Top 10 Bestiaries (any D&D variant including Pathfinder and 13th Age)

[Enrico Poli1]

"If you had to choose only one of your dear Bestiaries to bring in a lost island, what would you chose and why?"

Present your Top 10 for Bestiaries! Any variant D&D is admitted, so Pathfinder, 13th Age and Hackmaster are welcome.

My choices:

10) Monster Manual 3, D&D 3.5.
It presented a host of extraordinary new monsters with fantastic art.

9) Creature Collection for the Scarred Lands Setting, Sword & Sorcery, D&D 3.0.
It came out before the Monstrer Manual 3.0 and it made a terrific entrance. I love the art and the way the monsters are functional to the setting.

8) Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix 1, AD&D 2e.
For the incredible DiTerlizzi Art. Plus, these extraplanar monsters could be used in every setting of AD&D 2e.

7) Pathfinder Bestiary.
It's a polished and more artistic version of the Monster Manual 3.5.

6) Dragonlance SAGA Bestiary.
Simply gorgeous. Incredible art and first-person tales.

5) 13th Age Bestiary.
Unbridled creativity in the reinterpretation of the original MM. Masterful use of 13th Age system-features such as Escalation Die and Icon Relationships.

4) Hacklopaedia of Beasts, Hackmaster 5e.
Gorgeous art, first-person tales, a lot of incredible information such as size, footprints...

3) Monstrous Compendium Binder, AD&D 2e.
This Binder in itself has a lot of charme. Plus, I can add my favorite expansions. Come, Dark Sun & Ravenloft Appendices!

2) Monster Manual AD&D 1e.
Original Gygax. The one that started it all, the model that each iteration tried to surpass.

1) Monster Manual 5e
The art is excellent, so is the fluff, and the way they presented the stats is both concise and efficient. I think it surpassed the Original one by a very narrow margin. I'll take this one for my island vacation!

 

[Ath-kethin]

Are we assuming we have all the other books too? Cause a monster book to look at will be used differently than a monster book to use at the table.

My go to for utility is the 2e Monstrous Manual. 700+ monsters in one easy to use book, packed with social and ecological info on each one. It's still a handy reference 25 years later. The art and editing and format are somewhat inconsistent but for sheer info it can't be beat.

So that or the 5e book; 5e because I assume that's the game version I'd be playing if I was actually playing the game.

If I'm not actually going to be playing, I'm with you on the SAGA book, and I like the Hackmaster Hacklopedias (Hacklopediae?) too.

 

[Arilyn]

Definitely, the 13th Age Bestiary, because it's one of the only ones that I read cover to cover.

The old Ars Magica Bestiary, because it had so much flavour that matched the time period.

 

[trancejeremy]

Yeah, my winner would be the 2e book. I mostly run 1e but I use the 2e book because it's got everything (and the monsters are actually meant for AD&D, while many of the original MM's monsters were just from OD&D without conversion which meant they were underpowered compared to 1e characters who got a power boost from OD&D, like say, the 8 hit dice Balrogs)

The Tome of Horrors Complete is also pretty nice

 

[MoutonRustique]

I can't place them in order... (obviously, I can't write them concurrently, so they'll be in an order, but... Hell's damn it Jim! You know what I mean!)

Monster Vault : Threats to the Nentir Vale - so awesome, it's like a campaign, a setting, the pogs, and all that jazz! It's the best!

13th Age Beastiary : probably the best in terms of "mechanics are flavour are mechanics" (yes, you read that right) there has ever been.

Creature Collection - Scarred Lands, S&S 3.0 - it made me buy over 10 books I never used because it made the setting come alive so much! Plus, as a 3.0 supplement, the monsters were very well made (on the whole) - on the other hand, my book stinks! (really! ... I think it's the ink?) But it's still awesome!

Monsternomicon - Iron Kingdoms - so much cool stuff! Innovative without going into "yeah, this is weird just to be 'edgy' or 'different' ". Another one of those that makes a setting come alive (starting to see a trend?). And it had the scale reference! WHY DOES NO ONE USE THAT AWESOME SCALE REFERENCE? WHHYYYYY?

Any and all PlaneScape monster books with DiTerlizzi - for the art and the awesome cool of those unrestrained innovations.

... I have over 30 monster books (at least!). There might be some that I'm not thinking about, but then again, these poped right up - so I guess, that's the true answer.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm surprised the original Fiend Folio hasn't been mentioned yet. That was a parcel of glorious strangeness.

Beyond that, the more recent Tome of Beasts from Kobold Press is outstanding. So many creative and interesting monsters.

The Monsters of the Endless Dark - The Wanderers Guild Guide to Subterranean Organisms was a 3e D&D book that I didn't use nearly enough. Art by Andy Hopp, who would go on to do Low Life, no less.

 

[Celebrim]

1) Tome of Horrors, 3e AD&D - Probably the best D&D bestiary of all time.

2) Monster Manual II, 1e AD&D - While the original monster manual was very good, it's also very uneven and very primitive. This book uses basically the same format but in a much more refined and polished manner, making one wish they'd gone back and redone the first to the same standard.

3) The Bestiary: Predators for 3e D&D - I cannot hype this little tome by Betabunny enough. Although it covers only a very narrow slice of the monster phylum, namely just large predatory natural animals, this tome will leave you wanting all monsters covered with the same careful detail and attention. A hugely influential work on my own thinking, every DM ought to own a copy.

4) Monstrous Compendium, 2e AD&D - Influenced by naturalism, the 2e version of the monster manual offered fuller write ups of the ecology and culture of the creatures in question. While this had some value, it began the trend toward telling the DM what to do with monsters, and used up a lot of text. It was still a very good book, but it lacked the terse utility of the original and somehow despite all the increased attention to fluff, was less evocative both in its artwork and its writing.

5) 13th Age Bestiary - The best of the monsters for dummies books. Part of the recent trend of making every monster campaign defining, with profound impact over the culture and nature of the world that they are placed in. A very little of this goes a long ways, and people looking for things to sandwich into an existing homebrew will have to be picky about what they do with content like this. All said, a great book for 13th Age with some utility as inspiration outside of it.

6) Everything else - My general problem with monster books is that I buy this 200 or 300 page tome, and I'm lucky if I ever use 5 pages out of it. So I generally don't bother, preferring to quickly homebrew out any monster I need with a simple stat block and add detail later if I need to. The vast majority of monsters I need are covered by the core D&D canon anyway, and those that aren't usually don't appear in any book, or if they do depart from my expectations for the creature that were set back in the 1e era.