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Coolest Monsters Introduced After the 1e Era

Celebrim

Legend
I started playing in the early 80's and much of that set my preferences as a DM for content. Part of that of course is owing to the fact that the 1e designers got to grab the low hanging fruit and do the obvious things that first come to mind when you think of fantasy. In terms of monsters the most iconic stuff like dragons, orcs, griffons, gargoyles, minotaurs, hydras, and so forth naturally was introduced first and the particular interpretations of the early designers have tended to color how we see those creatures since. Troll evokes certain images and ideas in any D&D player, even though that particular troll is just one of many different beasts that could have been tagged troll.

When thinking about the vast array of monsters that have been published over the decades, its hard for me to think of any that really caught on and became as iconic as those introduced in the 1e AD&D era. But this could just be my vantage point as a player. In your opinion what are the best, the coolest, the most iconic, and most influential monsters that have been introduced by later editions of D&D?
 

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Do Dragonborn and Tieflings count? They're iconic now, they're influential now, and I for one see them purely as monsters rather than PC race options... :)
 

Girallons - but then, I've always been a big fan of the "John Carter of Mars" series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and those are just Barsoomian great white apes with the serial numbers filed off. (Rather like osquips are merely renamed Barsoomian ulsios.)

Johnathan
 

Do Dragonborn and Tieflings count? They're iconic now, they're influential now, and I for one see them purely as monsters rather than PC race options... :)

Definitely they count. I don't like them, but I can't deny that for newer players they've carved out a niche or notch in the list of expected PC races and that they are popular with many. And one of the most iconic characters in D&D based PC gaming is a Tiefling.
 

Girallons - but then, I've always been a big fan of the "John Carter of Mars" series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and those are just Barsoomian great white apes with the serial numbers filed off. (Rather like osquips are merely renamed Barsoomian ulsios.)

Johnathan

Indeed. My first response to your post was to think, "No, surely Girallons have been around since 1e", precisely because I expected all the Barsoomian beasts to make it into 1e with the serial numbers filed off. But as best as I can tell, they did show up first in 3e.
 

To be fair, they didn't just go after the low hanging fruit...a lot of monsters were produced before 2e, even more so if you include things done specifically for B/X D&D.
 

Not sure how "cool" these are:

Twig blight
incubus (its a variant of a long standing one, but its cool that its explicit)
Nothic
Gray rendar
Shadar-kai
Arch-fey/Fey deities


And thats about it!
 

Do Dragonborn and Tieflings count? They're iconic now, they're influential now, and I for one see them purely as monsters rather than PC race options... :)

Tieflings for sure (there was even in that Avengers movie, if that's not big time, I don't know what is).

Other planescape races maybe not as much. Or maybe.
 

Not sure how "cool" these are:

Twig blight
incubus (its a variant of a long standing one, but its cool that its explicit)
Nothic
Gray rendar
Shadar-kai
Arch-fey/Fey deities

And thats about it!

Yeah, add unlike 'tiefling' you are going to have a hard time convincing me that those have been particularly influential. Cool or not, how much published material do they actually show up in? I know they pushed shadar-kai pretty hard there for a while, but was anyone actually buying?

I think for my entry I'd vote Eberron's 'Living Spell' as one of the coolest post 1e concepts, and while it might not be widely influential, I think it's probably been one of the most influential on me. In fact, come to think of it, I suspect after Planescape, that Eberron has been one of the most influential post 1e IPs.
 

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