Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I don't recall exactly when it was I first looked up the various Monstrous Compendia in their order of publication, but I do (rather faintly) recall being surprised by the fact that MC3 Monstrous Compendium Forgotten Realms Appendix was the first of the supplementary appendices.
That was largely due to how the Forgotten Realms had the least pedigree among the Big Three of campaign settings, i.e. those campaign worlds that got their start back in AD&D 1E (which technically more than three, but Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms had been marketed under the Forgotten Realms banner, and of course TSR's first rule about Blackmoor is that they don't talk about Blackmoor; so three it is). OD&D Supplement I: Greyhawk was the original splatbook, don't forget, and TSR had only recently put out Greyhawk Adventures (1988) and The City of Greyhawk (1989).
Likewise, Dragonlance had just released the last in its original DL series of modules, DL16 World of Krynn (even if that wasn't really part of the original War of the Lance series of adventures) barely two months before AD&D 2E had come out, with Weis and Hickman's "Chronicles" and "Legends" trilogies already having proven themselves to be hits. Finally, Dragonlance Adventures was barely two years in the rear-view mirror, and Taladas had just been introduced in the hot-off-the-presses Time of the Dragon boxed set.
All of which is to say that I'd underestimated the appeal of the Realms.
Although it only formally debuted in 1987, it's no secret that Ed Greenwood had been priming that particular pump for years via teasing glimpses of the setting in his many contributions to Dragon magazine. Whereas Greyhawk had always been defined in fairly scant terms (and remained inextricably linked with Gary Gygax in the minds of many, which may explain why TSR's leadership at the time wasn't wild about it), and Dragonlance was quickly coming up against the problem of expanding the setting beyond the War of the Lance and its iconic cast, the Realms had already proven itself to be a wide, wild world just waiting to be adventured in...enough so that it didn't feel like Elminster, Drizzt Do'Urden, Alias, Midnight, and so many others were crowding your PCs out.
Of course, you naturally needed monsters for your heroes to triumph against, and two binderfuls of generic monsters weren't going to cut it. No sir, you needed the monsters of MC3.
Except, looking back through this one...I'm not sure how true that necessarily is.
I'm beginning to suspect that a recurring theme of what I'll be talking about for a lot of these retrospectives is just how many monsters haven't withstood the acid test of time, in terms of their popularity with gamers. I'm going to try not to harp on that, especially when we get to creatures that are tied to campaign settings that have themselves been quietly retired (or given only modest appearances in subsequent editions), but it's hard not to note just how forgettable a lot of these creatures are.
But while I could go on about the lameness of the ascallion, or the bhaergala, or the burbur, or the rhaumbusun, or the vurgens, etc., the honest truth is that I think this MC hit more than it missed. While I don't think you necessarily have to have anything in this book to play in the Realms, memorable creatures such as the Oriental dragons (apparently that nod toward Kara-Tur couldn't wait until MC6), dracoliches, wemics, cloakers, svirfneblin, crawling claws, revenants, thri-kreen, and quite a few others all debuted for AD&D 2nd Edition here. Of course, this wasn't where any of them originally came from; literally, every single monster in this book had already been printed somewhere for AD&D 1E (mostly Dragon magazine), but I certainly didn't know that at the time, so it was interesting to me to see the "origin" of so many notable monsters (even if I'd first run across them in the Monstrous Manual long before I'd picked MC3 up).
And then there's the dinosaurs.
So many dinosaurs.
In his product history on the book's DriveThruRPG sales page, Shannon Appelcline posits that the dinosaurs are presented here as a nod to Chult, the "prehistoric lost world" area of the Realms. Okay, except I don't recall Chult being spotlighted back in 1989. James Lowder's Chult-focused novel The Ring of Winter came out in late 1992, and his FRM1 The Jungles of Chult was a mid '93 release. Did we really need to make sure that Chult's dinosaur population was adequately covered when MC3 came out in late '89?
Apparently we did, because they ended up getting twelve pages of coverage in this sixty-four page supplement, giving us forty-six (!) dinosaurs...and that's not counting the four pages of dinosaur illustrations, plus a two-page entry for a half-dozen Pleistocene animals that's clearly rounding out the "prehistoric creatures" shtick. When you're devoting over a quarter of your total page-count to monsters of one particular theme, it's clearly a priority. I just wish I knew why TSR wanted to spotlight that angle so much.
Overall though, I'd say that this was a fairly good showing for the first of the many, many campaign-specific appendices that we'd see. The Realms have always been the "kitchen sink" setting, and that was firmly on display here, as there are quite a few monsters that seem to be emblematic of D&D as a whole which made their AD&D 2nd Edition debut here, placed specifically under the FR banner.
