Review: The Monster Overhaul

tl;dr: its great, if you are in any way generating your own games, get it.

If you are in any way generating your own games, don't even bother reading this review. Go get the Monster Overhaul. It is so useful.

I backed the Monster Overhaul quite some time ago but I write this now, very late to the game, because I finally got it to my own tables so have earned the right to speak. Since then I have been staring at it for a while trying to properly express what it is that makes this just great.

This is an operating manual for a school, a style of gaming. There are terse instructions about how this is all supposed to work but this is a practitioners guide, not an instruction manual. You get the fruits of a movement of gamers and bloggers trying to figure out what is the most useful tool they could have and then creating it.

Noted as a practical bestiary, it says it is "designed for at-table utility." In place of a standard bestiary with a page per critter with all its stats, you get concepts to support running that critter. These entries do not have hundreds of words of detailed, repetitive stat blocks but something more of the old school with stat lines of maybe two sentences. The rest of the space is then given to tons of context - everything you need in the run up to ever drawing steel on this monster. Less stat block, less of the fight-focus and more 'how it turns up in the session'. You are given the hints and clues to bring it to the table - "the space for you to think" as it says in the introduction.

This book is great for pulling off the shelf when you are thinking of using any given critter and looking up some ideas about how to spruce that critter up and make it interesting. Absolutely tons of ideas in here, the distilled wisdom of some people who have gamed hard and thought about how to support that gaming for others. The monster entries are more streamlined so you will need that notch extra of understanding to interpret them but once you are past the point of just wanting to use a critter as-written every single time, then this is your advanced text.

The whole thing feels almost fractal - the contents page doubles up as a random table - d20 categories of monsters, roll on that, then roll on the next thing - lower dice for less weird possibilities. Parts interlock, one monster serving as the reference for the treasures of others or for behaviours etc. There is a level of layout and depth of design that I think is simply a quantum leap beyond anything else. I imagine this was also a heartbreaking amount of effort so we should treasure this example that we have.

The book itself is lovely too. You get standard book paper in here with black and white printing and good margins because this is a book to be written on, annotated and used at table. Multiple artists keep things interesting - the different sections get a different artist each. Inside of the covers, we get a whole bunch of random tables for things like generic creature upgrades, where to find useful sidebars, how your reaction rules are going to go, reasons for an encounter, where the encounter happens indoors and outdoors. These are mirrored inside front and back covers to make it useful from cover to cover. A beautiful artefact of a book - chunky, heavy, distinct. I will be loathe to actually scribble on my copy but it is going to end up festooned with page-markers and post-its.

So what have you actually got in here?

Seven pages of Introduction including jargon, stats and effects, how to use random encounters and the definition of monsters
Three hundred odd pages of the monster overhaul itself split into twenty categories:
1 People (32 pages)
2: Dungeon (24 pages)
3: Dragons (18 pages)
4: Thinking Beasts (16 pages)
5: Heraldic Beasts (12 pages)
6: Primeval (12 pages)
7: Elemental (14 pages)
8: Divine (20 pages)
9: Dark and Malign (18 pages)
10: A Wizard Did It (20 pages)
11: Spring (10 pages)
12: Summer (12 pages)
13: Fall (10 pages)
14: Winter (10 pages)
15: Hostile Forests (12 pages)
16: Hot Plains (10 pages)
17: Mysterious Mountains (10 pages)
18: Stormy Seas (12 pages)
19: Strange Water (14 pages)
20: Science Fiction (16 pages)
Fourteen pages various indices close it out

The meat of this is the chunky chapters by theme - dungeons, primeval, "a wizard did it", hostile forests, etc. For each entry you get some generic layers - the base 'old school' stat line of numbers, armour, move, attacks/damage - plus additional information focused on how the monster turns up at table - appearance, voice, wants, intelligence. These are half-dozen word thumbnails that do all the heavy lifting of a paragraph of 'monster ecology' and situate the critter in-world and also in its game-role. Then for all the different entries you get beastie appropriate random tables. Few entries have even similar *types* of random tables reflecting the huge variety of concerns of different monsters and their place in the campaign e.g. your Mandrake has a variance table and a little recipe while your Tunnel Hulk gets purpose, motivation and special attack.

The sections are set up differently because you run different types of games in those different cases. Broadly there are a few groupings of the sections by type - the People section, environment themes (Dungeons, Plains, Seas, etc.), monster themes (dragons, bizarre things in 'a wizard did it', elementals, divine, etc.) and then what I think of as 'campaign mood' (spring, summer, fall, winter, Science Fiction).

