P.H. Dungeon's page

The Bestiary is a very attractive looking monster book, filled with lots of great art and interesting fluff, and some fun new monsters. However, as far as the monster stats go, there are very few changes to the actual monsters themselves. They are essentially just reprints of the monsters from the 3.5 MM. The 3.5 monster manual has been around for a long time now, and there has been plenty of time to figure out which monsters work well and which one's need some changes/improvements, so am I not noticing many? As a quick example- the pit fiend, while it does have neat new power called devil shaping (which is useless during combat as it takes 1 minute to use), still doesn't have enough hp to keep it standing for more than a couple of rounds against the average 20th level party, and it's regeneration is only 5. If you are going to create a new game, why not change a few things to make it better than its predecessor?

There's no middle of the road reviews on this one. People either love it or they can't stand it. I ran my first session of it yesterday, and our gaming group had a blast. It still felt like we were playing dnd, and there is just a much room for story and rp as ever. Our belittling warlord was a testament to that. He knew how to get a fallen soldier back on his feet.

I do admit that the books are heavy on crunch and lower on fluff, but these are the core rule books, and crunch is what I want in core rule books. If I want a lot of fluff, I'll open up my classic monsters revisited. As it turns out I can still use all the good stuff in there with my 4E game. How weird.