Includes over 250 monsters—updates to the monsters include making spellcasters easier for Dungeon Masters to run, giving many monsters more damage and resilience, and improving the organization of the stat blocks themselves. One of the things I’m most excited about having to do with DM convenience, is, when I’m prepping a game with this book, we’ve changed the alphabetization of all the monsters,” Crawford gleefully explained.

The novel Starlight Enclave reimagines Drizzt Do’Urden’s ancestors as just one of several branches of the drow family tree.I can’t think of a single combat encounter that actually lasts a full ten rounds, without it being a gigantic, end-of-campaign finale featuring multiple BBEGs. We really wanted to reinforce that all of the game’s races are just as flexible as humans when it comes to the range of culture and personality,” Crawford said. I intend to come back to spell lists another time and examine them in greater detail than I have this past week, but one thing I notice at first glance is that certain spells of a particularly coercive nature seem to have been purged from all monster stat blocks.

Several entirely new monsters have been introduced into Monsters of the Multiverse, such as the Dolphin Delighter, a fey version of a dolphin that can teleport and use telepathic abilities. One thing that stood out to me, and that I appreciate greatly, are some of the subtle word changes, primarily around Alignments and ‘Madness’. For Deities and larger creatures that often had ‘Madness’ effects, there are now sections detailing the cultists that follow such creatures, detailing actions taken in the name of such monsters rather than an emotional reaction that should be specific to the personality and experience of an individual character. I don’t have any of the Tome of Beasts books; my understanding is that some of the monsters in them are interesting, and since they’re less familiar, they’re good for surprising jaded players with, but the CRs on them were pulled out of a bingo cage.

Multiverse also collects all the post– Player’s Handbook race options that aren’t inextricably associated with some other specific setting, such as Ravnica or Ravenloft. Monsters of the Multiverse is worth a look regardless of how long you've been playing - and regardless of the books you already own. When spells strictly do or don’t work on different types of creatures, having this information clearly laid out is going to make combat run a lot smoother. Andrew Stretch, for TechRaptor, commented that while there are quality of life improvements in the design changes, the book seems aimed at newcomers and not towards people with "an expansive 5e library".