The first big one is the "People" section because here we get all of our occupations - mercenaries, peasants, merchants, cultists - along with what they are likely to be up to. These function as your behaviour generators for all kinds of settlements or occupation-driven activity by any other more fantastic things you might run into. Mixed in you get all sorts of useful bits like a generic world map and a generic cult lair with all of the cultist, heraldry generators for the knights, reasons the mercenaries may not fight, landmarks in the peasant villages and so on.

For the 'environment' sections "Dungeon" showcases the general approach of batching monsters by 'purpose at table' - all the miscellaneous odd beasts are grouped as dungeon vermin to reflect their purpose mostly as challenges on the way to whatever the players goal is but liches get sub-tables for omens, minions and a generic lair since they are likely to be a driving force behind the dungeon as a whole. We also see our first examples of 'variety additions' for the more generic monsters - goblins, skeletons - which is great for making monsters that ought to be quite common interesting on repeat encounters.

To take an example, instead of having to choose a bunch of distinct undead monsters, with slightly different fiddly stat-blocks, you can effectively do an all skeleton dungeon and it is still interesting because Monster Overhaul gives you lots of little wrinkles to make those skeletons different. You can then re-spice and run more similar encounters - those skeletons are centaurs, so fast and lancers, those are archers, those are armoured - which I like a lot because with that commonality and repeated encounter you can start to layer in the weird stuff - like the skeleton-mimic or the dryad "wearing" bones on their ivy-form. We get the tools to keep the base monsters interesting so that we can then shuffle in the really sneaky surprising stuff.

For the monster focussed sections "a wizard did it" showcases the approach - many of the monsters have different names but will be familiar to most - the eye tyrant for example. Each of these is quite different and so the supporting tables address a lot of things - from Mind Easter Eater artefacts to the creator of this homonculus, mutation tables for the mutants and features of these golems. We get lairs for some that could be easily used for others too.

In "dragons", representing their iconic presence, we get a variety of sizes and how those show up in the campaign and a bunch of different dragon-adjacent things like kobolds. A small dragon might be an ally or a minor threat, an ancient dragon is effectively weather.

For the 'campaign mood' sections we get collections of wildy diverse critters grouped by how they capture the erupting potential of spring, the high heat of summer, the last frantic action of fall or the bitter depths of winter. Initially these puzzled me as groupings but on reflection I find them helpful, useful for when the major parts of the campaign are in place - you do not need more sites - but the seasons are turning or some event is wreaking change - and these sections provide good fodder for throwing a curve-ball into a running campaign. You get a some nice goodies in here too like the little generic swamp hex crawl at the back of summer.

Then we have a bunch of indexes at the back which are 20 odd pages with comparative heights, a split by challenge rating, an index of celestial things, who could give advice, and who could be decent retainers. We get a schematic of a generic mega dungeon, which is a two page spread with a campaign's worth of play just thrown in there, gratis.

Throughout, all these serve as useful randomizers for everything that is in here with lots of cross references to other tables. Together it makes a vast spark list to be your at-table super-source and a great help for session prep. This is the equivalent of shorthand or a scientific formula - if you know how to read this, it is incredibly information dense and you can unpack whole sessions, whole campaigns from just a few pages.

Wrap up

As has been said by lots of others already Monster Overhaul is just great. This is the collected wisdom of the funkiest minds of the OSR at about the 10-year mark. This thing came out in 2023 after Kickstarting in 2022 so 5 years after the efflorescence of ideas from the G+ community, collecting and distilling out the battle tested nuggets of wisdom. The only people that the Monster Overhaul perhaps is not for are those folk running by-the-book only. Some folk might want to do 'ironman-esque' 5e campaigns with only monsters-as-written to just ring that bell. Monster Overhaul is going to be less for them - though I would argue still useful for all the motivations and game-world info.

The book is both inspiration and utility toolkit, made as a gameable thing to help DMs at table. I myself have been slow in bringing this into use because there is just so much in here it took me a while to get my head around it (and thus bring to table or write this review) but I would counsel learn from my mistake and do not to let that stop you. In the same way you would not expect to read any Monster Manual cover to cover before using it, pick this up and get stuck in with 'People' and whatever section feels appropriate for your campaign - Dungeon or one of the other terrain based ones. Cross-references will lead to connections and will bring the whole book into focus through use.

As I said above, this is a practitioners handbook for a certain style of gaming, one less concerned with the full-page stat-block and more with what leads up to the use of that stat-block. If you see this in the wild, grab it, you will not regret it.

For more reviews see: Rob Wieland on Enworld, The Holy Roller Substack, randomrpgreviews or Portals & Pegasi (just the Elements section).