D&D General Index of Dungeons and Dragons Monsters?

[Echohawk]

I've seen indices of 2e and 3e monsters, but never a complete one. That would be a very tall order, especially if you include all the monsters from adventures, Dragon and Dungeon magazine, etc. Also, at a certain point, you have to decide how 'complete' you really want to be- do you, for instance, want to include things like a half-fiend vampiric gelatinous gibbering mouther as a separate monster if it appeared in one obscure adventure?

The index I linked to a few posts up includes all 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition monsters, including things from adventures and from Dragon, Dungeon, Polyhedron and Imagine magazines. It's at least 99% complete. And yes, of course a half-fiend vampiric gelatinous gibbering mouther deserves to be included if it has its own stat block!

 

[Echohawk]

Were they ever in Original Edition D&D either? I don't know if they were in an OE article in White Dwarf before the 1e Fiend Folio.

No. The first aarakocra god (K'ooriall) appeared in White Dwarf #39, in an article titled Inhuman Gods, but the aarakocra debuted in the Fiend Folio.

 

[Dire Bare]

No. The first aarakocra god (K'ooriall) appeared in White Dwarf #39, in an article titled Inhuman Gods, but the aarakocra debuted in the Fiend Folio.

Dude, that's a deep cut!

Absolutely love your index! Even with it stopping somewhere in 4th Edition, it's a great start for the project the OP seems to have in mind.

I'd command you to complete your index through Rime of the Frostmaiden . . . but that might detract from your excellent Monster ENCyclopedia articles! Definitely keep those coming!

 

[Echohawk]

Dude, that's a deep cut!

On the plus side, I pulled White Dwarf #39 out of the cupboard to double check that reply, only to discover that there was a picture of K'ooriall, so I scanned it and added it to the aarakocra article.

 

[the Jester]

The index I linked to a few posts up includes all 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition monsters, including things from adventures and from Dragon, Dungeon, Polyhedron and Imagine magazines. It's at least 99% complete. And yes, of course a half-fiend vampiric gelatinous gibbering mouther deserves to be included if it has its own stat block!

Okay, I am impressed- I just learned that the chagmat got incorporated into the Creature Catalogue. I did not know that before, and I love those guys. The adventure that originally featured them is one of the first adventures I ever ran, and I've converted them to every edition since.

 

[Orius]

If you're talking everything from the original 3 books to the most recent monsters published for 5e, and including stuff from the classic D&D line, that's huge. I'm redoing a list I used to have, just primarily covering 2e and 3e, and it's going to be pretty big. 46 years worth of monsters is going to get nuts, especially if you don't just do things that only appeared in a single edition, but a single magazine or adventure reference. D&D has a lot of monsters that just never caught on.

 

[khantroll]

Yeah, it's going to be crazy, and almost certainly never be finished. The idea is sort of like a monster encyclopedia; something I can search and have all of the data on on a thing. Right now I have something similar, in that I can use search apps and search through some pdfs and stuff I have saved from websites, but that is like searching your work email for something vs actually having something documented.

In the case of the aarakocra, for instance....I could cobble together notes from their appearances: stats, combat tactics, religious notes, ecology, magic notes, etc, and it'd be right there when I looked it up for a game.

As it sits right now, I'd grab my copy of Complete Guide to Humanoids, and then off to either search my pdfs or to google.

 

[khantroll]

I had never heard of a Chagmat...had to google that one. I might have to spring that one on my players

 

[Voadam]

So your project is to compile all the data from multiple sources into one document so you can have one compiled place to go to for reference?

That could be a big project for just one monster let alone trying to be comprehensive.

I did something similar but with just d20 stuff back in the 3e days, copying and pasting monster entries and NPC stat blocks from the srd and my PDFs into one word document so I could have monster stat blocks and descriptions in one document for searching. It quickly grew to be huge, the last I added to it according to the file date was in 2013 and it was over 4,500 pages long then and it was not even that many sources (hadn't gotten to the Tomes of Horrors stuff or anything from Pathfinder). Pulling it out here is the list of sources I have listed for myself in the beginning:

SRD 3.5, SRD 3.5 Psionics, SRD 3.5 Epic, SRD 3.5 Divine, SRD 3.0, SRD 3.0 Psionics, Draft SRD Cuts, d20 Modern, d20 Arcana, d20 Menace Manual, d20 Future, Beyond the Ebon Mirror, Bodies and Souls, Abyssal Dragon, Portable Hole Full of Beer, Kids Coloring Book O Critters, Librum Equitis Compiled, Crimson Contracts, Son of a Portable Hole Full of Beer, Thee Compleat Librum of Gar’Udok’s Necromantic Artes, Arcana Societies of Magic Web Enhancement, Arcane Strife, Armies of the Abyss Preview, Lands of Conflict, Complete Minions, Minions Rebirth, Spells and Magic, Gamma World Player’s Handbook, Ravenloft Gazeteer V, Oathbound Campaign Setting, The Little People, En Route, Complete Guide To Beholders, Book of Eldritch Might, Book of Fiends Web Enhancement, Book of Beasts, Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary, Asgard 2, Asgard 3, Asgard 4, Asgard 5, Asgard 6, Second World Sourcebook, Alien Anthology Web Enhancement, St. Johns College of Abjuration, Dryden Hero or Horror, Everyone Else, Dread Codex, A Question of Honor, A Question of Loyalty, A Question of Honor Web Enhancement, Aberrant d20, Adventure d20, Trinity d20, Aztecs, Endless Sands, Nile Empire, Doom of Odin, Ragnarok, Twilight of Atlantis, Legacies 1, Guildcraft, Contagion, Caldor, Lore of the Gods, Thrilling Tales, Into the Green, Into the Black, Into the Blue, Arcane Class Shaman, Men in Black, Dread Codex 2, Posthuman, Buccaneers and Bokor 1, Buccaneers and Bokor 2, Buccaneers and Bokor 3, Buccaneers and Bokor 4, Buccaneers and Bokor 5, Buccaneers and Bokor 6, Buccaneers and Bokor 7, Foe Factory Modern, Victorian Monstrosities, Mars, Minions of Mars, Pulp Villains Thugee, Adlatum, A Final Fantasy, Villains Rebirth, Order of the Gilded Rose, Bloodfangs, Thunderfists, Horse Mashers, Classes and Races of Cthonia, Ave Molech, Suddenly Encounters, Imperial Age Faeries, Adventure Blocks City Watch, Faeries, Alchemy and Herbalists, Neiyar,

You might want your document to be segregated by individual monster types so that when you search for information on orcs you could go to the orc entry and not get bogged down by aarakocra entries that reference orcs, then bugbear cross-references to orcs, then goblin references to orcs and so on before hitting the main orc section.

 

[khantroll]

So your project is to compile all the data from multiple sources into one document so you can have one compiled place to go to for reference?

That could be a big project for just one monster let alone trying to be comprehensive.

I did something similar but with just d20 stuff back in the 3e days, copying and pasting monster entries and NPC stat blocks from the srd and my PDFs into one word document so I could have monster stat blocks and descriptions in one document for searching. It quickly grew to be huge, the last I added to it according to the file date was in 2013 and it was over 4,500 pages long then and it was not even that many sources (hadn't gotten to the Tomes of Horrors stuff or anything from Pathfinder). Pulling it out here is the list of sources I have listed for myself in the beginning:



You might want your document to be segregated by individual monster types so that when you search for information on orcs you could go to the orc entry and not get bogged down by aarakocra entries that reference orcs, then bugbear cross-references to orcs, then goblin references to orcs and so on before hitting the main orc section.

When I started this last time that's exactly what I did: copied and pasted stat blocks and articles per monster in alphabetical order as a I found them. This time I'd like to do it a bit more concisely and methodically if possible. Or, as I think about it, maybe not. Maybe just with tabs to signify edition breaks or something.

I'm trying to decide how I want to do the indexing and cross-referencing. My initial plan was just a searchable, tabbed encyclopedia broken down by letter. Volume A would be a PDF containing monsters starting with A and their subtypes, each entry would be tabbed, etc.

The idea of cross-linking entries is good. It could be as simple as a hyperlink to a list of goblinoids for instance.

If it stayed broken up into volumes, though, it might be better to merge them under types. So Bugbear under Goblinoid...

For all of the above, a locally hosted website with pages akin to Echo's Monster Encyclopedia pages might be a better way to put all of it together then a pdf.