Preview VOLO'S GUIDE TO MONSTERS

Polygon has scored a look at the upcoming Volo's Guide to Monsters from WotC - six full pages, in fact, which give a very clear idea of what we can expect from the book when it arrived next month! From the looks of their article, it seems that WotC is using this as a testbed for the way they handle future sourcebooks. Polygon confirms the overall product description - 96 new (to 5E) monsters, tons of rules for monster PCs (goblins, orcs, firbolgs), and a buch of deep dives into some iconic monsters. The beholder section is nearly 14 pages on its own. Check out the article at Polygon for more!

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[dave2008]

Just read the Polygon article that goes with the preview pictures, and was exceedingly happy to see that the monstrous deities will be fully covered (well, they specifically mention the kobold deities, but I assume it will be the case for all "featured" monsters).

OK - now I have to get it!

 

[dave2008]

I have it. It's great. But it's not enough. If it were, then there would be no market for Volo's Guide.


What's a "table?" I play online. Groups are ephemeral.


That's arguable. Volo's Guide is full of player options. Players outnumber DMs. It's possible that players will represent a larger share of the book's market than DMs. The most comparable product here is the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, not the Monster Manual.

What is enough? 65 in ToB, + 67 in the MM, +1 in RoT , + 4 in PotA, +7 in OotA, +1 in CoS, +1 (at least) in SKT brings us to at least 145 monsters above CR 10 and that is not included a lot of quality DMsGuild products.

How many would quell your need for more, or is it an insatiable desire? I know it is for me, but I like really Epic CR20+ monsters myself.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

My biggest problem is that my players' PCs are getting upwards of 9th level now, and the types of monsters they're running into are getting a little more repetitive, as the number of high-CR monsters is fewer. I'm hoping there will at least be a few more critters that are CR 10 or more in here.

I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, you do have to be more creative in high-level challenges. It's pretty much mandatory to use lots and lots of minions.

On the other hand, with a few exceptions (the Ultraloth stands out as too weak), I like that the CRs create a more believable world. I didn't like how 3e's epic rules had no cap. Things could just endlessly get more powerful. 5e, by contrast, gave us an example deity statblock, as well as some elemental princes and demon princes. We now can calibrate how tough various things should be relative to those reference points. (Those statblocks also demonstrate that the epic boon rules in the DMG are more than sufficient to handle epic characters. You could technically raise all of your abilities to 30, and pick up every feat and boon you qualified for. You really could stand toe-to-toe with a deity if you could rack up the enormous XP required.)

It's a common critique -- people said the same thing when the 2001 forgotten realms campaign setting came out, was their first 40 dollar book, but people still paid it all the same because it was chock full of story detail as opposed to stats. I'm all for more crunch as long as it's worthwhile, but good story elements are worth a lot to me, too.

And that is still one my all time favorite D&D books. I consider it one of the best campaign setting presentations ever done--and I'm not even interested in the 3e crunch anymore. The small text allowed them to pack massive amounts in and they covered just about everything except the subsettings (that they mentioned and showed on a map).

I've made peace with the fact that if I want high-level monsters, I'll have to design them myself, so it's not a huge complaint, but... one of the issues with these monsters is that they -- like many of the high-CR monsters in the Monster Manual -- are rare and solitary. There's only one Elder Brain in an illithid colony, for example. You can't roll on a random encounter table and say, "You encounter four Elder Brains!" Whereas in low-level adventures, you can make random encounter tables for every single terrain type and never run out of options.

So it's not just that we need high-CR monsters. It's that we need high-CR monsters that can roam dungeons and forests and deserts and mountains in great numbers. Almost everything that we have now -- behirs, dragons, beholders, purple worms, liches, etc. -- are rare and solitary.

This relates to my previous comments. With too many kinds of high-level monsters, the settings just won't make sense--unless they explicitly leave certain monsters out of settings. Just a bunch of high-level monsters with a protected "No Established Setting - DM Options Only" tag would be fine. It would have to be an iron-clad rule though. Monsters that explicitly will never be canonically placed in anything and are purely DM toolbox options, so the settings aren't overun into crazy unbelievability. Of course, 3rd party monster products are the perfect solution for that, since they can make whatever monsters they want, and they'll never have official presence in D&D settings.

Just read the Polygon article that goes with the preview pictures, and was exceedingly happy to see that the monstrous deities will be fully covered (well, they specifically mention the kobold deities, but I assume it will be the case for all "featured" monsters).

That will be awesome, but I'm not going to expect it. I'm still planning on picking up a pdf of 2e Monster Mythology for that.

Me thinks you are clouded a bit by nostalgia. Most of the Monster Manuals and other books from 5e have had very little quality complaints. There have a been a few books that got the short end of the straw. (My Monster manual had a few pages that were connected to each other but other then that everything is fine. None of my books have started falling apart there.)

I got the short end of the stick on some of my 5e books because of the printings I got apparently.

By contrast, I thought 3e had some of the best made books. Mine are still rock solid.

 

[Demetrios1453]

OK - now I have to get it!

I know!

