There was a good few books put out for 4e under their horrific GSL licence, right at the start. Almost every company that tried it put out one book, and then stopped, because they did not sell. Because 4e is a bad game, and the people who liked it were house ruling like never before. I'll do a "what happened later" at the end.
The 4th edition D&D Monster Manual
It's terrible. In every way an RPG book can be bad, this book is bad. Well, nearly, the binding apparently holds up well, it's physically able. Content, it compares very poorly to the 1st edition Monster Manual, the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual, and the 3rd edition Monster Manual. I rate it below such tragic wastes of a tree as the Pathfinder Bestiary 6 (which is at least very pretty and has stories).
It wasn't a huge surprise that this book would be one of the worse ones. The 3e MM IV and MM V were bad books, like 60 monsters you wouldn't use anyway in 200 pages of pointless word count, much like the worst of 2nd edition there. But also that they had everything about 4e already present.
The art is ... I don't even. Some people like it, for its grimy brown "even the fire is dull and smoky" aesthetic of dark creatures in misty shadows on dark backgrounds, with back lighting. They are wrong. If you're ever thinking of art in a reference manual with images of what things look like, consider, the first thing folk do IRL is pin their sample to a white board under a bright light so they can see what the fucking thing looks like.
But there's layers of wrong in that front-of-the-book art piece. Even McDonalds wouldn't get away with calling it aspirational. There's 11 actual monsters vs 3 PCs, which doesn't work. One of them is an epic Solo Soldier, which doesn't work. Do any of these monsters even work together? Hahahaha, welcome to 4th edition, you are attacked by a scorpion riding a frog (except not riding it, because mounted combat doesn't work).
The example statblock says monsters are simple to use and easy to find everything on, the explanation of everything in that pic takes them just five pages!
Then you turn the page and find the Aboleth Overseer making it all super complicated for no benefit at all. An Elite with 348 hp, and you're supposed to fight his friends the 200 hp Aboleth Lasher and 128 hp Aboleth Slime Mage too (so it can just use Enslave every round, I guess, but honestly Lashers are far stronger use of encounter budget because the worst bit in there is just being Dazed and taking damage), plus a few minions in the form of Aboleth Servitors, who aren't even Aboleths, nor are they Skum, because the game has decided to ignore everything about the game's history, on top of everything else.
3e's Aboleth slime you to make you take damage from leaving water, and give you the ability to breath water if you stop fighting them. That's good monster writing, it's a critter PCs can interact with who's obviously going to just casually enslave them, and also it can cast a Dominate Person if they annoy it. 4e's just beats you up and a side-effect of your death is they can paint your corpse the same way things used to work.
They could've easily had a L18 Aboleth with 6+ recharge on dominate vs anyone, tentacles that give you the slime curse, and an aura that gave you water breathing. A level 10 Solo Aboleth too with some reactive or area attacks, and some Skum minions at about L14 in between them. Except of course the
original game design was based around nothing outlasting an encounter! Once they saw that as a bad thing, it was too late to salvage the Monster Manual. Like, the game could have replicated all the classic D&D monsters within the new format, but their encounter-only game design made concepts like "you're all gunna work for the Aboleth for a while" no longer fit for purpose.
And that severely limited their initial monster designs down to "it hits you again, have a condition (save ends)".
Abomination have nothing to do with each other. Individual monsters are at least one page though by the new format, so here they saved a whole page by putting five unrelated types on four pages. This is later wasted with massive amounts of white space and ludicrous monster choices.
The Tarrasque is quite fast and you cannot fly near it because arbitrary magic is magic. The main problem though is it is a level 30 Solo Brute, so has 1420 hp, and you'll spend a long-ass time often missing but sometimes hitting it for 30 damage a hit. Possible no one actually ever finished that fight, it would take many, many hours, and is not interesting along the way.
Angel and
Archon in 4e all became a pile of no one even gives a fuck. Officially they wanted everything in the MM to be fightable, because everything is only ever a single to-the-death fight. Unofficially someone was fervoured enough to force their very specific Christian theology into the game without even bothering to justify it. Andy Collins, was it? Anyway, you also can't summon these guys as buddies because the game would explode, because it's crap.
seankreynolds wrote:To those of you involved in the decision to do this to the archons, and other inexplicable changes for the sake of change, I apologize for calling your design choice “stupid.” I meant to say “super-stupid.”
Azer make you ask what's the difference between Archons and Azer now, and the answer is the Azer are like -1 to hit, but +1 damage. They are the same things using the same abilities, right next to each other in the book. It's all so bad.
Balhannoth first appear in 3e's MM IV, probably transplanted from here. For this new stuff, Lore checks, right? Useful? DC 20: After it teleported to attack you, you can roll that to know it can teleport to attack. DC 25: It's an elite, so never found in large groups, which you can know when you find it not in a large group. DC 30: This is what you roll to know it was
not making any sound when it attacked you without sound.
People paid money for those Knowledge DC tables. Seriously. That is garbage. I get it's a dumb beatstick because it's 4e and everything's a dumb beatstick, but maybe just stop writing.
