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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5238208" data-attributes="member: 15538">Not at all. I was simply pointing out that mind flayers specifically have a fair amount of setting assumptions in their description.Who? What do you mean by ream?I don't feel the same way at all. When I was eight years old, I saw someone reading a Monster Manual at church camp and I was completely intrigued by this book, the purpose of which I didn't quite fathom. Monster books have dozens of monsters, more than could fit into most MMORPGs, much less an average tabletop campaign. When you buy a monster book, you are primarily purchasing a resource that provides options, but logically, you are also buying a book 75% of which you will not use in play.That really depends. Big campaign books were just popping up around the time time I started playing D&D.I find this phrasing confusing. A toolkit is piggybacking on the work on others. I think of RPGs in much the same way as I approach reskinning or modding a game, or customizing a mini. Whatever I don't want can be cut away, replaced, or reinterpreted. "My drow are patriarchical sky dwellers" actually provides more interest in the presence of contrasting MM material than otherwise. In what way are they like the drow I know? In what ways are they different? It's the essence of what made Dark Sun interesting. Halflings were still small and food-oriented, but in Athas, that made them cannibalistic raiders. I enjoyed the full page speads in the Monster Compendium. If something sounds stupid it's a lot easier to replace it than to try to create whole cloth for every single critter in the campaign. In the absence of fluff, monster manuals make very little sense, actually. A real monster toolkit would give you lots of modular ways of designing monsters. Instead, monster books give you finished monsters, for the most part. The question then becomes, Ok, what do I do with this monster? don't get me wrong, I thought Races of the Wild for 3e was junk as a player book, because I hated the flavor, but I didn't dislike the idea of flavor itself, just that particular book. I disliked the MM IV because I thought the monster designs were vacuous and cutesy, like a blander version of the old Fiend Folio and its disjointed creature list. I disliked the maps and planned encounters and so forth. I thought monster lore was poorly implemented. But I liked the concept of throwing more into a monster writeup than some stats.</blockquote>

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