JasonKoivu

My favorite and most perused Dungeons and Dragons book of all time!

From the meager kobold...

…to the mighty Tiamat...


…the Monster Manual provided a bevy of sword fodder such as goblins and orcs, as well as easily dispatched undead like skeletons and zombies:


(I can't even begin to imagine how many orcs I killed. Stupid noisy pigs...)

Not to mention trickier specters in the shadowy form of ghosts, ghasts and, well, specters with their ability to drain the life right out of the player’s characters:



The book drew heavily from traditional mythological prototypes like unicorns, mermaids, minotaurs, and sphinxes as well as common place and less than terrifying giant badgers and beavers, right down to utterly mundane animals like deer, jackals, jaguars, wolves and whales.


***BEWARE THE SAVAGE BROWNIE!***

However, it also introduced into the fray plenty of its own bizarre creations like bulettes, black puddings, and xorns.


(I always felt like the Xorn was included just so they'd have something to put under the letter X.)

Right before the unnecessarily large section on dinosaurs (probably due to an interest D&D’s creators felt was ripe at the time) was a fiendishly enticing section on devils and demons…oh boy the pants-dance that succubus made me do in my nethers! This was back in a time when naked boobies made it into illustrations made for adolescent eyes and no one – well hardly anyone – seemed terribly bothered.

Even if maybe only half of them actually made it into the D&D games I played, all of these creatures populated the imaginative landscape of my youth during those rainy, pre-cable, pre-Nintendo days. Nightmares were packed with creatures right out of this book. The poor trees in the forest behind my house took on the appearance of ogres and giants in my mind and took a beating with my wooden sword (or a whiffle ball bat if my homemade Sting broke) as me and my buddy hacked off limbs while imagining ourselves as powerful knights or beefy barbaric warriors. Then my wife made me come in and do the dishes…I kid. Seriously though, my youth would not have been nearly as fun and exciting if it weren't for this game!