D&D General D&D monsters that have been changed the most over time

[Ruin Explorer]

1) Actually exercise discipline over the art. There was a lot of variants in how artists did kobolds over the years, which spawned a lot of confusion. But the text descriptions in the monster books (like the 2e Monstrous Compendium Volume 1) gave them "dog-like" heads and scaly bodies. Compare the canonical 1e MM image and the canonical 3e MM image, and tell me how much changed other than art style?

I mean, I'd say a lot had changed myself. Prior to 3E there was no clear indication they were even "reptilian", per se. They're scale-y, sure, but this is D&D and lots of things are, and they have horns, and are consistently drawn in a non-reptilian way. I can't think of a single "reptile-style" kobold prior to late 2E/early 3E. You can even see a dog-nose on the example you have from 1E, and ears! The 2E description from the MM doesn't mention them as reptilian at all, just scale-y (they lay eggs, but so do some mammals), but they have "rat-like" tails, smell, like dogs, yap like dogs, and so on.

Whereas in 3E, we basically have a humanoid dinosaur (procompsognathus-inspired), with tiny horns for the sake of acknowledging it's a Kobold, having lost the ears, mammalian nose (or flat face of some of the 1E/2E kobolds) and ratlike tail, and so on.

Re: Draconic I guess the big change with 5E is that they clearly decide "Okay, they're reptilian" and abandon the mammalian characteristics they previously had. Hence them speaking Draconic not their own language or Orc/Goblin. So not draconic out of the game, but solidly reptilian out of the gate.

So then given their association with dragons from Dragon Mountain, and Meepo and so on, we see the actual decision is somewhere in the 2000-2003 range as confirmed by Race of the Dragon (not sure why Mongoose's book would matter - they had no special insight did they? Or did WotC people work on it?).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In 3rd Edition, they keep nasty and hate giants too. But, they shrink from Large to Medium. In 2005, we get the option to play gnolls, because Drizz't did it so why not? Is that why they had to shrink?

Gnolls (including Flinds) were first playable in 1993, with the Complete Book of Humanoids. Unlike some, PC Gnolls may be of any alignment, too. I mean, technically we can still blame Drizzt, because even by 1993, he was a thing (indeed in some ways he was more "a thing" in 1993 than 2005), but I very much doubt that's why they shrunk. I suspect that was simply because Large meant a hell of a lot more in 3E, mechanically, than it did in 2E.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

I think someone had an entire thread about all the 4e setting lore on rpg.net it was more detailed than you might think.

The default 4E setting was ostensibly started out as a bare bones setting that DMs could customize as they saw fit, but in practice the sheer amount of content released during 4E's short lifespan filled things out pretty quickly. What made it unique, though, is that in an effort to try and keep the Material Plane (or mortal world, as it was more often called in 4E) relatively undefined, a lot more detail was given on the rest of the multiverse and its denizens. Details about the world itself were often hidden away in books dedicated to PC options like the various "x Power" books and magazine articles. It wasn't until after the Conquest of Nerath board game that articles about different nations in the world and a world map were presented; before then, fans of the implied setting hunted references and collected them piecemeal.

A poster on RPG.net created a good number of Let's Read threads that compiled information, and there are others available there as well:
Let's Read 4E Setting Lore
The Complete Guide to the World Axis
4E's Faces of the Planes
Let's Read 4E Monster Articles
Let's Read 4E Racial Supplements

 

[Yaarel]

The default 4E setting was ostensibly started out as a bare bones setting that DMs could customize as they saw fit, but in practice the sheer amount of content released during 4E's short lifespan filled things out pretty quickly. What made it unique, though, is that in an effort to try and keep the Material Plane (or mortal world, as it was more often called in 4E) relatively undefined, a lot more detail was given on the rest of the multiverse and its denizens. Details about the world itself were often hidden away in books dedicated to PC options like the various "x Power" books and magazine articles. It wasn't until after the Conquest of Nerath board game that articles about different nations in the world and a world map were presented; before then, fans of the implied setting hunted references and collected them piecemeal.

A poster on RPG.net created a good number of Let's Read threads that compiled information, and there are others available there as well:
Let's Read 4E Setting Lore
The Complete Guide to the World Axis
4E's Faces of the Planes
Let's Read 4E Monster Articles
Let's Read 4E Racial Supplements

It reminds me of how Greyhawk came into existence. What began as random incompatible options, eventually evolved into an "everything is true" systematized canon.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Nightmares have had some interesting variations. The beyond-excellent Power Score RPG has a good article on them, A Guide to the Nightmare, though the author does note they seem to be an underutilized monster.

