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My Top Five RPG Monster Books
Ever since I saw Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts on my parents’ black-and-white TV, I have been obsessed with monsters – especially those from myth and folklore. In my first D&D game, I played two thief characters, both of them killed by a minotaur. In the Games Workshop printing of the basic rulebook, I saw other names I recognized, and I was hooked right away.
I still love monsters, mythology and folklore, and monster books are still among my favorite types of tabletop roleplaying supplement. In this post I will discuss some of my favorites, looking especially at what each one offers the reader beyond the basic description and stat block.
Some of these are old – very old, but then so am I! – and there may very well be newer, even better books out there that I have not yet seen. If that’s the case, let me know! The comments section is right there at the bottom of the page. I’ll look forward to reading your views, and discussing what makes a monster book good, or great, or amazing.
So here they are, in no particular order:
Monster Manual 3.5
The original Monster Manual from 1977 was a landmark product in many ways, and just about every monster supplement published since has been influenced by it. Still, the 3.5 edition is better in my opinion. This is for three main reasons:
First, each monster description includes a ‘Combat’ section which covers the creature’s combat-related abilities and its preferred tactics. This makes it far easier to design encounters and run combats.
Second, the chapters at the back of the book – Improving Monsters, Making Monsters, and Monster Feats – make the book far more than just another collection of creatures. Following their instructions, the DM can customize monsters and create new monsters, providing the sort of endless variety that will keep players on their toes.
Finally, the list of monsters by challenge rating saves a lot of trouble when creating adventures. Page for page, it might even be the most valuable part of the book.
Today, no self-respecting monster book would be without these three features, and that makes the 3.5 Monster Manual something of a milestone.
Petersen’s Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors
There are Cthulhu Mythos monster books aplenty, but Petersen’s Field Guide stands out. It starts with a jokey-looking flowchart titled “Identifying Monsters of the Mythos” which is actually very useful indeed.
Fifty-three full colour spreads describe monsters in detail, including brief notes on their habitat, distribution, life and habits, and distinguishing features. A full-page main image is supplemented by sketches and notes illustrating different life stages and other peculiarities, as well as a human image for scale reference.
The lack of game stats is both a positive and a negative feature. On the one hand, they are something that readers expect in a monster book published by a game company; on the other, their absence makes the book system-independent. There are a lot of Mythos-based games on the market, from Call of Cthulhu to Delta Green to Arkham Horror, and their various rulebooks provide game stats for pretty much all of the creatures covered here.
The book ends with an extensive bibliography, covering game supplements, fiction, and other sources. The section headed “Bibliography for Other Monsters” winks at the reader, for its contents are entirely fictional. However, it makes a great list of documents for player characters to find in-game.
One very nice touch is the provision of initial letters on the page edge. This makes it very quick and easy to riffle through to the creature you are looking for.
Old World Bestiary
I’m allowed to like this one, because I didn’t work on it. Packed full of grimdark Warhammer atmosphere, it is broken into two parts. The first presents common knowledge about various creatures, consisting of equal parts useful information, rumor, and prejudice, while the second, aimed at the GM, contains the more familiar descriptions, stat blocks, and rules for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s second edition rules.
The presentation works well enough, and although it can sometimes be annoying having to flip back and forth to find everything on a particular creature, the atmospheric material is gold for a GM who needs something to tell a player who just made a successful Lore or Research roll. Another nice feature is the appendix of hit location tables for different body plans.
GURPS Fantasy Folk
Fantasy Folk differs from a standard monster book (such as GURPS Fantasy Bestiary) in that it looks in depth at 24 races, providing enough detail on each one’s ecology, culture, and politics to create an almost endless variety of NPCs from each– and player characters too, if desired.
Centaurs, great eagles, and other non-humanoid races are covered in addition to the usual elves, dwarves, goblins, and so on. Best of all, each race is provided with a worked example of a character – essentially a detailed NPC, ready to go – and a selection of adventure seeds.
While most GMs will not use every single race in this book, it offers a solid starting-point for developing races for use in a campaign. Better still – and perhaps without meaning to – it provides a template for describing fantasy races of one’s own, which is far better than starting from a blank screen.
Buy it from Steve Jackson Games.
Trollpak
Chaosium’s Trollpak for RuneQuest was one of the first tabletop roleplaying supplements to describe a single race in detail, and it is still worth reading if you can find a copy. The boxed set consists of three booklets: Uz Lore (“Uz” being the trolls’ name for themselves) covers their nature and history, The Book of Uz presents rules and information on playing troll characters, and Into Uzdom is a selection of adventures. Also included are two more adventures and a 22” x 17” map of the troll heartlands.
Both atmospheric and useful, Trollpak sets a standard that is hard to beat even now, and anyone planning a single-race roleplaying supplement would be well advised to study it. There is much here worth plundering.
Honorable Mentions
In addition to these five, I have to mention two series of magazine articles that, to my mind, significantly advanced the art and craft of rpg monster descriptions.
