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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7393765" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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