Mongoose's Ultimate Monsters Errata

[Jonny Nexus]

OK. So I just made the worst mistake of my Gaming Life. I just bought Mongoose's Ultimate Monsters Vol 1 (check out the review in the reviews section, the gut's WAAAAYYYYY too nice in giving it so high a score as a 2/5.)

The book's the greatest example of complete, total, absolute, uncomprimising, utter, shear, INCOMPETINCE I've seen in a d20 book. I won't bore you here, just read John Cooper's review at: (by the way I can already add 30+ errors to all those he's listed).

http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=active&reviewer=John+Cooper&product=UMV1

Well it can't be that bad - it got a higher rating (2 out of 5) than my Slayers Guide to Games Masters (official ENWorld rating of Appalling 1/5*).



*Which I believe was the lowest Mongoose score in history, something which - I confess - I take a certain perverse pride in.

 

[Li Shenron]

When I first read the 3.0 DMG a very long time ago, I imagined that one of most possible supplementary book for 3rd edition would have been a book of prestige classes - I could not imagine instead that EVERY 3rd edition books since would have had loads of PrCl... - therefore when I later heard that there was a Mongoose "Ultimate Prestige Classes" I was kind of interested in giving it a look.

I have never seen that book, but instead I stumbled upon the "Ultimate Feats" book which one of our DM had bought. I borrowed it for an evening and returned it the day after since reading that book simply brought me major nightmares. Since then I think that comprehensive books which taps from many sources should be avoided at all costs. Even if they had no errata, it seemed to me that there was no control over how the material from different sources build up together... in Ult.Feats you had several feats which gave the same benefit, sometimes one of them was outright better making the others completely unuseful in the same context. I guess that Ult.Monsters has creatures with completely uncontrolled CR at least...

 

[Ian Sturrock]

I e-mailed Matt as he suggested. He has been most helpful about the whole situation. Here, in brief, is his reply.

Matt:

"I cannot agree more. I won't go into the whole sorry tale but several things happened at Mongoose that culminated with the errors in the Conan RPG. That was a real watershed for us and we had a real staff shuffle (read: fired the incompetents)

It must be pointed out that there are two or more sides to every story. The above account is certainly less than true, and Matt knows that perfectly well. Maybe we should just leave it at that.

Although if he does want to go into the whole "sorry tale" I'm sure he would find it far more embarassing than the "shuffled" staff would.

 

[jgbrowning]

Since then I think that comprehensive books which taps from many sources should be avoided at all costs.

I'll hope you'll be willing to give our forthcoming Monster Geographica series a chance, even with your hesitations about comprehensive books. We're trying very hard to take monsters from many different sources and make sure that they're done properly. Boz is doing our conversions and co-editing it with us, so we're hoping to catch the surprising numbers of mistakes we've found in published monsters.

I say surprising, but now that we're almost done with the first one, I can see how easy it is to simply forget the little things, such as how if a creature is wearing armor in it's AC description, it should be reflected in its climb and swim checks or skill synergies. There's a lot of little things that aren't obvious, but we hope *cross fingers* that we're fixing the majority of them and we'll just have to live with the ones that will inevitably slip through and hope they're few in number.

For us at least, it's not just a monster collection book. It's a chance for another two pairs of eyes to look over and tweak each monster as well as to upgrade a lot of 3.0's to 3.5.

joe b.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Hi Vraille,

Though I did not work on that book personally, I have to confess that I was less than happy with it. As I have detailed on these forums elsewhere, Mongoose has recently undergone a _huge_ revision in procedures that mean mistakes such as those appearing in this book can never arise again. These include multi-layered editing, a vast increase in proofreaders (we now spend thousands every month on proofreading, rather than hundreds) and dedicated statistic anaylsts.

Drop me a line at msprange@mongoosepublishing.com. We'll see if there is anything that will convince you to change your mind about our current and future titles.

Regards,

I think it's great that you reply here, but where is the errata? The city of the dark elves is also in need of the 3.5 errata. When will those files be made available?

 

[JoeGKushner]

Mongoose has announced that this one of three books they are destroying. They are having a 50% off sale this week I think, but after that they will all be pulp.

While Mongoose has had some problems with their books, some have been very good.

So they're less than proud of the book and feel that it may turn potential customers off of the title and have decided to put it on sale? Can't quite follow the logic of that one.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

So they're less than proud of the book and feel that it may turn potential customers off of the title and have decided to put it on sale? Can't quite follow the logic of that one.

Makes sense as a stop-loss. At least in this particular case, there is some guarantee that the buyer is an informed buyer, aware of exactly what he's getting and unlikely to be disenchanted with his purchase.


Wulf

 

[JoeGKushner]

Makes sense as a stop-loss. At least in this particular case, there is some guarantee that the buyer is an informed buyer, aware of exactly what he's getting and unlikely to be disenchanted with his purchase.


Wulf

I can buy that. But if you go to their webpage, it doesn't mention those errors so how would you be an informed buyer as opposed to someone who just thinks, "Wow, monsters and spells on sale? Awesome!"

Monsters

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I can buy that. But if you go to their webpage, it doesn't mention those errors so how would you be an informed buyer as opposed to someone who just thinks, "Wow, monsters and spells on sale? Awesome!"

Well, that would be a different, more cynical kind of stop-loss. Let's rather assume it's an oversight or miscommunication between Matt and his webbie.

Wulf