I like monsters. ( )

I haven't carefully dug through everything here, but it strikes me as, in most fashions, what you would expect from Pathfinder's "Monster Manual". A few minor things jump out; for one, the aasimar pictured is hot. (Can I take the out that it is the very first monster in the book?) Comparing the SRD monster list to the book's list seems to show that one out of every five or six monsters in the first was dropped; goodbye allip, azer, blink dog, grimlock and titan. I'm not sure the space devoted to animals was worth the loss of old friends. There's a few new creatures tossed in, primarily from the Tome of Horrors: the yeti, vegepygmy, dracolisk, a couple new golems, etc. While the changes can be debated, the selection is overall pretty conservative.

My biggest problem with this book is the lack of description. One extreme example is the bronze dragon; after the generic stats, stats for the young, adult and ancient bronze dragons, we get the description of their behavior: "Bronze dragons have been known to ally with travelers and adventurers if the cause and reward is right and just." That's all. With rare exception, the length of the description seems dictated by the amount of space left by the stats, so the succubus, vrock, and dragons get a few lines of description, where as the hill giant has plenty of space discussing them in detail. Breaking the monsters up by page makes things neat, but made it impossible to move space around much.

Overall, I'm not thrilled. It might have helped, or really hurt, if it hadn't so simply emulated the Monster Manual. As it is, it feels like the Monster Manual with some numbers changed, and the lack of description makes me worry that I may have to refer to older volumes for more than just pure stats on the creatures. ( )