Monster Manual 2
Regardless of edition, the Monster Manuals have always been one of my favorite parts of Dungeons & Dragons. More than simple threats, they’re also idea engines. The best of them – like the classic Fiend Folio – can inspire adventures with almost every entry. In the case of Monster Manual 2, it needed not only to inspire, but also to fill holes in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition’s selection of monsters. Those holes – like metallic dragons, frost giants, rust monsters, and other iconic creatures – were purposefully left out of the first 4th Edition Monster Manual to build anticipation and interest in the second.
It’s not a strategy that I was a fan of at the time, but I have to admit that it worked. Monster Manual 2 restores classic monsters to the game while introducing enough new ones to keep the game fresh. The monsters themselves are a good mix of terrestrial and planar threats, making it a welcome addition to any 4th Edition campaign, and an essential tool for game masters.
As promised, many old favorites have returned in the new book. The metallic dragons – adamantine, copper, iron, gold, and silver – are as physically menacing as their chromatic counterparts were in MM1. The metallic dragons share similar builds involving breath weapons, frightful presence, and wing attacks, but each has a unique power or two to distinguish them. Copper dragons are highly mobile, and can make double flyby attacks. Iron dragons are tough to damage, and have powers that make them even tougher. Gold dragons can surround themselves with a “burning tomb” that incinerates nearby opponents. They’re also the most skilled of the metallic dragons, with impressive Arcana, Diplomacy and Insight skill ranks.
While I’m sure these dragons will be impressive opponents, I wish they were a little more nuanced. I expected the chromatic dragons to be combat brutes, but I would like to have seen more magical powers (combat or utility) with the metallic ones. I miss the sorcerous abilities of the 3rd Edition dragons, but perhaps we’ll see them return with in a future Monster Manual or dragon source book.
Demogorgon is the signature monster of the new book, with the two-headed demon prince gracing the cover and garnering eight pages of content. Demogorgon’s Level 34 statblock is enough to give any adventurer pause. His two heads, Aameul and Hethradiah, allow him to take double actions each turn, and each gets their own capstone ability. The Aameul head can daze or dominate opponents, while his Hethradiah one can cause an opponent to use an at-will power against an ally.
Supporting Demogorgon is a host of allies and servitors. The Aspect of Demogorgon is an avatar that cultists can summon into the real world, and shares many of the true Demogorgon’s powers. Dagon, a demon lord who appeared late in 3rd Edition’s life cycle, emerges as the first true demon prince and the master manipulator behind much of Demogorgon’s psychosis. The book also offers champions known as Exarchs for each of Demogorgon’s heads, as well as three kinds of insane, low-level cultists who serve the demon prince. 4E is often accused of stressing crunch over content, but this section does a good job of detailing Demogorgon’s backstory and giving you the pieces you need to have his cult play a major role in your campaign.
The demon prince is not alone. A whopping 14 demonic monsters accompany him, including bebiliths, dretches, and nycademons. Surprisingly, the designers chose to make dretches level 2 Brutes instead of minions. This seems like an odd choice – if any monster was meant to be fought and destroyed in large numbers, it’s the dretch. Dretch hordes are something I always loved to threaten my party with in 2nd and 3rd Edition, but it could be difficult to run. Changing them into minions would have solved that problem nicely.
My favorite of the new demons is the pod demon, a bulbous, constantly-spewing creature which has the ability to create podspawn. But not just create them – it can spew them at enemies as a close blast effect, and detonate one to damage all opponents standing next to the thing when it goes off.
A number of devils also appear in the book, including the diabolical furies known as erinyes, infernal armor animuses, and the fate-altering misfortune devils. I wish we’d had a few more of them – demons outnumber devils two to one – but I was pleased to see so many planar bad guys added to the book.
