This book will make you want to run a new campaign NOW

I’ve been a huge fan and follower of Kyle Latino’s youtube channel and various works for some time now, and I was excited to finally read through Monstrous. It’s incredible and if you’re enough of a nerd that you’re reading this blog you should stop what you’re doing and go buy it now.

Reading with a DM’s eye, the mark of a good RPG book (no matter the subject, whether it’s core rules, a supplement, or something else) is whether or not it makes you want to start running games, and every chapter in Monstrous is like mainlining inspiration.

It starts with a brief, simple passage about monsters as metaphors which leads into why cosmology is important before laying out Kyle’s simple cosmology. This beautifully frames the rest of the book. 

My favorite part is the brevity of the opener. I’ll admit, I was nervous at first when cosmology came up immediately as that can be a rabbit hole for new DMs (it certainly was for me), but it was handled so well that this turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Kyle’s own cosmology is demonstration of how DMs don’t need to have it all figured out. You can keep it simple, mythological toplines which guide how you make world-building decisions as needed. Oddly enough, this paralleled a recent Bob World Builder video on Dungeon Ecology, but enough about that, this is a book review dammit!

From there, Monstrous lays out broad archetypes (Brutes, Dragons, Celestials, etc) and simple mad libs-style tools to craft your own, along with bullet points of inspiration to go with each section. Then there are three examples of each type followed by inspirational tables at the end to craft your own.

Read that description, I haven't wanted to run orcs this badly in years

These sections take “stock” monsters like orcs, werewolves, dragons, sentient bugs, and turn them into mythically motivated, unique creatures that beg for interaction. It’s all system neutral, thought there’s plenty of inspiration that organically led to mechanics in most systems I’ve encountered for enterprising DMs (that said, I do think it would be uninspired to use Charisma checks against a dragon given how evocative and full of character the dragon parlay sections are).  

The best part about this was how the descriptions of each creature lead the reader to real RP scenarios. Orcs were a great example. They are cursed creatures bound by a pact to find fuel for their monarch’s ever-burning forge. The problem: the monarch has been dead for ages and their soul is bound to a slag-throne. 

This reframes the humble orc in a way modern D&D or Pathfinder books don’t. Most of the big games are obsessed with delivering mechanical variation with their monster manuals, which is neat and can occasionally make me excited to design an encounter with novel mechanics, but that’s a small part of the game. 

The way Monstrous deals with creatures communicates world-building and requires engagement from the players through exploration, research and roleplay, and (maybe) combat; in other words, the whole game. It also leaves openings for non-lethal encounters as most of these monsters aren’t looking for a full party wipe; they have goals, and once those goals are met, they’ll leave (but they’ll be back to cause trouble and disrupt the natural order). 

These monsters are problems at different scales. Ignoring a werewolf or group of orcs will mean slow horror and disruption for a village or maybe across farmland. Ignoring a chimera could mean trade routes are impassable or no one can hold a wedding in this region. Ignoring angels or raising the ire of a dragon will mean cities burn (or become chimera infested, or turned into mirror-craters, fungal forests, or other dope scenarios).

This is the essence of roleplay for me. Creatures that cannot be met head on and solve using information on your character sheet. They are creatures that force players to interact with the world and fully utilize the potential of the medium they’re engaged in, an RPG. 

And this is what I mean when I say this book makes me want to run a campaign. When I read about the orcs, I wanted to have a little village dealing with this orc problem, but that also meant having some ruins with this throne. Then I got to the Red, Red Ribbons, and this made me want to have a Ravenloft-esque region of the map where no one accepts the coin of the realm and you can’t quite understand why. Chimeras can offer obstacles to travel, and Imposters offer organic explanations for dungeons that world-build along the way.

Now THIS is a fucking chimera

That’s just the static components. Monsters like Liches, Mobs, and Outsiders may have cults (or be cults) that are disrupting the status quo. This offers dynamism. As the PCs become bigger players in the world and exert their influence, maybe they start disrupting the status quo, earning the ire of Dragons or Celestials that count on things remaining as they are. 

These were just the thoughts I had while doing a first pass at the book. It’s awesome, and the art is beautiful. I’m going to leave you with three things I loved and three things I was a bit more “meh” on, because I believe in balanced reviews:

Great!

Goblins and Orcs - This book offers incredibly fresh takes on the most basic of fantasy creatures, and these were two prime examples. Orcs as a faceless horde finding wood for a pointless fire is both tragic and terrifying, while goblins being creatures made from the spite (and spit!) of children (along with broken glass) makes D&D’s favorite joke horrifying again

Celestials - Angels should be more than a sack of hits points and rigid adherence to an alignment. These celestials are terrifying and alien. Monstrous offers you enough juicy details to run an entire campaign arc based on a celestial, from a prophet calling down plagues to the arrival of the entity to a mission to appease (or somehow defeat) an otherworldly force.

BUGS! - When I first read this section, I was like, “Bugs, really?” But boy oh boy, was I wrong. This was perhaps the most atypical section in that it took creature which have largely fallen out of favor (the 2E MM had tons of different critters stat-ed up, but 5E/2024, not so much) and totally revamped it. This section left me feeling that any setting which lacks a strange, blue-orange morality hive of oddly proficient craftsmen would be incomplete. The book is worth it for the bugs section alone.

Meh

Repeating text - In most sections this passed notice, but some of the creatures are a victim of the format. All creatures follow a template, and in some sections there are nearly identical blocks of text repeated 4 times (once in the template and three times for the example creatures). For Celestials and Dragons I barely noticed this, but the Assimilate and Adapt subsections for Imposters was virtually word for word, and that felt like a wasted opportunity.

Speaking of Imposters - I really loved the creatures in this section but they just didn’t connect with me thematically. The examples given felt like they had less connective tissue between them than the others. This could just be personal preference, but I want to emphasize that I still liked the monsters individually and would totally run them (albeit with some modifications). 

In Conclusion

This is a great book. As I wrapped it up, if left me wanting to start a new campaign in a new setting just so I could incorporate all the elements in this book. It would work for 5e, but with all the player options 5e gives you I’d probably prefer to adapt it to Shadow Dark, Knave, Mork Borg, ICRPG, or another ruleslite d20 system that is a bit more inherently deadly than 5e. That said, it would work great for EZ d6 as well.

Go get this book!