Temple of the Frog has to have a third party come around for the old giant frogs eh?

Throw in several 3.5 ‘classic’ monsters and you’ve got a book that’ll help expand out the core Monsters .until WoTC decides to take another whack at their anemic monster collection.