This article originally appeared in d20 Weekly
Monster Manual II
Published by Wizards of the Coast
Written by Ed Bonny, Jeff Grub, Rich Redman, Skip Williams, and Steve Winter
224 page color hardcover; $29.95
The MM is a central work in the Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition game, providing DMs with foes for would-be adventurers. The third edition of the game moved forward the "art" of monsters, providing them with more detailed statistics and methods for advancing creatures. It is in these footsteps that the Monster Manual II must follow.
As with the MM, the beginning section of the Monster Manual II includes details on the use of monster statistics blocks and special abilities. The section is more in-depth than the one in the original book, however. It contains many of the deeper aspects of monster design that were originally detailed in the oft-referenced "How to Create a Monster" article that first appeared in the pages of Dragon magazine.
The layout of the Monster Manual II is similar to that of the Monster Manual. The book has two columns throughout. The monster descriptions do not consistently begin on column or page headers, which makes the book somewhat more difficult to read than monster books such as Creature Collection II and Legions of Hell, but the use of space is much better than those books.
The interior of the book is full-color. There is a large team on contributing artists, including veteran Dungeons & Dragons talents such as Denis Cramer, Tony DiTerlizzi, Jeff Easley, Todd Lockwood, Raven Mimura, Richard Sardinha, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 2, 2002
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