What intrigues me is that it says "kobold pantheon", which is pretty surprising. Since 2e, the kobold deities have pretty much been ignored outside Kurtulmak, and even then they weren't particularly detailed outside short write-ups in Monster Mythology. Presumably we'll see Kuraulyek the urd deity and Gaknulak the kobold trap-building god, both of which were in that book. Outside that, there is Dakernok the kobold war god who appeared in a Dragon magazine article... and that's about it. Although it's not beyond reason that Volo's might update xvarts for the new edition and we'll see Raxivort the xvart deity (although xvarts could just as well be under gobilnoids as kobolds, being sort of intermediate between the two)...

It also gives me hope we'll see more on the goblinoid pantheon outside Maglubiyet as well...

 

[I'm A Banana]

Sure, I get that there are people who find value in this stuff, and I am not trying to bash those who do.

Here's the thing though - I don't need a book of plot hooks. I don't need a bunch of deep lore that may or may not work with my campaign. I don't need droll Elminster anecdotes. I just need some damn monsters.

Earlier editions understood that there were different markets for different products. They had rules-heavy monster books and more lore oriented stuff like Monstrous Arcana and Elminster's Ecologies. By contrast 5E has ... $12.50 worth of monsters packaged with $37.50 of stuff that I couldn't care less about.

Here's my thing:

How many unique monster stat blocks did you use last session?

Last session of D&D I played, it was one. Rocs.

I've seen more - sometimes maybe 5-7, if we're having a very diverse kind of night.

D&D's been out for 2 years now. If I ran a session every week and used, say, three distinct stat blocks every week on average, no repeats, no homebrews, no templates, not counting racial modifiers (so "dwarf scout" = "orc scout"), I've used 312 monster stat blocks.

That's not even every monster in the monster manual. And it's not counting running the official adventures and using their stat blocks (which, by far, has been my personal experience - I'd be surprised if I've used half the monsters from the MM).

I might be atypical...but how many monsters from the MM have you used? Like, do you have a %? A weekly average? Is it especially high?

If so, Here's 250 more. And here's 400+. Here's a load more, on the cheap.

How long do you think those would last you? Because me, I could play with these stat blocks for decades and not use them all.

5e's got more of a glut of monster stat blocks than it does any other product. There are perfectly good monsters in these products that I will just never use. Hell, that last session of D&D? It's the first time in ever that some of the table fought against Rocs! These guys have been playing for 20-30 years!

What I've got less of is inspiration, setting material, useful plot threads. Context. My campaign doesn't need to be set up to accommodate them already, they inspire me to use them in my campaign. I didn't know I'd have ceremorphs in my game until I really liked the idea of making one an antagonist!

I don't need 1,000 stat blocks (though I've got 'em!).

I need maybe 5-10 stat blocks and 100 awesome ways I could use them.

"More Stat Blocks" is a solution to the problem of "I don't have enough monsters!"

I don't fully understand why someone would have that problem at this point in time in 5e, unless they're running a really unusual group for one reason or another ("Oh, I can't use undead or humanoids or beasts, so once you remove those...." / "Oh, I'm philosophically opposed to non-WotC stuff" / "Oh, my games feature 30 monsters every night and we meet 3 times per week, so I run through these books in like, three months")

My problem is more, "Why should I use Mind Flayers when I've got 1,000 stat blocks to choose from?"

That one page gave me at least a small handful of reasons to do that.

 

[Azzy]

2e PHBs were notorious for how quickly they fell apart in my college gaming groups...

Heh, my first printing 2e PHB is still intact—the covers are beat to hell and back, but on the whole it's held up really well (and I got more use out of that book than any other D&D book before or since).

Now, the 1e Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures books. They fell apart if you just looked at them funny.

 

[Parmandur]

I know!

What intrigues me is that it says "kobold pantheon", which is pretty surprising. Since 2e, the kobold deities have pretty much been ignored outside Kurtulmak, and even then they weren't particularly detailed outside short write-ups in Monster Mythology. Presumably we'll see Kuraulyek the urd deity and Gaknulak the kobold trap-building god, both of which were in that book. Outside that, there is Dakernok the kobold war god who appeared in a Dragon magazine article... and that's about it. Although it's not beyond reason that Volo's might update xvarts for the new edition and we'll see Raxivort the xvart deity (although xvarts could just as well be under gobilnoids as kobolds, being sort of intermediate between the two)...

It also gives me hope we'll see more on the goblinoid pantheon outside Maglubiyet as well...

There were Mindflayer gods in earlier editions, but the fluff here seems to indicate that they have none, wonder if that gets explicitly retconned, or just glossed over.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

There were Mindflayer gods in earlier editions, but the fluff here seems to indicate that they have none, wonder if that gets explicitly retconned, or just glossed over.

Weren't the Mindflayer gods killed by Orcus.

 

[Parmandur]

Weren't the Mindflayer gods killed by Orcus.

Sounds plausible...? I would also expect their god to just be Cthulu.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Sounds plausible...? I would also expect their god to just be Cthulu.

To be exact I recall that Orcus killed them back in 2e. Back when he became an undead god.