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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5295942" data-attributes="member: 78116">I have also had time now to fully digest the Creature Catalog, which is really good. It's one of my favorite monster books by far, not just because it's another host of excellent creatures that use the MM3 stat block and have some decent fluff. Some of the creatures though really confuse me, like the Mekillot, which is supposed to be this horribly ferocious thing but it looks obscenely cute (even their 2E art does). Of course it is bigger than a house so maybe it is more terrifying in 'person' than it is from looking at its art in the book so there might be something I'm missing there. Dark Sun also has a good helping of things I would just describe as "delightfully goofy" monsters, like the cactus that makes zombies and the other one that runs people down.The solos, looking at them look like they need some help though. Unlike MM3 solos and some of those being published now like the new dragons - they seem to be very under-action economied. They don't have a lot of specific protections to daze, dominate and stun - which is pretty disappointing and are loaded up on lots of standard actions (which due to the above, they are unlikely to get many of). While they are designed nicely, they will definitely need some powers to help out with being stun-locked and similar. Especially because many of them are epic tier. The elites actually work a lot better than the solos because of this.Not all the solos are like this though, one makes tentacle minions to help out and you can easily play with the number of minions to make him one very tough cookie. The advantage of the minions is that they protect his action economy easily (as technically the tentacles are a part of the solo monster, not separate creatures) and force the PCs to choose between attacking the solo or the tentacles. Additionally this even rewards PCs with area/burst powers, something that often gets overlooked in a genuine "solo" fight. It's easily one of the most evocative and well designed solos in the book: a fantastic model for anyone who wants to run a Kraken type encounter in a normal campaign as well.There are some gaffs though, one of the arena/gladiator monster power swaps is ridiculously poorly worded. It's supposed to allow saves against effects that a save can't end, such as stun and daze. Unfortunately whoever wrote the power made it an immediate reaction, making it completely useless against most of these powers and effects anyway. It's a bit of mystery why it was done like this, because it makes the power pretty useless as it will never actually be used on anything that it wants to be used on. On the other hand, some of the theme powers are terrific, like the elementally infused powers and the sunwarped mutations (even has a random table!).Overall I approved very much of the creature catalog and I can definitely see Dark Sun monsters being refluffed and moved into my other non-Dark Sun games as well.</blockquote>

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