Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jannica Thales" data-source="post: 2566974" data-attributes="member: 33331">Monster Manual 3The Monster Manual 3 (MM3) is a d20/D&D monster supplement for a fantasy campaign.  The back of the book suggests that a DM needs the DMG as well as the PH to use the MM3.  But while the MM3 could technically stand by itself, I wouldn’t use it without the 3.5 Monster Manual.  The Monster Manual is centered around story needs for fantasy gaming, while the MM3 is more of a meta-gaming book. The MM3 is hardcover, 224 pages, and the interior artwork ranges from the high-average to sublime.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, WotCs books are nothing else if not pretty.  On the Enworld review sub-site, John Cooper does a masterful job of handling editing and technical issues with the book, so I won’t duplicate his effort – not that I could – so instead I’ll focus on my impressions and the use I envision this book seeing in a standard fantasy campaign. I had originally planned to tackle this book monster by monster and give my one-sentence impression of each.  I put the kibosh on that once I got to the new dinosaurs.  There is a wide variety of monsters here, though the book is light on demons, devils, dragons, and celestials.  So I don’t honestly envision a game that uses both the Poison Dusk Lizard folk as well as the Slaughterstone Behemoth, the former being a race of lizard folk that – wait for it – use poison and the latter being an underground fantasy robotic rhinoceros.  Though I would imagine that the Eberron setting might use both, I say that not as a person who has read much of the Eberron book, but rather as a person who has read the MM3 and sees a tremendous amount of Eberron references. The MM3 takes great pains to integrate itself with Eberron, though nods are given to the Forgotten Realms as well.  A friend of mine has the Eberron Campaign Setting, and there is reprinted material between the ECS and the MM3.  That’s not a bad thing – especially if you play in Eberron – and I rather like the idea of a separate paragraph or two given to WotCs settings rather than drop the setting within the monster description. So, unless you’re an Eberron junkie, you’re simply not going to get full use out of this book unless your homebrew game suddenly sprouts Warforged and other icons Eberron.  This isn’t bad, but it is one of the reasons keeping me from giving the book a 5/5. What monsters are here have an excellent range of diversity, but they don’t so much replace the MM as they do compliment it.  The range of Challenge Ratings is great, they skew low, but that’s what templates are for.  Some of them are quite creative, such as the Ephemeral Swarm, undead incorporeal rats that act as a swarm.  The Girsgol is a construct made of defunct magic items, that makes for an excellent vault guardian, the only quibble being that there are a lot of constructs in the MM3. The Living Spell template is utterly fantastic, I love it even though it’s one of the imports from Eberron and if you own the ECS you already know about them.  While the history behind the Living Spell won’t work for most campaigns, you can change the description out and make for a great set of new monsters, so you could have a fireball Living Spell instead of a fire elemental, just to switch things out on your players. There are several giants and trolls presented.  I’m a little lost by some of them.  Why not give a troll a few levels of fighter than use a War Troll?  Likewise, what’s wrong with a giant having levels in Wizard rather than use the Eldritch Giant?  There would be slight mechanical differences, true, but enough to warrant a whole new monster? It was when I got to the Snowflake Ooze that I had my revelation about the MM3 and why I wouldn’t recommend it as a replacement monster book as opposed to a supplemental book.  Do we really need an ooze that does cold damage?  Especially when we’ve already presented the Living Spell template that could be applied to Cone of Cold?  Well, you do if you’re trying to fill all the gaps in the MM and cover meta-gaming needs.  So we have a nice selection of plants, because the MM goes light on them.  We have exotic mounts that the MM lacks.  We have a new race that has monk as a favored class.  We have at least one monster doing ability score damage to each of the six base attributes --  I found the one for Charisma, the Visilight, to be a little silly, but whatcha gonna do? Conclusion: This is a good book.  I liked how they had monster tactics for some of the more challenging ones to run and the MM3 is better than the MM at integrating monsters with character classes, but it’s clearly meant to support the MM and it’s aimed at an Eberron game. I disagree with other reviewers that the technical and editing issues are a severe detraction.  However, they do exist, and if you’re a DM with an argumentative group that can be a hassle.  I don’t believe that books should be written in such a way that a moderately dysfunctional group – and what’s a gaming group without it’s share of eccentrics? – wouldn’t have a problem when using them.  That’s the whole point of buying a book rather than coming up with ideas yourself.  So I can’t give it a 5/5. I do think this is a 4/5.  There are monsters in here that I wouldn’t use and I’d have preferred to see their removal in exchange for an extra template or two, but this isn’t about me.  The MM3 is a solid supplement and as long as a DM is treating it as such, it should make a good purchase.</blockquote>

Verification