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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010673" data-attributes="member: 18387">Review of Monster Manual Two    This is the eagerly awaited second monster book that Wizards has put out.  It is better then the first one, however, the bar on these types of book has been raised by the great production of books like Creature Collection Two, Legion from Hell, and the Monsternomicon.  The Monster Manual Two is not as good as these books.  The other books have a higher level of creativity and more information per monster.  Monster Manual Two seems to be an odd collection of monsters that have no relation to each other or anything.  While this is the same format as in Monster Manual One, I feel that in the two years in between these books the goal of a Monster Book has changed.  I also feel that many of the monsters in this book are just not that interesting.  When I read through a book of monster I believe as I read through the entries I should be thinking of encounters and ways I can use this in my game.  I want to be excited about flipping the pages, but that did not happen in this book.  In this book as I read through it I found my self wondering if these monsters will add anything to a campaign.    The book starts off with a very good section of explaining everything one needs to know to creature creatures and all the special abilities that goes with them.  They rewrote a lot of the stuff in the original Monster Manual and cleaned it up a lot.  This section is excellent and will help anyone that wants to create monsters on his or her own or tinker with the current ones.  It then goes through the stat block and the rules for advancement.  These rules are all well done and are greatly needed.  This is by far the best section of this book.  A read through of this section will help any one in using and understanding all the abilities of the varies monsters in not just this book but others as well.          For the most part, the monsters in this book are of a higher challenge ratings then the first Monster Manual.  There are nine creatures, excluding the dragons, with a Challenge Rating higher then 20.  This was intentional to support higher-level characters and higher-level challenges.  It would have been nice if they had including rules for using the Epic Level Handbook with them, though.  Wizards does not have to make books require anything except the three core rules books, but it would be nice if they would include footnotes for those of use with more then the core rules.   While many of the creatures have a high CR rating, I wonder if some of them truly warrant a CR as high as they are given.  Many of the high CR monsters have one or two really low saves,  low AC, low SR, or some other game mechanic that will make it for characters of the correct level to have an easy time with the creature.      There is the usual wide variety of creatures in this book.  It seems that the writers even went out of their way to make sure there are plenty of undead, plant, and construct creatures in this book.  This does provide a wide range of strange creatures to use, but by increasing the number of strange encounter it will only make the strange seem mundane.      Abeil: This is a race of bee like humanoids.  They are expansionist that expand but do not revolt to combat; instead they prefer to push others out of their territory.  There is a small section on their society.  I think this section should have been expanded upon and could make this a more dominate race in many worlds.    Boggle: This is a silly little creature that steals and runs from fight.  The picture is ridiculous and looks like something from Saturday morning cartoons.  There are not many creatures like it, but in a book designed for higher CR creatures this really does not fit.    Bogun: This is an odd little creature that seems to be solely here to give Druids a new type of weird creature ally.  I’m not sure the purpose of this as they are not that useful or interesting.    Dragons, Gems: These creatures are one of the few highlights in this book.  Many people enjoy using Dragons and it seems that one can never have enough dragons.      Elemental Weirds:  This is another good set of creatures.  There is one for each of the four elements.  Theses creatures are known for their divinations.  Each element has an area that it can make predictions on.  This shows the creativity that Wizards people still have and I would have liked to see more creatures that can serve a purpose other then killing machine.    Linnorm: These are an ancestor to the Dragon.  However, they seem to be a dieing race and there are no lawful or good versions.  An interesting little story, but fluff like this should really be up to the DM because it might not fit his campaign world.  I like that Wizards made the attempt however, I think they did it poorly.  It reads more like a hint or a blurb of things to come.  This information would have made a better side bar as a way of using these creatures.  They also could have included stats for younger versions and other types.  Also, if they must place this type of back-story it would be nice if they would complete it.  AS it is now, it’s an incomplete little blurb that really does not help anyone.      Mudmaw: This is a crocodile with tentacles coming out of its mouth.  It seems like a creature that some random abilities and tentacles were given to.      Wyste: This is a large wormlike creature that lives in slime.  The creature is Twenty-five feet long, so the sheer amount of slime must be the size of a lake.  That seems rather large for a pool of slime and those are not that common in any campaign world.      The art in this book ranges from extraordinary like the Tempest, too cartoonish like the Teratomorph.  A few of the creatures do give ECL’s for them, so they can be used as PCs.  For many of these creatures it would be nice if the actual racial bonuses would be given.  Many of these Ecls are very high and can only be used in games that border on the epic.  Another chance for them to include a small sidebar to tie this book with the Epic Handbook.  Last in the book are the templates.  These seem okay and useable.  The Chimeric Creature template will make for interesting monsters to surprise PCs and the Deathknight is one that many PCs will demand to play.      Overall, I was not happy with the creatures in here.  Many of the creatures are just there to challenge players.  They are eating machines that are expected to be killed or to kill.  This is a book to look through and to stock dungeon crawls and hack and slash games.</blockquote>

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