The “Ecology of…” series in Dragon magazine established a very good format for looking at monsters in greater detail than the Monster Manual allowed. Sections on history (including, where appropriate, a short box on the creature’s origins in myth and folklore), physiology, psychology and society, and lair design offer invaluable information to the DM, and notes on the creature’s presence in various D&D campaign settings are useful to those who set their campaigns there. The sweetest meat, though, is saved for last: options for developing advanced versions of the creature, with at least one worked example. Like GURPS Fantasy Folk, these articles also establish a template which can be used for developing monsters of your own, which can only enhance both the monsters and the campaign setting.
Before the first “Ecology” article appeared in Dragon, though, TSR’s British arm published a short-lived magazine called Imagine. It ran to only thirty issues but contained a lot of innovative material – including the “Brief Encounters” articles. These presented a single new monster using a showcase encounter which was specially written to demonstrate everything that was new and interesting about it. Brief Encounters continued in Imagine’s even shorter-lived successor, the indie magazine GM Publications, and when most of the staff from both magazines joined Games Workshop, there was talk of re-using the format for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. However, the only published fruit of this effort was “Terror in the Darkness” in White Dwarf 108, which introduced a creature from the Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader rulebook to the Old World. More about that here.
These are my particular favorites, and I’m sure you will have your favorites too. I’m sure I have missed a great many very fine monster books, particularly given the way tabletop rpgs have proliferated in recent years. So don’t be shy – let me know about your favorites in the comments section. I’m always up for discovering a new monster book.
At some time in the future, too, I will set modesty aside and look at some of the monster books that I’ve worked on over the years, explaining what I was trying to achieve with each one and discussing how well I succeeded – or didn’t. (I did. It’s here.)
I’m looking forward to reading your comments and suggestions!
My Complete and Utter GURPS Bibliography
NOTICE
Since Steve Jackson Games is based in Texas, until further notice I will be donating all my royalties from SJG products to Texas-based organizations defending women’s rights to reproductive healthcare. I’m not blaming SJG for the laws recently passed in their home state, and it’s not a huge amount of money, but I felt I had to do something.
When I left Games Workshop in 1990, Steve Jackson Games was one of the first companies I approached for freelance work. I was attracted to GURPS because of the large number of settings it supported, especially in my favorite area of historical fantasy. Since I had studied Viking archaeology at college, the first proposal I sent their way was for GURPS Vikings. It got a very positive response, and led to more work in the same vein. A few rules additions from my sourcebooks also ended up in the core rules. Here’s the list:
Products
GURPS Low-Tech (2011) – contributing author Buy it here
GURPS Crusades (2010) – co-author Buy it here
GURPS Faerie (2003) – author Buy it here
GURPS Vikings, Second Edition (2002) – author Buy it here
GURPS Middle Ages 1, Second edition (2002) – author Buy it here
GURPS Best of Pyramid Magazine 2 (2002) – contributing author Buy it here
GURPS Best of Pyramid Magazine 1 (2001) – contributing author
GURPS Discworld Also (2001) – editor Buy it here
GURPS Compendium II (2000) – contributing author Buy it here
GURPS Compendium I (1999) – contributing author Buy it here
GURPS Middle Ages 1 (1992) – author
GURPS Vikings (1991) – author
Articles
“The Viking Dead” and “Indian Ghouls,” Pyramid #3/92, June 2016. Buy it here
“Tempered Punks,” Pyramid #3/87, January 2016 Buy it here
“The Knights Templar,” Pyramid #3/86, December 2015 Buy it here
“La Llorona,” personal blog, December 2015 Download free here
“The Nock Volley Gun,” Pyramid #3/57, July 2013 Buy it here
“The Puckle Gun,” Pyramid #3/52, February 2013 Buy it here
“The Air Loom,” Pyramid #3/32, July 2011 Buy it here
“Templars: The Fighting Priests,” Pyramid #3/19, May 2010 Buy it here
“Mummy Amulets,” Pyramid #3/17, March 2010 Buy it here
“The Vikings in the Atlantic,” Pyramid #3/16, February 2010 Buy it here
“Designer’s Notes: GURPS Faerie” View free online
“Solomon Kane,” Shadis #40, Sept 1996
“Nastassia’s Wedding,” Pyramid #19, May/June 1996 Buy it here
“Terra Incognita: The Ghost Ship,” Pyramid #12, Mar/Apr 1995 Buy it here
“Lady Mijiko’s Holiday,” Pyramid #14, Jul/Aug 1995
“Trespasser’s Isle,” Pyramid #16, Nov/Dec 1995 – View free online
“Black Dogs, Church Grims and Hell Hounds,” Roleplayer #30, 1992 View free online
“Norse Trolls,” Roleplayer #24, 1991 View free online
Other Bibliography Posts
My Complete and Utter Warhammer Bibliography (Warhammer, WFRP, HeroQuest, AHQ)
My Complete and Utter Warhammer 40,000 Bibliography (WH40K, Adeptus Titanicus/Epic Scale)
My Complete and Utter Cthulhu Bibliography
My Complete and Utter D&D/AD&D/d20 Bibliography
My Complete and Utter Vampire: the Masquerade and World of Darkness Bibliography
My Complete and Utter Fighting Fantasy and Gamebook Bibliography
My Complete and Utter Colonial Gothic Bibliography
My Complete and Utter Dark Future Bibliography
My Complete and Utter Video Gameography
Graeme Davis 