I just now picked this up, and I know it's been out for a couple weeks now, but I wanted to say something about it because it's kind of exciting to me.
As a long time, hard core, dragonlance fan, I was scared of this product. Honestly, I did not believe anyone could add enough to the setting to fill a book and not screw with the setting. Dragonlance is a closed world, and in order to maintain it's "dragonlanciness", most DL fans want it as closed as possible.
It's a low to moderate magic setting where a tad too much magic throws off the feel, a tad too fantastical of a monster does as well. Dragonlance creatures are fantasy, of course, but they tend to only stretch so far... any futher, and you throw the feel of the setting off.
So I purchased this book with trepidition. I am a dragonlance fan, so I was GOING to buy the book regardless of how much it butchered DL.
I'm pleasantly suprised!
The book is effectively 156 pages, though the dreaded Dragonlance margins remain. The artwork is good in places and average in others, and it's kept to a relative minimum among Monster collections, making up some of the ground that the margins lost. It's a short book, yet still costs your standard $30+, unfortunately.
The good parts, though... Cam Banks and Andre LaRoche have done an exceptional job of adding a ton of new creatures to the DL setting without upsetting the feel of the campaign a bit. Many of the monsters we've been waiting for are present... the Fire dragon, the Shadow Wight, and the Daemon Warrior all make their d20 debut, plus we have 5 new Draconians, a new Dragonspawn, 2 new dragons, and several new chaos minions. In all, there are about 65 or so creatures, depending on how you count them, plus 5 prestige classes, 26 random encounter tables, a 1 page map of the entirety of Ansalon (finally, was hoping for a poster map, but this is a start), and rules covering how well monsterous races are accepted into normal human society.
A side note, the pages seem to be of a higher gloss than usual. I'm finding this book unusually virbant and easy to read.
Let me say this: I don't expect non-Dragonlance fans too look as favorably on this book as Dragonlance fans. DL is very much it's own setting in terms of flavor, and we tend to like it the way it is. Many of us disdain Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms for being over-the-top to a certain extent.
