4 out of 5 rating for D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual
My kids and I love this book. This book like the Player's handbook, is absolutely gorgeous. The book is extremely sturdy and well bound. The pages are well designed the layout just beautiful. The collection of monsters is great and it contains a wide variety of creatures and monsters for every level and difficulty. The editing is great, the descriptions really nice, more on some than others. The stat blocks are easy to read and standout and are part of the art of the pages it seems to me. The index is good. There are several creatures that I wish never made it in here though and wish their were others. I despise the robot like or mechanized creatures like Modrons and hope that steampunk/gearpunk, space aliens and gun stuff just does not make its appearance. To me it seems out of place in a fantasy game. I know the debate that this can create, this is just my opinion. The book could probably use some tables categorizing kinds of creatures (Giant Spiders, I remember dozens of kinds, Undead, Conjured, Fire Breathing ones, etc.) and also could use more descriptions of monster's environments, eating and lifestyles, etc. Some of the descriptions went into planes, relationships with Gods I am totally unfamiliar with, and did not offer much in way of descriptions. Pathfinder Bestiary books are the measure I am using agains these and they do a decent job of categorizing monsters, have climate and environment identifiers, charts and table that are relatively useful. I recommend downloading from the DnD website the list of monsters by challenge pdf. Overall this is a beautiful book with a good variety of monsters. I have yet to find a Monster Manual that I do not throw some monsters out and never use. This is no exception. Most manuals also do not offer all the information I want on a monster and that requires me to improvise, which is fine and to be expected. I do wish though the ones I do use a lot were better talked about: I've always been a NPC and Miscellaneous Creatures kind of DM anyway, so a lot of this book, as does most of the Monster books out there, don't have much of what I am looking for.