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Monster ENCyclopedia: Ettin
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<blockquote data-quote="Echohawk" data-source="post: 8136445" data-attributes="member: 9849"><p>Heh. I started by spending a few years indexing all the monster stat blocks across all D&D products. That guarantees I don't miss any of each creature's major appearances. After that, it's a matter of just searching through my library for other mentions and filling in the gaps. Where WotC currently (or has previously) sold something as a PDF, I've snapped that up, and most (but not all) of those are OCRed and searchable. I also bought the Dragon CD-ROM archive back in the day, and digital copies of all of the Dragon/Dungeons that Paizo has on their website. Having a solid digital library makes searching for a particular monster easier, although in some cases (like say the "ettin"), the monster name is a terrible search key.</p><p></p><p>For the pictures, I just scan the original product off my shelves, unless it is one where WotC has released digital copies of the art, either through D&D Insider (80% of 4th Edition) or D&D Beyond (100% of 5th Edition), in which case, I just use that. Once I'm done with an initial draft based on my own library, I spend some quality time with Google, looking for miniatures and computer game appearances, as well as checking my work against some of the major fan-run wikis for the campaign settings, to make sure I haven't missed anything significant from those settings.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Echohawk, post: 8136445, member: 9849"] Heh. I started by spending a few years indexing all the monster stat blocks across all D&D products. That guarantees I don't miss any of each creature's major appearances. After that, it's a matter of just searching through my library for other mentions and filling in the gaps. Where WotC currently (or has previously) sold something as a PDF, I've snapped that up, and most (but not all) of those are OCRed and searchable. I also bought the Dragon CD-ROM archive back in the day, and digital copies of all of the Dragon/Dungeons that Paizo has on their website. Having a solid digital library makes searching for a particular monster easier, although in some cases (like say the "ettin"), the monster name is a terrible search key. For the pictures, I just scan the original product off my shelves, unless it is one where WotC has released digital copies of the art, either through D&D Insider (80% of 4th Edition) or D&D Beyond (100% of 5th Edition), in which case, I just use that. Once I'm done with an initial draft based on my own library, I spend some quality time with Google, looking for miniatures and computer game appearances, as well as checking my work against some of the major fan-run wikis for the campaign settings, to make sure I haven't missed anything significant from those settings. [/QUOTE]
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