This project was started in early January 2019. Right around this time several “Let’s Read” threads for D&D books were flourishing on the RPG.net forums and I was sorta binging on them. There were threads for the 3.5 Monster Manual, the 3.0 Monster Manual II, the BECMI Creature Catalog, the 3.0 Epic Level Handbook, and even the Book of Erotic Fantasy!

I decided to get in on the action, and to focus on my favorite D&D edition which I saw wasn’t getting much love. Since the threads about monster books were my favorite, I thought I’d start with the first Monster Manual for Fourth Edition. Early Fourth Edition monsters have a well-documented “bug” in their damage calculations, and a lot of the MM monsters were later updated in the Monster Vault supplement, so I figured I couldn’t really read one book without also reading the other. And so here we are!

I posted these entries first on an RPG.net thread, and here with some delay (plus text corrections and illustrations). It took 1 year and 4 months to finish posting all the entries in the forum, and around 2 years and 2 months to finish posting them here. Below you can see links for all the related posts.

  • Introduction: Introduces the project and discusses the damage bug I mentioned above, as well as how to fix it for older monsters.

After this, we get right on the monsters:

And finally, we close out the book with a small post about the Traits Appendix in the Monster Manual.