By JAMES RASBERRY/Staff Writer
Foreword: This is a personal review. This article will not cover issues with the parent companies of Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. This article will focus on the content of the Monster Manual and its effects on the game itself of Dungeons and Dragons.
As we entered the new year, the third and final core books for the D&D 2024/2025 edition were released. As with the previous two books, I approached this with hopeful yet cautious optimism. After reviewing the changes and new monsters, I can say this is my favorite of the three books.
The new Monster Manual is an excellent addition to the game. Compared to the other two books, it carries vastly more content per page with a stat block on nearly every page, and just like the other books, it has beautiful new artwork to match.
Despite this, many monsters were given a fantastic new makeover, and some designs were lackluster—the primary example being a few of D&D’s icon dragons now seeming more bland and generic, particularly the copper dragon. Many monsters, even the dragons, have received wonderful new designs. Be it as it may, in the end, this has no real bearing on your enjoyment of the game or its mechanics, and any group can simply choose to describe the appearance of these monsters however they wish. Dragons aside, I will say that the new designs for many demons, devils and the undead are fantastic which do a better job showing off these creatures’ power and intimidation.
Coming back to content per page, I am pleased to say that the book is genuinely bursting with stat blocks for monsters as you’d hope it would be. After a brief introduction into how to read stat blocks, you are shown over 300 pages of stat blocks with many of the monsters now having multiple variants, allowing use of them at various levels of play. The brief section going over the layout of stat blocks and how a DM can alter them covers only five pages but does well to explain the methodology of the stat block design, allowing easy use.
However, there is still the issue of understanding CR rationing for monsters. The system still has trouble clearly defining what will be an easy or difficult encounter for a party, especially with larger or smaller groups. As if to emphasize the challenges of CR, the actual explanation for CR is not in this book but in the 2024 Player Hand Book, while the explanation for encounter creation is only present in the DMG. This issue is essentially the primary factor that does seem to attempt to require the ownership of multiple books, but even having this book and an older edition of the others should provide more than enough info needed for a DM to design their encounters.
Like much of 2024 D&D, the book still manages to raise some eyebrows with certain choices, however. The elephant in the room is the removal of orcs from the monster manual. Now, removing orcs themselves is not an issue. After all, orcs are a player option, and there are no monster stat blocks for humans or elves. However, the questionable decision is seen in that they kept monster stat blocks for kobolds and goblins and removed their humanoid trait all but removing any implication of players being able to play as these creatures much to the dismay of many a goblin and kobold player. But, just like in previous editions before they were added by later expansions it is still a simple matter to make use of the old 2014 edition or homebrew them for player use.
This does raise the topic of conversions from the 2014 Monster Manual as a number of creatures under went name changes or were removed. To assist in these changes, a table is available in the back of the book. The table addresses the name changes and the new 2025 equivalents, smoothing the transition between books. Additionally, this table should help DMs manage large encounters efficiently.
Towards that end even in regards to humanoid creatures, there are plenty of options available. These include variants of each creature, making it easy to run varied encounters with the local town guard, pirates and thieves. This is all without needing to flip to various pages in the book.
The final notable change is the removal of monsters by section such as dragons, demons and devils; instead the full book is done in strictly alphabetical order. This change may be a bit surprising initially; however, with such a universal sorting method, it takes no time at all to navigate the book as easy if not easier than the 2014 version.
As a whole between all the books released so far for the 2024/2025 edition of D&D the Monster Manual is definitely my favorite of the core books, and I can’t wait to use it at my own tables.
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