





Original AD&D had accrued 3 books of monsters: Monster Manuals I & II , and the Fiend Folio ; and, since the original point behind 2e was to cut down on the books needed to play the game, and because TSR was adding new ones all the time, the Monsters presented a problem! There has always been a big demand for new monsters, so it was decided that instead of a typical book, TSR would sell a binder, and all of the monsters would be printed on loose-leaf paper. This way, one could build their own Monster collection, and each time you bought a module or additional compendiums, you could keep the monster in the binder. It sounds like a great idea! I’m not sure why this system was replaced, perhaps because users lost entries, or because the binders fell apart, I honestly don’t know as I have never owned this specific product. However, I have bought loose leaf, setting specific products such as the Ravenloft Compendium I & I I which I simply put into a cheap folder-binder and keep it in book form. Product 2102 and 2103 were the original Monstrous Compendiums. The most interesting thing about them was the way that they were bound.Original AD&D had accrued 3 books of monsters:, and the; and, since the original point behind 2e was to cut down on the books needed to play the game, and because TSR was adding new ones all the time, the Monsters presented a problem! There has always been a big demand for new monsters, so it was decided that instead of a typical book, TSR would sell a binder, and all of the monsters would be printed on loose-leaf paper. This way, one could build their own Monster collection, and each time you bought a module or additional compendiums, you could keep the monster in the binder. It sounds like a great idea! I’m not sure why this system was replaced, perhaps because users lost entries, or because the binders fell apart, I honestly don’t know as I have never owned this specific product. However, I have bought loose leaf, setting specific products such as theI which I simply put into a cheap folder-binder and keep it in book form.





Since I have never owned the product itself, I have no idea what specifically is in there, so I won’t comment on that; however, I will say that monster presentation was done a lot better for the 2e publishing. Each monster got its own page or pages with very few exceptions. Each monster got a black and white image of the basic creature, if a modified version of the creature was created, then this was listed as well.



For the most part, stats were kept the same with very little changes. One could easily still use their 1e monsters as is, or could modify them to 2e specifically, by comparing them to the other monsters with very little difficulty.





What was improved in 2e, were that the descriptions of the creatures were dramatically expanded. Since each creature had its very own page, they used the space wisely by listing how a creature attacks, and defends its self, what it looks like, where it came from, and how it lives. This stuff, despite being just a gaming manual, was fun to read all on its own! Humanoid societies were cleanly listed so that one can quickly create tribes and unique NPCs, and the DM gets to do all of the fun stuff! Each entry is like brain candy, and it contained all of the monsters that made D&D unique from its competitors. It wasn’t just what modern players call “Crunch”, it contained a lot of “Fluff”, which us 2e’s LOVE, but fluff was also something that was severely needed at the time. The monster listings were written in such a way that it was more helpful to the DM than it was bossy; it told you a creature’s general INT, but it left the stats open for interpretation unless they were specific, such as the strength given to Giants. What this did was give the DM the ability to take quick notes down, and be able to run the entire adventure session just from those quick stat blocks.





If one read the entries, it gave clues about what you can do to run the scenario, but it didn’t enforce them. Modifying all of the monsters wouldn’t affect the system, and creating your own monsters was simple to master!





This product was ultimately replaced 3 years later by the hardbound Monstrous Manual which was a sampling of entries found in all of the Compendiums printed before it; I had always assumed that it did contain all of the entries in Monster Compendium I & II , as these are the basic monsters which all others that came later were based upon, but since I don’t own the actual product, I can’t tell you if that is an accurate statement or not; maybe one of the collectors out there could be so kind as to confirm or correct this statement?





Overall, I wish that they would have kept this method. The monster products published between 1989 and 1992 used this loose leaf method, and the products themselves were more affordable because of it. Once the Hardbound MM was released, the updates were all put into softbound volumes of very poor quality that were difficult to reference; the idea that you could add the updated monsters right into your existing binder is a much better idea, particularly since I think that it is faster to just create a monster rather than spending all day looking through a stack of monstrous compendium books for a monster that may or may not even be there!





To a collector, this is a great product, it is odd and I honestly haven’t seen many of them. While the system was superior to the books published later, the 1992 version of the MM is still the most usable product. I have gone all of these years without it, but I’d still like to own it just for the oddity that it is. Would I use it instead of my MM? I honestly don’t think so.





At the time of its release, this product was indispensable! It gets an A, however today, since its usefulness is so limited, I’d give it a C. Some users, no doubt, swear by it! You don’t need a large collection of monsters; you just need enough examples so that you can create your own if you really need to.