Banshrae pre-introduced in the 3e's MM V, these are insectile humanoids with no mouths who explicitly cannot sing or play wind instruments in 4e (DC 25!). Their attacks are still made
with blowguns. One of the designers was clearly not on board with the edition goals. That is a little "this game is really stupid and no one will even notice if I do this" sort of a monster entry, that is. It took two years for the 4e community to find that particular easter egg. There was even 4ries jumped on that thread to defend 4e's integrity, because of course there was. Surprised they're not here yet.
Basilisk reminds that despite nothing being allowed to exist outside combat, save or die still exists within it. Like all SOD in this edition, it's not really functional enough to win them the fight, but it'll still kill PCs if they stick at it. This one sticks at it, nothing you can do, closing your eyes does nothing because rules must fit within the three lines of text. The Venom-Eyed Basilisk instead of stone,
spits exploding poison with it's eyes, because just woo, whatever, who cares, right, it's only D&D.
Bat picture includes the bat swarm, which the book itself does not. Bats have a flyby attack that is unlike each other and also unlike anything else, because ... caring about doing things right is so 1999. They used that sort of thing as a marketing highlight. Like a toddler picking shit out of their nappy and showing it to you all proud.
Battlebriar are slightly before 4e, from 3e's MM III. They are both spiky, but with very different mechanical ways of expressing that, yes indeed. Doesn't burrow + trample mean it never takes damage if it just waits for the encounter music to end each time? Who knows, tactics entry says it doesn't bother winning.
Bear is nether Black nor Brown, because fuck tradition, but instead Cave and Dire, even though those are the same thing, and the artist struggled to say otherwise. Like, the person whose job it was to put the text on the image saying which was which, instead just skipped that one. The cave bear does not get a crush attack because 4e is poison, also, you might have then noticed there is no fucking difference between any of the monsters if they sat them right next to each other like that.
Beetle is where someone did something good with this edition.
That's well done, it's fast, it hurts you if you start your turn next to it (so, bigger than it looks in effect), and the attack is ongoing necrotic damage (save ends) which is lovely flavour for a few of the rot scarabs burrowing into you. Most importantly it's very easy to use. Within the limit of most everything in this edition being a pain in the ass, that is solid design. Then they ruin the page by having the Fire Beetle shoot fire out it's butt and not give you a light to carry around for the day. Because ... they hate D&D. They just do. The text even gloats about how other monsters (who do not need light) use them for light (which they do not give off).
Behemoth I quite like, as a rename of Dinosaurs, even though it's from the same bible basher who fucked up the Angels and Archons no doubt. They're both recognisable (ankylosaur and stegasaur) and have not terrible names. The mechanics are just arbitrary bullshit of course, but well, that's 4e.
Beholder could be good, right? Appropriately a solo, they gave it 10 different eye options, a free random eye attack on anyone within 5 squares, plus two chosen eye attacks on its turn (and a few extra as it dies off). But it's mostly, like, nothing quite works in 4e so mostly it has to zap away for damage and the others are just reasons the random attacks aren't doing anything useful. Absolutely no anti-magic cone out the front, gone, because god forbid monsters do anything interesting that requires players to change tactics in this game.
Which makes it a rather uninteresting disintegrate-zap robot all things considered. I give it a 3/10, they didn't even bother making the zaps have different ranges, come on.
Berbalang is just a weird choice for 4e. Traditionally you normally fight its astral projection form, never even meeting the original. But 4e monsters never exist outside combat, so this guy is a ... he's a solo who splits up into monsters and then rejoins for a bonus and is nothing to do with Berbalangs. It's not even a good mechanic set, looks a pain in the ass to work with. Just, don't do that.
Boar is Dire and Thunderfury. Thunderfury does Thunderfury as often as it can. You might even say Thunderfury gunna Thunderfury. Also has a Thunderous Charge. Those mechanics don't seem to help it win, but, um, they sure are there.
Bodak Skulk and Reaver tamed from 3e days by having their Gaze be an encounter power. Far more likely to work than most, but only drops to 0hp, and only one PC each, often misses, so really just an annoying use of healing. Almost thought they might be dangerous, but not really.
Boneclaw is a reach Soldier and thus very boring. That's bad everywhere, and this guy is a perfect no-one-moves slog fest, but there's worse Soldiers later.
Bulette I so want to care about, because it has such good history in D&D, but there's a Dire Bulette and it is exactly the same monster, plus nine levels, and they are pissing on their own concept here. The whole fucking idea of this whole fucking shit show is that the monsters do different fucking things. This is word for word copy with bigger numbers (there's one slight phrase change presumably to skirt the automatic detection of such bullshit). Like, people can probably just put bigger numbers on stuff, the actual design bit that we paid for is the annoying little bullshit arbitrary mechanical differences I've been pointing at so far.
That is why these monster groups take two or more fucking pages instead of half a column.
That was their only job in 4e, there's nothing else here. It's vacant. There is supposed to be a stat block that does something pointlessly different to the other stat block, that's why there's two of them instead of a system of just increasing the hit and damage bonuses and they didn't bother with the Bulette and the Dire Bulette.
See you for the Cs. I have more to say but just, Dire Bulette is dire. That is so bad.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.