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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Garnfellow" data-source="post: 1819952" data-attributes="member: 1223">OK, I finally had a chance to spend several hours with a friend's copy of this book over the weekend, and upon review I think John’s 3/5 score is pretty fair. Even if there were no proofreading errors, this still wouldn’t strike me as a 5-star book. For what it’s worth, there’s <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=102263" target="_blank">a thread over in the Creature Catalog forum</a> that finds even more errors than John did. And keep in mind, the proofreading standard I'm using isn't perfection itself, it's WotC's own books. I expect the MMIII to be just as well edited as the MM.The art and flavor text are very, very nice. This is probably the best looking of the monster books. It’s so pretty, in fact, I can almost understand why people are willing to just ignore all the other problems. That charnel hound illustration in particular really caught my eye, even though the actually game stats seemed a lot less inspired.There are lots of nice swarms and several good new undead. The spellwarped template is a keeper.A huge selling point for a lot of people seems to be the Eberron support throughout the book. While the Eberron setting looks quite interesting, right now I have no use for it, so I’m not giving the book any extra credit for this angle. But I’m also not going to give it any demerits for having Eberron and Forgotten Realms sidebars. In fact, I think the MMIII designers nailed just the right balance of setting-specific details, which is always tricky.But looking past the illustrations and improved layout, I was pretty disappointed by the general selection of monsters. A lot of people have suggested that we’ve been caviling over insignificant little errors, and missing out on a book filled with brilliant content. I’m not so sure, though.There seem to be a lot of needless retreads and variants on established monsters throughout. For example: Forestkith goblin, flind, blackscale and poison shadow lizardfolk, skullcrusher ogre, prismatic roper, Ak’chazar and Naztharuna rakshasa, and then cave and crystalline and forest and mountain and war trolls.Endless variants on monster races were one of the hallmarks of 1st edition AD&D, to the point of ridiculousness. (This is a hobgoblin, but they live in the desert, see, so they have 3+3 HD and a tail attack. This, meanwhile is a hill hobgoblin, with 2-2 HD and regeneration . . .). To my mind, one of the best things the original 3e designers did was to excise all of these variant races from the core rules, and then use templates, prestige classes, and feat chains to model the variants.Another smart move was for WotC to allow Necromancer Games to make the Tome of Horrors, which gave old-school lovers a back-door chance to have all those wacky subraces updated to 3e. Sadly, Wizards couldn’t leave well enough alone. Book by book, those old subraces have been creeping back into the core game. Should the flind really be a separate race? Wouldn’t it be much cooler to have a prestige class to model these elite gnolls?Or take the Eldritch Giant, one of the more interesting entries. While it’s fine as is, couldn’t this also have been a prestige class or maybe a template instead of a completely new, fantastically powerful giant race? As a race, it probably ranks a B+. But an Eldritch Giant prestige class probably would have kicked this to a full A, giving DMs everywhere a lot more options.And then there are a lot of silly monsters that fill already occupied niches, like dracotaurs, gorilchnid (I really didn’t  much need gorilla driders in any of my campaigns, thanks.), or the quarraphon. And the snowflake ooze? What’s next, the buttercup slime and the plush pudding?And add me to the list of people who hate the newly multiarmed yugoloths.Is this a terrible book? No, not in any way imaginable. But is this a great book? I don’t think so. If it didn’t have so many errors, I would probably call it a pretty good book. But with all the proofreading gaffes, it feels more like just a pretty OK book.</blockquote>

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