Spoiler alert: that won't be the case a lot of the time going forward.
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
That was largely due to how the Forgotten Realms had the least pedigree among the Big Three of campaign settings, i.e. those campaign worlds that got their start back in AD&D 1E (which technically more than three, but Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms had been marketed under the Forgotten Realms banner, and of course TSR's first rule about Blackmoor is that they don't talk about Blackmoor; so three it is). OD&D Supplement I: Greyhawk was the original splatbook, don't forget, and TSR had only recently put out Greyhawk Adventures (1988) and The City of Greyhawk (1989).
Likewise, Dragonlance had just released the last in its original DL series of modules, DL16 World of Krynn (even if that wasn't really part of the original War of the Lance series of adventures) barely two months before AD&D 2E had come out, with Weis and Hickman's "Chronicles" and "Legends" trilogies already having proven themselves to be hits. Finally, Dragonlance Adventures was barely two years in the rear-view mirror, and Taladas had just been introduced in the hot-off-the-presses Time of the Dragon boxed set.
All of which is to say that I'd underestimated the appeal of the Realms.
Although it only formally debuted in 1987, it's no secret that Ed Greenwood had been priming that particular pump for years via teasing glimpses of the setting in his many contributions to Dragon magazine. Whereas Greyhawk had always been defined in fairly scant terms (and remained inextricably linked with Gary Gygax in the minds of many, which may explain why TSR's leadership at the time wasn't wild about it), and Dragonlance was quickly coming up against the problem of expanding the setting beyond the War of the Lance and its iconic cast, the Realms had already proven itself to be a wide, wild world just waiting to be adventured in...enough so that it didn't feel like Elminster, Drizzt Do'Urden, Alias, Midnight, and so many others were crowding your PCs out.
Of course, you naturally needed monsters for your heroes to triumph against, and two binderfuls of generic monsters weren't going to cut it. No sir, you needed the monsters of MC3.
Except, looking back through this one...I'm not sure how true that necessarily is.
I'm beginning to suspect that a recurring theme of what I'll be talking about for a lot of these retrospectives is just how many monsters haven't withstood the acid test of time, in terms of their popularity with gamers. I'm going to try not to harp on that, especially when we get to creatures that are tied to campaign settings that have themselves been quietly retired (or given only modest appearances in subsequent editions), but it's hard not to note just how forgettable a lot of these creatures are.
But while I could go on about the lameness of the ascallion, or the bhaergala, or the burbur, or the rhaumbusun, or the vurgens, etc., the honest truth is that I think this MC hit more than it missed. While I don't think you necessarily have to have anything in this book to play in the Realms, memorable creatures such as the Oriental dragons (apparently that nod toward Kara-Tur couldn't wait until MC6), dracoliches, wemics, cloakers, svirfneblin, crawling claws, revenants, thri-kreen, and quite a few others all debuted for AD&D 2nd Edition here. Of course, this wasn't where any of them originally came from; literally, every single monster in this book had already been printed somewhere for AD&D 1E (mostly Dragon magazine), but I certainly didn't know that at the time, so it was interesting to me to see the "origin" of so many notable monsters (even if I'd first run across them in the Monstrous Manual long before I'd picked MC3 up).
And then there's the dinosaurs.
So many dinosaurs.
In his product history on the book's DriveThruRPG sales page, Shannon Appelcline posits that the dinosaurs are presented here as a nod to Chult, the "prehistoric lost world" area of the Realms. Okay, except I don't recall Chult being spotlighted back in 1989. James Lowder's Chult-focused novel The Ring of Winter came out in late 1992, and his FRM1 The Jungles of Chult was a mid '93 release. Did we really need to make sure that Chult's dinosaur population was adequately covered when MC3 came out in late '89?
Apparently we did, because they ended up getting twelve pages of coverage in this sixty-four page supplement, giving us forty-six (!) dinosaurs...and that's not counting the four pages of dinosaur illustrations, plus a two-page entry for a half-dozen Pleistocene animals that's clearly rounding out the "prehistoric creatures" shtick. When you're devoting over a quarter of your total page-count to monsters of one particular theme, it's clearly a priority. I just wish I knew why TSR wanted to spotlight that angle so much.
Overall though, I'd say that this was a fairly good showing for the first of the many, many campaign-specific appendices that we'd see. The Realms have always been the "kitchen sink" setting, and that was firmly on display here, as there are quite a few monsters that seem to be emblematic of D&D as a whole which made their AD&D 2nd Edition debut here, placed specifically under the FR banner.
Spoiler alert: that won't be the case a lot of the time going forward.
Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.
Last edited:
