Is this really the best solution? Monsters of the Multiverse Review (D&D5e)
Both Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder have a very similar problem: the sourcebook bloat. Meaning that these companies make most of their money through selling new books for their games. This leads to there being a TON of books as the games get older and older. For D&D, I counted 31 books at the time of this writing. With most books going for $49.99 MSRP, that's over $1.5k in books. Compared to some games…like my new obsession with Warhammer….that's a bargain. However, most people are probably not shelling out that much money for their RPGs, whether it be the Wizards of the Coast or Paizo variety.
Unlike games like Warhammer, RPGs have the characteristic that really only 1 person needs to have all the material to play. In fact, I've seen this notion online and I agree with it: if your DM is consistently providing you with enjoyable entertainment week after week, you and your group should pitch in to buy them new books. Or, make them food at the very least. Obviously everyone's financial situation is unique, but if you can afford to do so - tell your DM thank you by getting them something cool as a gift!
Ok with that Public Service Announcement over, let's focus on D&D for the rest of this post. Pathfinder has solutions to this sourcebook bloat problem too, but this is a review of a D&D book after all. Over the years, Wizards has tried a bunch of different approaches to this bloating issue. Honestly, D&D Beyond is one of the best solutions I've seen for this. If your DM has the various books unlocked, they can pay a small monthly fee to share that stuff with their players. Or, on the flip side, if you are a player and only need to know one race out of a book, you can pay to unlock just that information. It's not a perfect solution, as ideally if you bought the physical book, it would come with a code to unlock the D&D Beyond version.
I mean, if even Games Workshop has figured that part out…then you are really behind the curve Wizards.
Wasn't this supposed to be a book review?
I'm getting there. So now we have "Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse". This new release from Wizards of the Coast has gotten some bad reviews. If you look on amazon, you'll see a lot of people complaining that there are not any new monsters in this book, that it is all reprints from Volo's Guide to Monsters ("Volo's" from here on out) and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes ("Tome of Foes"). Those are fair criticisms, if it weren't for the fact that the following text is ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK ITSELF:
So these people are review bombing a book for being the direct thing it purports to be. Granted, you could make an argument that "why did Wizards need to do this?", which is kind of the basis for this blog post. Unlike these people who bought the book sight-unseen, not everyone auto-buys every D&D book that comes out. Some people only buy the books that have information that they are looking to use in their next campaign. Monsters of the Multiverse provides players and DMs with a "One Stop Shop" worth of races and monsters to use in their games, without having to buy 10 other books.
Ok, so how is the book?
I like the premise of this book but not the execution. And when I say "premise", I don't mean the text I linked above, I mean the idea that the book represents. What do I mean by that? My problem with the book is that the monsters are taken from Volo's and Tome of Foes. These two books were already books that contained a lot of varied monsters in them. It would be like making a Monster Manual 2 and a Monster Manual 3 and then making a "Best of" book that contained monsters from both books. It both helps the sourcebook bloat problem, while making it worse at the same time.
So why did I say I liked the premise? The first chapter of the book contains a lot of player races. These also are reprints of older materials, but from all the various setting books that they've printed out. If you didn't buy the Theros book or the Eberron book, you could just buy this one and still have all of those player races in one place. Heck, even if you own those books, you could reference this one book for those races instead of bouncing between different sourcebooks. The first chapter succeeds in the "hey you only need this book" premise, while the premise of the second chapter of "hey we expanded on stuff in these books" is technically correct, but not in the same spirit as the first book.
I think the better path for this book would have been to take all of the monsters from the setting books and include them here, to match up with the first chapter. Then, fill up the rest of the book with new monsters. This would provide value to those customers who already own everything. It wouldn't have needed to be radically different monsters too. You could take those monsters from the setting books and expand on those - make more sub-race monsters and new varieties of those monsters. Just how Fizban's took Dragons and made an entire book about Dragons, this book could have expanded on the different monsters from the sourcebooks and provided new versions of those monsters. It is a book about the multiverse. Give us versions where the monsters are *slightly* different than the ones presented in the other D&D books.
Conclusion
If you own every other D&D book out there, you probably don't need this book.
If you *don't* own every D&D book, this would be a good pickup for the money if you want to expand the amount of stuff to use in your games.
Now I want to go make alternate versions of classic D&D monsters. Like an Elder Heart instead of an Elder Brain. Maybe it has a cult that takes prisoners and they all feed on their adrenaline!
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