So now we come to
DMGR4 Monster Mythology, and before I say anything else I have to get this out of the way:
ZOMGILOVETHISBOOKSOMUCH
SQUEEEE!!!
Remember how much I gushed out
The Complete Psionics Handbook? Well that's nothing compared to the enjoyment I get from this! I bought my copy of DMGR4 years and years ago, and I'm quite honestly shocked it hasn't fallen completely to pieces from how much I've read it. I still pull it off the shelf just to peruse when the mood strikes me, despite having half of the book memorized. As someone who owns around two thousand print RPG products (if we include individual issues of magazines like
Dragon and
Dungeon), I like to think it means something when I say that this is in my personal top ten. Yeah, it's pure nostalgia winning out over practical functionality, but who cares? I love this book!
I mentioned back when I was going over
The Complete Priest's Handbook that this was the closest I came to looking for a generic book on deities that weren't tied to a particular campaign world. Sure
Legends & Lore fit that bill also, but its cultural trappings were too strong for me (which also the case for 1E's
Deities & Demigods). Here we got the completely original pantheons that I wanted to find, without having to splurge on a boxed set, and while fifty some-odd deities here were updated from earlier sources, more than half of them were completely new (and at the time, they were almost all new to me). And while I'd thankfully be over my search for a generic pantheon by the time that
Faiths & Avatars,
Powers & Pantheons, and
Demihuman Deities came out (that last one retreading some of the ground in DMGR4) - setting a new standard for how gods were presented in AD&D 2E -
Monster Mythology was the MVP of "god books" prior to that.
(As an aside, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention AuldDragon's
Monster Mythology Update Project. I know everyone knows about it already, but it deserves to be mentioned again for how superb it is.)
But about
Monster Mythology, I could go on for paragraph after paragraph, there's just so much to love here. For instance, there's a minor shift in presentation here from
Legends & Lore that I quickly picked up on: unlike in that book, the deities in DMGR4 are presented as existing within the holistic scope of the Great Wheel cosmology. That is, this book tacitly acknowledged that all of its gods were a part of the same setting, unlike how L&L presented its gods in the context of historical Earth. Of course,
On Hallowed Ground would put them into the Great Wheel as well (though, to be fair, D&D had assumed that all the various human pantheons were on the Outer Planes as early as the 1E
Manual of the Planes, but it was nice to get a contextualized presentation of how the various deities fit into a planar point of view). Since I didn't know much about D&D's planar setting at the time, I found those tantalizing.
I also remember being quite pleased with how
Monster Mythology took into account the new clerical spheres from the 2E
Tome of Magic, something that
Legends & Lore didn't have since it predated that book (there'd be a series in the "Sage Advice" column of
Dragon magazine, starting around issue #198 or so, with unofficial updates for the new spheres to the pantheons in L&L, but again, I wouldn't find out about that until later). To my mind, this was another mark of greater usefulness.
I think what stuck with me most, however, was just how much this put a whole lot of "big bads" into play. For all that I know a lot of people looked down on the idea of "gods as just big monsters," I absolutely
loved the idea of being able to mix it up with (the avatars of) actual gods. Of course, I came by this honestly, since D&D had been indulging in that at least as far back as
Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but I still relished the thought of crossing blades with the likes of Maglubiyet or standing up to the savage fury of Yeenoghu.
That reminds me of another point: quite a few demon lords made the jump to being deities as of this particular tome. Demogorgon, Yeenoghu, Baphomet, Juiblex and more. To this day, I'm still not sure why the decision was made to elevate them (since they weren't gods in 1E, even if the
Manual of the Planes edged them closer to that status, nor were they divinities in 3E), or why they were the only planar rulers to get that treatment, compared to, say, Asmodeus and the various Lords of the Nine.
Also, despite my fanboying out over this book, I've never been entirely sold by how small the Unseelie Court is compared to its good counterpart. Seriously, it consists of exactly
one deity! I mean, the tale of the mysterious and insidiously powerful Black Diamond that turned the Queen of Air and Darkness into what she is makes for a damn cool story (and we've never gotten the lowdown on just what the Black Diamond really is), but you're really telling me that the numerous gods of the Seelie Court couldn't take down one intermediate deity? Yeah, I know Titania doesn't want to destroy her sister, and everyone is leery of the corruptive power of the Diamond, but come on; the Unseelie Court needs more to bulk it up!
Also, fun fact: this book features the Elder Elemental God and the Dark God, the latter of whom is Tharizdun by another name, matching how he's presented in
WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. While everyone takes it for granted that Tharizdun and the Elder Elemental God (or "Elder Elemental Eye," as it was called in
G1-3 Against the Giants) are one and the same, that was a connection only made as of 3E's
Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. (For more on this, check out
this thread over on RPG.net.)
But yeah, so much to love here. Stats and lore galore, my favorite combination. This just might be as good as the leatherette series ever got.
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