Very Belatedly, The Monster Overhaul Is The Best Damned ‘Monster Manual’ I’ve Read

By JimmiWazEre

Really quite hungry, but otherwise opinionated tabletop gaming chap

 

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TL;DR: Looking for the best monster manual for TTRPGs? The Monster Overhaul delivers 200+ creatures, logical organisation, and improv-focused tools that make running games faster (betterer, strongerer) and more dynamic.

This post contains affiliate links

What is The Monster Overhaul?

Well obviously, it’s “a practical bestiary by Skerples” of course, it says so on the front cover, see the image below if you don’t believe me :)

 

 

In case you don’t know, Skerples (a pseudonym, their real name unknown - Although, I’d like to think it’s something like ‘Max Danger’) is a bit of a rockstar in so much as we have them in the OSR blogging community. Kind of like a Banksy, for nerds.

Coming on the scene in the back end of the tweenies with the successful Coins and Scrolls blog, Skerples is responsible for community favourites such as the introductory OSR dungeon; the Tomb of the Serpent Kings and the somewhat gloriously whimsical Monster Menu-All: Eating the AD&D Monster Manual.

“Skerples wanted this book to exist, and it didn’t exist, and therefore had to create it” - Kickstarter

Geared towards value as an in-game tabletop resource, The Monster Overhaul (TMO) is a TTRPG bestiary that contains 200+ creatures, 20+ maps, traditional D&D style line art, and about a bazillion random tables of improv friendly prompts.

It was launched as a Kickstarter in 2022 with the help of Editor; Dai Shugars and a small team of artists including Dyson Logos & Lucas Roussel (and many more), and then delivered in 2023.

Naturally, I’m late to the party with my review coming in a solid 2 years after the fact. That means this blog post is neither evergreen, timely, nor an attempt to make an emotional connection with the audience. Good work there Jimbo - blogging 101 master… Don’t worry folks - I’m gambling on a late surge of interest which will rocket this post to the top of every single Google search. Wish me luck.

OK, this review isn’t sponsored in any way either, I bought the book myself. Twice technically, because I’m an idiot. Sigh, let’s get on with it shall we?

What’s It Trying To Do Differently

I see TMO as a clear reaction to the popular mid/late-tweenies 5e school of thought, whereupon a surge in new people into the hobby lead to the inability to correct en masse an oft held assumption among GMs to view creatures as little more than bags of hit points to simply be balanced against player characters for them to fight. “Fairly”.

 

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Instead, this book wants to flip the script and give creatures breadth and depth to their behaviour and motivation, to help train GMs to replace the idea of a “combat encounter” with the more liberating idea of a “generic encounter” - in other words, not all encounters with creatures need to be conflicts, or if they do, then they certainly don’t all need to be combats, or if they do, they certainly don’t need to be balanced!

Additionally, it’s clear that TMO wants to address the issue of TTRPG books being mostly full walls of top to bottom long form text, and nigh on impossible to use effectively whilst under pressure at the game table. If you’ve read my guide on how I prep notes for an adventure, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

So, What Works Well

All the information in TMO is presented concisely, which is great when you’re at the table trying to find something out on the fly. If you’re anything like me - then you cease to be able to function efficiently when presented with lengthy prose to parse under pressure. Skerples (AKA Max Danger, by me exclusively) obviously recognises this and has made sure that each monster write up is lean and to the point, functional, and respects the urgency of the moment. That’s… liberating.

 

 

Additionally, each creature gets a set of bespoke prompts delivered in a tabular format which allows the GM to quickly add some extra flavour to a vanilla monster (terrible metaphor - I bloody love vanilla), in turn presenting the players with an array of hooks and roleplay opportunities to explore as solutions… you know, as opposed to simply presenting the same bland goblin we’ve seen a hundred times before, thus setting the expectation of another combat.

Such flavour might include names, attitudes, motivations, where their home is, modus operandis, catchphrases, favourite riddles - the list goes on and is bespoke for each creature, with more options provided for more worthy creatures.

Without saying the same thing over and over again in a slightly different way, this; 🡱 is the money, right here. If you only wanted the main reasons to pick this book up, they’re in the former three paragraphs. Reread them if you have to - I’ll wait. If they don’t sell you on it, then nothing else will.

You want to know more? OK, well the book is organised by the logical category (habitats, seasons, game genre) that you would find the monsters in - so what, right? This is another clever way of saving your time at the table. Imagine, your players are in a dungeon and you need to make up an encounter on the fly - Now the most relevant ingredients of that encounter are all next to each other in the book and you don’t have to go page flipping.

Not that the book makes page flipping hard though - with a handy ribbon bookmark to keep your page, and sturdy stitch binding, I’m confident that my copy of TMO is going to last for years despite the regular use.

Why It Might Not Be For Everyone

This book is great, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I didn’t highlight some of the reasons that it might not be right for you. So here we go:

1. It ain’t cheap by a long shot. I mean, sure, you pay for quality - and I’m certain that Skerples can’t afford a loss leader business strategy, but we’re talking £50 for the hardback book. Even the corporate overlords at WOTC are only charging about £35 for their latest monster manual wheeze. The PDF isn’t much cheaper either: £22 squidlyroos! That said though, would I rather have something cheap, or good? For me - it’s totally worth it. Twice in fact.

2. If you’re running something with heroic style characters like Pathfinder or D&D 5e, then this book is still great for you for all the improv prompts and stuff, but you are gonna need a separate resource for your monster stats - well, either that or the ability to convert them satisfactorily on the fly.

3. The book is the same sort of size as a WOTC book. It’s mahoosive. Sure that means it’s packed full of value and creamy marrowbone jelly, but it also means it’s quite unwieldy to have this beast hidden behind your GM screen among your dice, notes, and stash of Universal Monster Tokens.

4. The artwork inside is all very old school, black and white lines - I think this is very, very cool in general, but some of the art isn’t for me, maybe not for you either. Additionally, if you’re wanting full colour spreads, this isn’t that.

5. Reeeeally nitpicking now, but I wasn’t kidding when I said those pages were chock-a-block full of stuff. I’m… not normal (ha!), when I see that much stuff on a page it can be quite disorienting. That’s not to say that I didn’t get used to it though, but it’s something to be aware of which could be an issue for some folk, let’s call it a lack of whitespace!

What Other Reviewers say

My own conclusion is coming below, but in the meantime, whilst you might think that it’s a novel approach to include content from other creators in my review, my stance is that if information is power, then my dudes, I want you to be powerful. Let me know in the comments at the end of the review if you appreciated the links to these videos, or if you think I should leave them out next time.

Conclusion

I really like this book! It’s an evocative, actionable toolbox for GMs, and so much more than a mere monster manual. If you want to pick it up, I have an affiliate link for Drive Thru RPG (The Monster Overhaul) that means I’ll get a small kickback on the sale at no extra cost to you. Go on, treat us both ;)

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Catch you laters, alligators.