Monster Manual IV - a Review

The first thing you'll notice about the newest offering of monsters from WOTC is that a change in formats. The stats have now been consolidated in a stats block that has smaller print, making it a bit harder to read, however that means you'll have to spend a bit more time preparing - perhaps by using a Combat Sheet, such as you can find here. The other thing you'll notice is that each monster now takes up 2 pages instead of the one page standard the previous MM's used. That translates into less monsters, but a lot more information on each one - things like ecology of the monsters, suggested treasures and lairs, and entries for the Eberron and Forgotten Realms campaign. The other new addition isn't really new to anyone who's been reading the 'Ecology of ____" articles in Dragon Magazine lately - a table giving the applicable Knowledge Skill and what information the players can glean about the monsters from the Knowledge Check Roll. I like this new development, it prevents veteran players from going 'oh, that's a mind flayer, my character will use such-and-such" - it forces them to play the characters as though they'd never met that monster before. Of course, the corollary is that the party will need at least one character with the necessary Knowledge Skill, actually a couple, since some monsters use the Knowledge(dungeoneering) roll, while others use Knowledge(the Planes) or Knowledge (Arcane).

As for the monsters themselves, they generally tend towards the CR 4-9 level, the highest is the Concordant Killer at CR 19. One new feature is that a lot of the monsters are actually examples from previous races, for instance, under Orcs we have the Orc Berserker (Barbarian 4), War Howler ( Barbarian 2/Bard 2), Orc Battle Priest (Cleric 1), and Orc Plague Speaker (male unholy scion Cleric 5), which leads me to my one complaint about some of these additions - some of them are dependant on your owning another book, for example the Unholy Scion is a template found in Heroes of Horror. Another example is the Drow Elves entry - of the 4 entries in MM4, 2 of them use classes found in The Complete Adventurer. Nonetheless, it's nice to have something you can quickly use in place of the generic Orc/Drow/Ogre etc. Another large entry is found under the heading of Spawn of Tiamat - basically a variety of monsters linked to the chromatic dragons, but not necessarily looking like dragons, which would be handy if you wanted to run a campaign using Tiamat as the protagonist.

Overall, this is a good buy - rather than a slew of new monsters, some if not most of which you'll never use, WOTC has opted to present a lesser quantity of entries, but of a better quality and presented so that you'll have little difficulty fitting them into your campaign setting.