I love it when non-D&D people write about D&D. Guess what! With Volo’s Guide both dungeon masters and players will be able to bring new races to the table, both as player and non-player characters. That includes rules for goblins, orcs and even something called a "firbolg."
Ooh! New races, you say? And as player and non-player characters as well? And what's a firbolg? It sounds awesome.
I should ignore articles like this, because I am just not the target audience and I am also the kind of person who gets profoundly annoyed by people telling me things like "we are living in a post-Game of Thrones world". But still, I can't help but feel that the really interesting and innovative thing to do - the thing that would really set DMs free, expand their minds, empower them, and "inspire new stories at the table" - would be a Monster Manual without the stats, the banal descriptions, the leaden prose, the amusing pseudo-narratives, the prescriptions, the stats. It would have nothing in fact but art. 196 pages of pictures of monsters. Just pictures. No words, except for a short introduction: "Do what you want with this."
That is a bestiary I would pay good money for. Volo can go fuck himself.
That would literally be the opposite of what I want out of a monster manual. Inspiration is nice and all, but what I'm buying when I buy a monster book is also prep time. I don't have that much of it, so a book of pictures would not help even the littlest bit.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I don't need a book to give me rules for goblins, firbolgs and soforth.
Fair enough, but I'm not saying all Monster Manuals have to be like that. Just if you want to do something really new and inspiring.
DeleteI dunno man. You got a lot of mileage out of the text of the 2e manual.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThough I do agree that a volume containing tons of pictures actually unique, interesting and inspiring creatures would be great. I think a lot of the art in monster manuals falls pretty darn flat (even though the most recent edition is quite a bit better than the last two in that regard).
DeleteThat's true but I wonder what mileage we might have got out of a picture book.
Delete[self plug] Not quite what you're looking for but Arion Games' Beyond the Pit is a sequel to the old Fighting Fantasy bestiary Out of the Pit, and features art for 200+ monsters drawn from the FF & Sorcery! gamebooks themselves (as well as fluff text and AFF stats). You can buy a physical copy here:
ReplyDeletehttp://store.arion-games.com/Beyond_the_Pit/p2182564_11609293.aspx
Or PDFs here:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/194792/Beyond-the-Pit
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194792/Beyond-the-Pit
I'm currently working on volume 3, with yet more old 80s gamebook art.
Funny, but that is exactly what I get when I go to Japanese bookstores, and buy books like 'The Art of Monster Hunter'.
ReplyDeleteMonster Hunter, for those who don't know it, is a popular series of video games in Japan, of which a small number have been translated and sold in the US, and UK markets.
I should point out that I am underselling their popularity in Japan. Monster Hunter is HUGE!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Hunter
I love buying the artbooks, which are chock full of hundreds of pages of monster designs including concept art, unused designs, cg illustrations, and finally what they look like in the game. Each book also contains text on the various editions of the game, the monsters, their abilities, and tactics for defeating them, all written in Japanese.
I don't read Japanese.
Do yourself a favor, Google 'Monster Hunter Art', 'Monster Hunter Concept Art', or 'Monster Hunter Monsters' before your next game.
You're welcome. ;)
I have played some of the monster hunter games. Funnily enough they sort of link to my previous post as well - they have a restricted geography of locations.
Delete"Firbolg" is from Irish mythology. They're not even monsters. Why are they in D&D mythology? Why is every monster in D&D? Why are there whole ecologies and detailed backstories for each monster and explanations on how all these monsters interact with each other? Under the guise of giving you more options, they are putting everything under one mythology: the D&D canon mythology. It's way beyond the "implied" setting that D&D used to have.
ReplyDeleteI would wish for a monster manual that was setting specific or maybe even just environment specific. Just something that was coherent and could be helpful in actually creating your own adventures, as opposed to a shotgun blast of random monsters.
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DeleteThat's what you get when you have 'The Ecology of the...' once mythical beast. D&D needs to define its monsters as it defines, categorizes, and over analyzes all things. To make absolutely sure there is nothing magical left in these once magical creatures.
