JoeGKushner said:
The creatures in the new Campaign are an example of the style that the monsters follow. Page of text. Half page illustration. Pretty empty looking. Art okay, not my style.Looks like a lot of white space.
We actually chose to do that lay-out wise on purpose, dedicating at least 2 pages to each monster. Why, you might ask? Because, it's a hell of a lot easier to show players a picture of what they're facing with our book, without them really seeing any damaging game-information.
On top of that, not all monsters have "white-space." Quite a few, in fact, have the art imbedded into the text, ala MM3. We wanted each monster entry to begin on the left hand side, to make it much easier for a GM to flip through in the middle of a gaming session.
As for Andy Hopp's artwork, it's a hit or miss whether you like his style or not... however, at least we were consistant and used a single art-style throughout, without mixing and matching between a bunch of different artistic styles.
You want different, badder dragons than any other world? Pick up the Bestiary and read the Dragon entries in the appendix.
Each and every monster in the book was designed so that they would tie in with the world of the Sovereign Stone campaign setting, yet could still be used in other campaign worlds by simply adding an Alignment (since we don't use them... yeah, I know, I can hear the hollers beginning already) and swapping spells for spells.
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OTOH, I have Denizens of Darkness and I quite liked it

I'm a big ol'Ravenloft fan from way back and I think they managed to do a half-way decent job with what they had to work with. Hell, just by them putting in the Emordenung (one of my all time fave monsters) in, it was a guaranteed winner in my mind ;-)
CCI did a good job with what they had to work with. Considering they were out fast, first out of the presses and working with only a preview of what would become D&D3E, I think they did an incredible job... and CCII proved they could do great work (even if there are a lot of Blood and Bone monsters!)
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