Next Friday the second core rulebook for D&D 5th Edition, the Monster Manual, will land at Wizards Play Network stores next Friday, September 19th, and at all retailers (and Amazon) on the 30th. I was very impressed with the Player’s Handbook, and I just wanted to give a quick recap of what we’ve been told so far about the Monster Manual.
First and foremost, we have the table of contents, and thus a complete list of the monsters contained within (although there are doubtless variations and sub-types that are also included).
We’ve also been given various sneak previews of specific monsters on the Wizards site. We’ve seen things like the Intellect Devourer, Umber Hulk, and Sphinxes, which gives us a good idea of the layout and level of detail we can expect to see.
We’re also starting to get full reviews of the book (from the lucky bastards who have gotten advanced copies – no, I’m not bitter at all, I promise). Critical-Hits.com came out with a very good review today, Dread Gazebo has a brief overview (and will be doing a live page-by-page look-through next Monday), and The Walking Mind has been giving paragraph-long mini-reviews of each monster, as well as a nice recap of the book as a whole. I am sure there will be others coming out in the next week or so.
From what I seen so far it is riddled with an implied setting. I am thinking about teasing it out and building a Blackmarsh style hexcrawl that explicitly incorporates all of it.
Interestingly, the Succubus/Incubus has its own entry and it is not in the Devils section. Same goes for Shadow Dragon, shouldn't that be under the Dragon section?
Great idea, Rob! New Blackmarsh for 5 edition would be fine entry of a classic hexcrawl into the modern D&D.