The MCDM Monster Book - built around 'action oriented monsters' - the revamp of the 5e monster manual that MCDM has been talking about for a while prior to launching the kickstarter. I backed it since I agreed with the thoughts about some of the issues and was interested to see what solutions they came up with.
Gorgeous book, great art, slightly glossier, lighter paper than the standard WotC book but it makes a bigger book not take up more space. The dust cover really makes it stand-out on the shelf. All the little quality elements are great - sewn pages, ribbon, dust cover - the finish is very good. Getting my hands on a copy here in Europe involved shelling out ridiculous shipping fees but in for a penny I guess.
So what is all this stuff you get in the book?
Introduction - 28 pages covering concepts used and design principles
Creatures - 264 pages of bestiary monsters
Environments - 54 pages of terrain specific stuff
Villain Parties - 44 pages with a selection of antagonist NPC parties
New Psionic Powers - 3 pages of psionic powers
Going through this chunk by chunk we start with Introduction where we get a bunch of new tags - often round-ups of things that come up a lot in base 5e such as the 'flanked' condition, or 'save ends at [time]' to compress down commonly repeated rules. The rest of this section describes a block of new mechanics that collectively form a '5e mod' that tweaks the game towards the 'action oriented combat' style. First roles - similar to MMORPGs or 4e - that a monster can fill - skirmishers, controllers, ambushers, etc. Then mounts and retainers, minions for villains and how to use them, and general guidance on encounter building.
There is also a set of ancestry traits for the various groups in the book so that you can rip and replace the ancestry of any monster you particularly like to convert it easily to another group. For me this harks back a little to the 3.5e days where building a monster was a long day surrounded by rulebooks and crumpled sheets of paper but nice to have the work done for you should you wish to go down that path.
The main block of the book is 264 pages of monsters, grouped by ancestry, each set typically coming in at a range of CRs and having a handful of roles within it to give encounters a certain flavour. Each stat block has got the standard 5e stuff then continual effects, actions, bonus actions and reactions listed beneath. Most of the monsters in here will be familiar - Voiceless Talkers and Overminds standing in for famous copyrighted tentacled monsters - but all of them reworked to give them more actions to be distinct. This tells more at the lower CR end of the spectrum - orcs are about endurance and tenacity with powers to get advantage on saves, force attacks to target their blockers, and hammer their foes with damage spells. Goblins are nimble with lots of ways to duck in and out of combat and move around in a fight. Gnolls lay out lots of attacks but also push and pull their foes around. Each set of foes has their own range of minion,ambusher, artillery, brawler, etc. fitted to their theme so they each have a full toolkit for whatever the tactical situation is.
This is the part of the book you will love or hate - you get your full range of combat archetypes within each group tweaked to their particular groups strengths and approach to a fight - but each is slightly different so to get the full use out of them a DM is going to have to study up beforehand and then keep their wits about them operating a full suite of new monsters for each encounter. On the one hand, the range of archetypes mean you could run a full campaign against orcs and have every encounter be both different and thematically orcish so you would build familiarity, but on the other hand that implies you would be using a small section of the whole book - and surely you want to use as much as you can?
Moving away from the humanoids and other creatures that operate in groups you have lots of big monsters too who get suites of villain actions to balance the 5e action economy. On the one hand this is great to make monsters menacing but it does this by giving each one lots of things to track. I have a lot more time for the villain actions, reactions and bonus actions as those are ones you can keep an easy eye out for the triggers. The passive things like Mummy Dust dealing poison damage to anyone nearby when a mummy is injured by piercing or slashing is trickier - while thematically nice the specific trigger makes it something hard to keep in mind and rewinding to go 'oh, you should have been...' is less than ideal.
The Environments section is full of traits and terrain specific lair actions to add to your combats along with a handful of terrain specific monsters. The traits are interesting in serving to make being present in an environment feel distinct to other locations and the lair actions could also serve as minor encounters and traps. There are a few battlemaps within the section too. Some of the traits just bolt on to the creatures - acid resistance for swamp dwellers - others give more broad reaching effects that might want to be introduced on entry to the terrain. Again these are more buttons, and adding them into the game might require a little cunning - some minor stuff on the terrain to show the environmental traits before diving into a fight on the terrain that leverages them. For a DM, I see post-its with the relevant traits and elements being helpful.
Villain Parties gives us seven villain parties at every two CR levels from 3rd to 15th. Villain parties get Party Actions similar to lair actions but shared amongst the villains present. We also get some advice on dramatically presenting villains and sensibly handling evil folk at the table. For each villain party we get about six pages - some neat art, a background paragraph on each of the NPCs, their goals and methods, signature magic items and the stat blocks for each of them. Each party is also thematically tied to a terrain type - urban, forest, graveyards - and there is enough meat in their background stories to set up a lot of game time running them to ground before a big final fight.
New Psionic Powers are fifteen spell-like powers that are additions for The Talent which is MCDMs psionicist class. They appear associated with a specific creature within this bestiary, and nice to have them collated here. Neat if you have a Talent, not taking up a great deal of room if you don't.
Wrap up - this is a good book for the 'moar!' style of gaming - more buttons, more in the stat block, more specific monsters to do specific things. If this complexity sounds good to you, where you and your table are comfortable enough with 5e that you could happily layer on what is effectively a big block of combat house rules, then go for it. I can see myself using this in moderation, mostly for ease of tracking at table and because I no longer have the kind of prep time to set up the intricate encounters that this is a toolbox to build.
I like this book a lot, I am glad someone out there put some thought on this problem of making different groups feel distinctly different in combat. I am not sure I will be taking it to table myself, but I can see folk getting a lot of mileage out of it - and if this does sound like your style of thing then the gorgeous art and attention to detail in here makes it a very nice bit of kit to have on your shelf.
For other reviews see Tribality.
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