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The Advanced Bestiary is from Green Ronin, and I snatched a copy when Paizo did the big GR stuff sale some time ago. Recommended, is a collection of highly interesting templates to apply to creatures (some easy, almost on the fly, other more complex), customizing them to almost no end.
You can get it here. :-D
The Tome of Horrors is a collection of critters made by Necromancer Games, with some classical creatures not included in the first MM by WotC (and some never published in any else official 3.X book). Interesting and very nostalgic bunch of beasties.
A while ago, DriveThru had the pdf file for free download; I fear that the print copy can be hard to get (but I have not checked Amazon or Ebay).
These are two really great sources. I heartily recommend them.
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The Tome of Horrors is a collection of critters made by Necromancer Games, with some classical creatures not included in the first MM by WotC (and some never published in any else official 3.X book). Interesting and very nostalgic bunch of beasties.
A while ago, DriveThru had the pdf file for free download; I fear that the print copy can be hard to get (but I have not checked Amazon or Ebay).
You want the PDF anyhow, as it has been revised for 3.5, while the print edition was prior to that.
Tome of Horrors is indispensible if you need one of those old critters on the fly, and you need the stats THAT INSTANT (like if you're running a 1e adventure straight from the adventure, with no conversion notes). Otherwise--although I hate to admit this--I'd personally take a pass on it.
To be fair, the intent was obviously to stay as true to the 1st/2nd edition source material as possible, but unfortunately (in my opinion) that approach often leads to fairly clunky, "bloodless"-feeling conversions. I can't give enough kudos to Scott, Bozz and the others for the hundreds of thousands of hours of work they obviously put into that thing; it was clearly a labor of love for them, and the effort shows. But still, when I'm writing an adventure and want and old critter that hasn't been converted yet, I vastly prefer to stat it up myself rather than using ToH.
The Advanced Bestiary is pretty much awesome. Through one of the more complicated templates I was able to create a dire wolf/hill giant amalgam! There's many cool templates in it, ranging from strange (fleshplant) to sweet (transforming construct).
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Tome of Horrors is indispensible if you need one of those old critters on the fly, and you need the stats THAT INSTANT (like if you're running a 1e adventure straight from the adventure, with no conversion notes). Otherwise--although I hate to admit this--I'd personally take a pass on it.
To be fair, the intent was obviously to stay as true to the 1st/2nd edition source material as possible, but unfortunately (in my opinion) that approach often leads to fairly clunky, "bloodless"-feeling conversions. I can't give enough kudos to Scott, Bozz and the others for the hundreds of thousands of hours of work they obviously put into that thing; it was clearly a labor of love for them, and the effort shows. But still, when I'm writing an adventure and want and old critter that hasn't been converted yet, I vastly prefer to stat it up myself rather than using ToH.
True.
The various stat blocks and creature description are quite "barebone", without much fluff - which sometimes could have helped a lot if you just can't pinpoint the original flavor of the critter.Let's just say it's more a useful reference than a real resource.
However, I also recommend the Tome of Horrors II and III, where a plethora of brand new (very inspired and creative) monsters are provided with enough notes to fit them in your games and spark some nasty ideas.
The Advanced Bestiary is incredibly useful to have a classical monster pull a new, unexpected trick without resorting to well-known templates or class levels/HD advances.