The last third of the book is a more traditional bestiary that you might be familiar with in the form of the many Monster Manuals across the different editions of D&D. It’s a cool crow-person who hollers and squawks and generally just owns bones all over the Forgotten Realms. The most I have to say about this is that you should definitely play the kenku. Aasimar, kenku, goliaths and a few others make up the thirteen new 5th Edition species. The second section of the book includes statistics and rules for additional races (I always prefer “species” here) that players in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign could roleplay as. Chaos ensues, but it’s predictable and investigable chaos that makes for engaging and exciting situations for players to be in.

Worse yet, Yeenoghu has sent that vision to dozens of gnoll leaders (because that’s just how he is). Volo’s Guide to Monsters gives a creator the basic tools to determine that, say, the leader of the raiding gnoll party believes that he has been chosen by the demon lord Yeenoghu to eliminate humans from the valley. It’s a rare D&D campaign that avoids monsters altogether, and it’s very easy as a DM to just say “here’s some mind flayers, they sure are mean, aren’t they?” The now-worn concept that “every villain is a hero of their own story” is really helpful for great storytelling, but it’s often hard to make those heroic stories without a structure of where the villains might come from. This first half of the book functions as some scaffolding for a Dungeon Master to create adventures out of. You can also do a deep dive on kobolds and why they hate gnomes (it’s because the gnomish god Garl Glittergold trapped a kobold god in an unending maze). You can learn all about how giants organize their life by an “ordning” and what it means to be an independent spirit in giant society. The first is a guidebook to certain creatures of the Forgotten Realms, and it contains a huge amount of information about the social structures, architectural styles, religions, personalities, and all kinds of other stuff of many different “monsters” that are familiar to D&D or fantasy fans. Volo’s Guide to Monsters is split into three distinct sections. He’s a point of view character who delivers information about the Forgotten Realms, its denizens, and the strange locations that dot the fantasy landscape that’s been in constant roiling development for thirty years. As I wrote in my preview of the book, the Volo of the title is one of the most interesting characters from the history of the game. Volo’s Guide to Monsters is the newest rulebook from Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s a damned good one.

Monster manual dnd 5e