OK, first off, in general, I hate the 3E faux tome covers. Always have, always will. That said, I think I loathe this one the most. What the hell is going on here? Why would you use a monster mouth that doesn’t quite seem dead to bind a book? And how deep is the hole in the cover? Ugh. Stop.
Monster Manual II (2002) is not great, I think. The best monsters are the handful of minor creatures that have appeared in previous editions, like the catoblepas and the weirdly treated death knight (more on that in a second). A smaller handful are interesting and useful, like the famine spirit and the moon rats. Most of the book, though, is divided among bizarre monsters I don’t immediately see a use for and monsters that combine the traits of an animal with a humanoid. Look, its an orca-man!
This Manual also gives us the first batch of templates. Basically, instead of giving you generic stats for the death knight, you get a template of stat tweaks you can apply to a given character, converting their existing stats to those of the monster. This works particularly well with the Monsters of Legend template, which takes a base monster like a griffin and turns them into The Griffin from which all other griffins descend. This modular approach is great for creating unique opponents, but it creates a lot of book keeping. And, as 3E aged, a lot of templates were introduced, and it got, well, ridiculous. More on that later.
The art in this book is weird. It is maybe the first time I have seen a Dungeons & Dragons book kind of flatten out its artists into a fairly cohesive visual whole. Most everything looks samey, even the handful of illustrations by artists whose style usually jumps out at me, like DiTerlizzi and Baxa. I think it has something to do with the color treatments – lots of maroon and grey.