DeleteDo you know the old joke about the ecology of the Tarrasque? If you have a Tarrasque, you don't have an ecology. ;)
It's definitely useful for those starting out with D&D. One of my friends has recently starting GMing his own D&D game and he was excited over much of this. I know he has expressed trouble with coming up with good ideas, so this kind of thing is good for him. I think he's better than he gives himself credit for, but this will certainly give him some confidentce.
DeleteAnd personally, I actually like reading these kinds of things as both entertainment and inspiration. It's pretty easy to file things off and make it your own twist.
From China Mieville: "If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s 'strength,' 'dexterity,' and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic."
DeleteThere is truth in that. I suppose that may be something with the medium of roleplaying games, which is meant to be much more interactive and open than books and movies and even video games. When making stats and ecologies of monsters for players to interact with (by combat or talking), it can feel like some of the fantastical elements are sucked out to DMs. There is definitely value in keeping ecologies light and less "thorough", making it less like a textbook and more like an old medieval bestiary.
DeleteThe recent Petersen's Guide for CoC7 is a great example of a stat-less book with evocative illustrations. Though it's Cthulhu Mythos based, the creatures look very dark fantasy and inspiring.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I'll take a look sometime.
DeleteIt's called pinterest and it's freely available on the interwebz. :D Here you go: https://hu.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=fantasy%20monster&rs=typed&term_meta[]=fantasy%7Ctyped&term_meta[]=monster%7Ctyped
ReplyDeleteYeah with all the artbooks out there, plus pictures you can find on Google, Pintrest, and DeviantArt, a pure Monster Manual of nothing but art wouldn't interesting me. I generally get the monster manual for expediency of stats, but also as inspiration for mechanics that would be cool for a creature.
DeleteYes, there is that...
DeleteI love MOnster Manual and its pix, I also have Monster Manual 2, Fiend Folio, and original Deities and Demigods. But Firbolg illustrates what is wrong with the illustration idea. They took a stylistic, caricaturized representation of a medieval yeoman archer, probably contemporary, and they made a creature in Game of Thrones look like it. Literally. That is stupid and lacks imagination.
ReplyDeleteBack in my youth our whole village had to share the one basic d&d rule book we'd been allotted. Weeks would go by before you got another turn with the book, so we often had to make do with the products of our own brain pans in the interim. A friend of mine found a book of Frank Frazetta-esque alien/monster illustrations at the library. I think there was text associated with the art, but what it said we never knew because we had our own plans for those critters. We almost never used the same monsters twice in our dungeons back then.
ReplyDeleteA few months later someone bought the Monster Manual and it was all downhill from there. But then, we were living in a pre-Game of Thrones world.
How did any of us survive in that pre-Game of Thrones world??
DeleteYeah honestly all you need is a nice, glossy Frank Frazetta art book. I got one recently for like $10 on a clearance shelf. It's basically what this blog post describes as ideal. Plus Frazetta is the best in the business. Unless you like feet. He usually hides the feet. Who knows what Freudian black hole lies behind that particularity of his style.
DeleteIn the days after pulp fiction sword and sorcery and before mainstream ran with the Lord of The Rings, American fantasy genre consisted of imitations of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. British scene fared better, since there were satirists a la Neil Gayman and Terry Pratchett. USA has Piers Anthony, to be sure. So, given all that talent, Hollywood running with Game of Thrones was a decided letdown. I threw away the first book in disguist after reading how the barbaric Dothraci were ripping chunks of roast duck meat and dipping it into vats of Duck Sauce. Really? They bought it at the American-style Chinese restaurant? In the 1970's they had I Claudius. I enjoyed watching that one. In the 1980's they made Sword and the Sorcerer, 1980's special effects cheese, but it was a true and only D&D film with a Lich and a Dungeon. Better than D&D films. I mean the opening patrol in Song of Fire and Ice and the search of the village in the D&D film and basically 1960's Vietnam era tactics. Martin whoever, who wrote the Game Of Thrones, just absorbed the surrounding culture of 1980's and regurgitated it into his fantasy. I was so sick of all the derivative BS in fantasy (that was supposed to be fantastic and haunt my soul), that I developed my own setting (Midlands) and started a campaign in it.
ReplyDelete