![]() But mostly, it's the actual contents that are unenlightening. It's kind of clunky language use in a way that's hard to describe, like when people use the singular and plural interchangeably in the same sentence. ![]() But also because they are all headings on the same page and aren't the same part of speech. Those don't quite sit right with me, because they all mean the same thing. The first page has an “Introduction,” a “Presentation,” and a “Reading the Entries” section. So in presentation and layout, these guys were hewing very closely to the established D&D artistic choices - faux-cool book cover, weird water damaged paper inside sheets, pencil-scratch lined pages, the works. However, I also think it was an effort by the main D&D guys to see how much they could get away with - that is, could they spit out mini-Monster Manuals and have the readers buy them? Because for a lot of gamers, monster manuals are only really of any use to Mister Cavern, as they generally have fuck-all useful information for players, unless you're a specialized summoner or necromancer or something. So in a lot of ways, it's the Forgotten Realms guys trying to jump on the D&D3 bandwagon and stay relevant. did their Kingdoms of Kalamar supplement advertised as the "IVth" essential book after the PHB, DMG, and MM. I honestly think that chunks of WotC were writing more or less independently of each other for years at a time, and what we have here is essentially a third party product put out by the main game company - something like when Kenzer Co. It did so not very well that the entire book line has a single book in it: Monsters of Faerun. Simply put: this project, the Monster Compendium book line, did not do very well. It is totally mysterious why that happened, just as it was mysterious why it was happening at the time, and it was mysterious why it was going to happen when it was announced that it would. Put in charge of this project are James Wyatt and Rob Heinsoo, two names spoken with spit takes today because they were also in charge of the project of 4th edition D&D. That is literally the actual reason for the name change. ![]() It's pretty much the same idea as for 2nd edition, but they call it a “Monster Compendium” instead of a “Monstrous Compendium” so that it will come earlier alphabetically than all the dozens of Monstrous Compendium shovelware installments they had lying around from the last 11 years. So into the era of 3rd edition but only barely so, WotC decided to give it another go. It was all very cumbersome, and didn't even seem like a great idea at the time. Back in 2nd edition, the basic set up for monster books was that they came in various regional and conceptual packets which all went into the vague “Monstrous Compendium” heading, and they got compiled and put into binders and shit. It is also when the last Monster Compendium came out for 3rd edition, or indeed for any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. We're setting the wayback machine to 2001, when the first Monster Compendium came out for 3rd edition.
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