Interesting to see that the nightmare went from an emaciated horse with only flaming hooves to an impressive steed with flaming mane and tail.

The 3E Monster Manual established the existence of greater, Huge-sized nightmares called cauchemars (which is the French word for nightmare). Pathfinder retained the cauchemar but made it more unique by making the ability to enter the Ethereal Plane an exclusive trait of cauchemars rather than all nightmares.

In 4E, all nightmares are said to be the progeny of two immortal parents: Sin's Reward, the greatest nightmare of the Nine Hells, and Thunder of Hooves, a huge, many-legged nightmare that roams the Abyss. When the urge takes them, the two travel to the Shadowfell to mate, the resulting foals split between those that follow Sin's Reward to the Hells, those that follow Thunder of Hooves to the Abyss, and those that remain in the Shadowfell. 5E presents a simpler but more wicked origin for the nightmare: they are pegasi whose wings have been torn off in an evil ritual.

I'm not certain which origin I like more. The defiled pegasus angle works for me, but I also like the idea of Sin's Reward and Thunder of Hooves (though there's no reason the pair couldn't still exist as unique nightmares even with the defiled pegasus origin).

 

[Hussar]

For all the hoopla over 4e's changes to the races, 5e makes a LOT of flavor changes to races. Kobolds are now a slave race to dragons. Minotaurs are completely rewritten. The Basilisk got a LOT more spikes and a color change and suddenly can be trained and domesticated. If you actually start doing some side by side comparisons, 5e is a major reworking of pretty much every single monster.

But, for me, the biggest change of any monster is the Piercer becoming the Darkmantle.

 

[Richards]

Funny you should mention that. When I was writing "The Ecology of the Darkmantle" for Dragon, I immediately made the connection between the two species but wasn't allowed to formally acknowledge it at the time. In my mind, everything that had come before (in previous editions) should still be true, but the WotC team was more of the position that this was a whole new game and that things that were once true could easily be reworked - like infravision becoming darkvision. (At the time, they hadn't yet decided whether the Demiplane of Shadows was going to be an actual plane or remain a demiplane so I wasn't allowed to mention it and my idea of piercers being warped on the Plane of Shadows and returning to the Material Plane as a new species was nixed.) But with the small handful of new monsters being introduced in 3.0 I was provided (I was writing my article with only the bits of draft documents that would eventually become the three core books for 3.0), I went with the darkmantle specifically because the very first "Ecology" article ever had been "The Ecology of the Piercer" and I thought using the darkmantle for the first 3.0 "Ecology" had a nice symmetry to it.

Johnathan

 

[the Jester]

I don't think this is a trend over time, but just the effect of edition maturity. The 1st edition MM only had basic elementals, xorn, salamanders and invisible stalkers.

Um, aerial servants, wind walkers, sylphs, djinni, efreeti, and water weirds, too- and that's off the top of my head.

 

[J.Quondam]

I've noticed that almost all monsters are much more colorful now than they were back in the 1e MM.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

For all the hoopla over 4e's changes to the races, 5e makes a LOT of flavor changes to races. Kobolds are now a slave race to dragons. Minotaurs are completely rewritten. The Basilisk got a LOT more spikes and a color change and suddenly can be trained and domesticated. If you actually start doing some side by side comparisons, 5e is a major reworking of pretty much every single monster.

It is kind of funny that 5E in terms of mechanics was a step back from the changes 4E made but in terms of lore has itself become pretty different. There was probably an expectation that 5E would continue on from the lore that 3E had carried over from 2E, but instead it made changes such as yugoloths being commissioned by Asmodeus rather than the original fiends (when even a late article in 4E, the edition where most yugoloths were folded into demons, mentioned that the yugoloths were rumored to have once been the first fiends who eventually got subsumed into demonkind).

Late 4E did a bit of work trying to establish the default setting as sort of an alternate timeline version of the older established lore for the Multiverse. The article that reintroduced the Modrons even included a portion about how their progenitor, the Prime Architect, attempted to transform the Elemental Chaos into discrete Elemental Planes before being thwarted.

Speaking of the modrons, here's the quadrone in 1E, 2E, and 4E: