Which non-core monsters should have been core?

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

Bullywug and Grell

 

[Breakdaddy]

I was hoping the Mountain Giant would be in there. Also, like Diaglo, I would like to see some of the fungii relegated back to creatures instead of hazards.

 

[frankthedm]

I'm pretty sure the first dracolich was in a Mayfair Games book, Lich Lords I believe.

They were called Night Dragons in the 1986 Dragon magazine http://paizo.com/dragon/products/issues/1986/110 , when did the Mayfair games book come out?

 

[Staffan]

Gnoll, Flind

Personally, I think Flinds and a lot of other humanoid monsters (like orogs) are redundant in 3e. Most of these came about as a way to basically keep using those monsters at higher levels, or as "bosses" for the basic versions of the monsters. In 3e, you don't need a separate monster for that, you just add some class levels. That said, you could make a case for including them as a powered-up variant in the MM, sort of like you have the Unicorn and the Celestial Charger, or both the "normal" Dolgaunt and the 4th level monk Dolgaunt in the ECS.

 

[diaglo]

They were called Night Dragons in the 1986 Dragon magazine http://paizo.com/dragon/products/issues/1986/110 , when did the Mayfair games book come out?

iirc, Lich Lords was released in 1985.

 

[Thotas]

Any monster that is part of real-world myth or legend should be core. No matter how obscure. That's banshee, catoblepas, and peryton right off the top of my head. The abishai are too cool to not be core. And the modrons ... gahhh. Want to talk about early hatred of these guys? When I opened the page to them, right about then. And every time some one tells me an anecdote about how "our group ran into them, and it was really cool, it went like this ..." I hate 'em even more. Maybe if someone rewrote them as a type of construct built by actual creatures of Lawful Neutral planes I could deal with them, but until then they don't exist in my multiverse!

 

[wingsandsword]

Banshee: It's a classic, it's something from the real world known well to non D&D players, and was one of the first things I noticed was missing.

Death Knight: Notably absent, the fighter counterpart to lich as an uber-undead was sorely missed.

Modron: The real incarnations of ultimate order, geometry personified. Oppressive ant-people out to conquer the multiverse are nowhere near as good an example absolute LN (as typically depicted, Formians are more LE wearing a LN label).

Yugoloth/Daemons: It's part of a matched set, the absence is conspicuous.

 

[BWP]

Sabretooth Tiger. It's always struck me as an odd omission.

 

[Glyfair]

Seriously, you have Succubi, why not balance them out with Incubi?

Well, by some traditions, Incubi are Succubi (since they are shapechangers). So, you could argue they are there.

 

[Shemeska]

Oppressive ant-people out to conquer the multiverse are nowhere near as good an example absolute LN (as typically depicted, Formians are more LE wearing a LN label).

Indeed. As Formians have been presented in 3e they are nowhere near being personifications of Lawful Neutrality. They're not even native to Mechanus, being refugees from Arcadia. And worse, on Arcadia where they originated, they were LN touched with LG while the expansionist 3e ones in Mechanus, as depicted, are LN heavily tainted by LE. The Formians in 3e are a wholesale species transplant to Acheron in waiting.

While I've largely ignored the Formians as presented in 3e, they make little sense given their origins, I've toyed with the idea that the 3e versions are the way they are because of the events that fostered the slide of their layer in Arcadia into Mechanus. They might eventually adapt to Mechanus, or be obliterated by either the Modrons, or more likely by the Parai, or they'll eventually be rejected by Mechanus itself as it shunts a chunk of itself, Formians included, into Acheron.