Leatherhead
Possibly a Idiot.
As you all have likely heard by now, there is a new D&D book available as part of the D&D Rules Expansion Gift Set. A set of 3 books intended to be used as supplementary materials to the core trio of 5th edition rulebooks (the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide, for those people who got to this page via a search engine or other means without context).
Two of the books in the gift set (Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything) are reprints of the same books with updated errata and rules changes. The third book, Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, despite having a similar name to a previous book (Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes) is not a direct reprint. While there are a multitude of recycled monsters and player races from 5 different books (in fact, nearly everything was originally found in some other book), WotC changed them in many ways. These changes, plus the fact you can’t buy the book outside of the gift set until May, have made it one of the more controversial books in the 5th Edition.
Personally, I bought the Alternate Cover Gift Set, mostly because it happened to be in stock at my FLGS, and I already have a collection of alt-cover books for 5e. The alt-covers for this set and the box they come in are gorgeous, if you are into that kind of thing. Unfortunately, my copy came with a printing error, making the stat block for Moloch hard to read. This may or may not be unique to my copy, as I wasn’t able to find any similar complaints after doing a quick internet search.
The main draw of this book is that it is a “sneak peek” into what to expect from the upcoming Revised Edition (or whatever name will be given to the rules update that is coming 2024ish). The monsters have overhauled stat blocks with different mechanics, and changed lore to better reflect their position in the D&D multiversal setting (as opposed to the worlds from which they originated from). Likewise, the player races have received new mechanics and lore, but I won’t be delving deep into those changes, as there are hundreds of pages worth of discussion covering the races on this forum alone. Instead this thread will be focused on the majority of the book, the monsters.
That out of the way, I will say I am a bit annoyed at a rule known as the “PHB+1” Rule. Popularized in the Adventurers League (The official format for organized D&D play, which you are likely to find a group for if you go to your local game store, given they are operating in these times of course), this rules philosophy stipulates that the mechanics for a character must be contained in no more than two books (with exceptions abound, to aggravate the situation further). This rule annoys me because of the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion. An official D&D PDF and supplement to the adventure Princes of the Apocalypse, that you can get for free, which contains previous iterations of a few of the races in this book, and a slew of spells not found in the PHB to complement them. While the races made it into Monsters of the Multiverse, their spells did not. Instead, those spells made it into the other books in this gift set! So, despite being able to buy the gift set and get the total package of spells + races and/or monsters to use said spells, and despite said spells being available for free in an official PDF for you to download come May for the people who only want to buy Monsters of the Multiverse when it becomes available outside of the gift set: The monsters and races in this book do not use the Elemental Evil Spells, even when they were originally designed to do so.
For the WotC staff that may eventually stumble upon this thread, I am blowing this a bit out of proportion (as demonstrated by the length of the previous paragraph), but seriously though I want to be able to use the Elemental Evil cantrips more often, they are flavorful and fun!
With over 250 monsters inside of the book, I will be talking about the monsters in the alphabetical groupings presented, and posting an index to jump directly to the monsters you want to read about as they get posted. Feel free to chime in between posts with your own musings, interpretations, and encounter ideas.
Book Abbreviations:
DMG: Dungeon Masters Guide
MM: Monster Manual
VGtM: Volo’s Guide to Monsters
MToF: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes
PotA: Princes of the Apocalypse
ERftLW: Eberron: Rising from the Last War
MOot: Mythic Odysseys of Theros.
BG: DiA: Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus
OotA: Out of the Abyss
Two of the books in the gift set (Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything) are reprints of the same books with updated errata and rules changes. The third book, Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, despite having a similar name to a previous book (Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes) is not a direct reprint. While there are a multitude of recycled monsters and player races from 5 different books (in fact, nearly everything was originally found in some other book), WotC changed them in many ways. These changes, plus the fact you can’t buy the book outside of the gift set until May, have made it one of the more controversial books in the 5th Edition.
Personally, I bought the Alternate Cover Gift Set, mostly because it happened to be in stock at my FLGS, and I already have a collection of alt-cover books for 5e. The alt-covers for this set and the box they come in are gorgeous, if you are into that kind of thing. Unfortunately, my copy came with a printing error, making the stat block for Moloch hard to read. This may or may not be unique to my copy, as I wasn’t able to find any similar complaints after doing a quick internet search.
The main draw of this book is that it is a “sneak peek” into what to expect from the upcoming Revised Edition (or whatever name will be given to the rules update that is coming 2024ish). The monsters have overhauled stat blocks with different mechanics, and changed lore to better reflect their position in the D&D multiversal setting (as opposed to the worlds from which they originated from). Likewise, the player races have received new mechanics and lore, but I won’t be delving deep into those changes, as there are hundreds of pages worth of discussion covering the races on this forum alone. Instead this thread will be focused on the majority of the book, the monsters.
That out of the way, I will say I am a bit annoyed at a rule known as the “PHB+1” Rule. Popularized in the Adventurers League (The official format for organized D&D play, which you are likely to find a group for if you go to your local game store, given they are operating in these times of course), this rules philosophy stipulates that the mechanics for a character must be contained in no more than two books (with exceptions abound, to aggravate the situation further). This rule annoys me because of the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion. An official D&D PDF and supplement to the adventure Princes of the Apocalypse, that you can get for free, which contains previous iterations of a few of the races in this book, and a slew of spells not found in the PHB to complement them. While the races made it into Monsters of the Multiverse, their spells did not. Instead, those spells made it into the other books in this gift set! So, despite being able to buy the gift set and get the total package of spells + races and/or monsters to use said spells, and despite said spells being available for free in an official PDF for you to download come May for the people who only want to buy Monsters of the Multiverse when it becomes available outside of the gift set: The monsters and races in this book do not use the Elemental Evil Spells, even when they were originally designed to do so.
For the WotC staff that may eventually stumble upon this thread, I am blowing this a bit out of proportion (as demonstrated by the length of the previous paragraph), but seriously though I want to be able to use the Elemental Evil cantrips more often, they are flavorful and fun!
With over 250 monsters inside of the book, I will be talking about the monsters in the alphabetical groupings presented, and posting an index to jump directly to the monsters you want to read about as they get posted. Feel free to chime in between posts with your own musings, interpretations, and encounter ideas.
Book Abbreviations:
DMG: Dungeon Masters Guide
MM: Monster Manual
VGtM: Volo’s Guide to Monsters
MToF: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes
PotA: Princes of the Apocalypse
ERftLW: Eberron: Rising from the Last War
MOot: Mythic Odysseys of Theros.
BG: DiA: Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus
OotA: Out of the Abyss
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