There’s a good mix of primordial and elemental creatures as well, which is great for those of us running planar campaigns (especially when coupled with the demonic/diabolic hordes). Monster Manual 2 introduces gestalt elemental creatures combining two elements – for example the chillfire destroyer has an icy shell but a molten core; when unwary adventures bloody it, the fire leaks out, causing it to do fire damage to near by enemies. If they manage to destroy it, the monster explodes. Frost giants are back, though there’s nothing particularly surprising there – they’re basically just hulking brutes that do a lot of damage.
More interesting are the formorians. These deformed giants and would-be conquerors of the Feywild gain a number of twisted powers. For example, the ghost shaman captures uses captured souls to wound and mentally dominate its opponents, while the fomorian totemist wields a chain of severed heads. The chain can be used as a melee weapon, but each head has its own unique voodoo powers. Finally, the formorian blinder scoops out the eyes of its victims, fills them with arcane power, and then throws them at their enemies. These are great monsters with unique, memorable powers, and I can easily envision using them to run a particularly memorable (and hopefully horrifying) encounter. The monsters are backed up with an extensive lore write-up, which makes them even better.
For the most part, the returning monsters work well in their 4e incarnations, but there are a few that didn’t feel quite right to me. The duergar are a good example: the dark dwarves have always been great foils for regular dwarves, but for some reason all of them now have quills sticking from their heads and beards. I understand that 4e duergar have made a pact with the devil lord Asmodeus, and that these quills are an outward manifestation of this pact, but the quills still feel like change for change’s sake.
The giant lizard-like behir and centipede-like remorhaz are back, and both monsters incorporate swallow mechanics. It’s great to see them, but I found the swallow mechanics (with their talk of obscuring line of sight and maintaining grabs from turn to turn) to be a bit too abstract. Call me old fashioned, but I liked it when we knew exactly how many medium sized creatures you could fit in a behir’s stomach, and how much damage it would take to slice your way out again.
The legendary (and much feared) rust monster is back, but isn’t not nearly as scary as it once was. It’s still capable of destroying metal and magic items … but any magic items it consumes are reduced to residium (the magical currency of 4e that lets you enchant new magic items). Not only that, but it becomes an amount of residium equal in value to that of the weapon or armor destroyed (instead of 1/5, which is what you normally get when converting to magical dust). This is all by design – the developers wanted rust monsters to be an inconvenience rather than a campaign-altering threat – but in doing so they’ve eliminated a big part of what makes the monsters so dangerous. Any monster can threaten your life, but here’s a creature that threatens your gear!
I found the resurrected oozes to suffer from a similar limitation. We’ve got black pudding (complete with minion spawn), grey oozes and green slime. Unfortunately, they’re all fairly mundane; they don’t destroy metal, wood or flesh in a round (or three) and instead grind down hit points. It’s nice to have them, but they’re puddles compared to their former selves.
Monster Manual 2 introduces a few new tricks to 4e, and I was glad to see them. The best of these are the two-stage monsters – creatures that, when destroyed, turn into something else. Of prime example are the fey lingerers, which are undead eladrin who turn into ghosts when slain … and then the ghosts continue the fight! Twin-souled phoelarchs have a similar ability: each humanoid phoelarch shares its soul with a phoenix-like creature. If the humanoid version is killed, the phoenix appears to avenge it.
One aspect of Monster Manual 2 that I found surprising was the lack of minions. Based on my quick count, the heroic tier has seven, the paragon tier has six, and the epic tier has only one. In comparison, the original Monster Manual had 18 at heroic, 15 at paragon and five at epic. It’s a striking change, and makes me wonder if it isn’t the developers’ way of indirectly admitting that minions can be a bit wonky to run at the upper paragon and epic tiers. They’ve said as much on the D&D Podcast, especially at the epic tier, where minions become little more than sentient terrain.
Overall, Monster Manual 2 does what it set out to do: reintroducing classic monsters to the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons while simultaneously adding enough new monsters (and new mechanics) to keep things interesting. It’s a worthwhile purchase for any GM, and it’s particularly useful for those running games in which the planes play a prominent role.