Most of the art is good, though a couple of the fiends only have very closely framed mugshots that don’t really tell much about how they look besides ugly, and it took me until the 3E-era Wayne Reynolds illustration of the ultroloth to figure out what it looks like. We’re introduced to the combatants of the Blood War and the whole larva ecosystem/economy that the Lower Planes have got going on. There’s the random monster generator that is the hordling, there’s tieflings, shadow fiends, night hags, and the animal lords of Beastlands. There’s the marut, which D&D 3E later ran with and used as a springing board for the inevitables. It’s got the main lineups of baatezu, tanar’ri, and yugoloths. It gathers together most of the major critters of the setting with the exception of modrons and some of the good-aligned outsiders. The text is janky, which is thrown into sharper relief when it sits alongside material written specifically for this book. Paul LaFountain was not a particularly good prosaist. While it’s by no means just copypaste, and some entries are lavishly expanded from the original, the fact remains that MC8’s writer J. While the art was all redone by Tony DiTerlizzi and the layout is the Planescape we know and love, complete with in-character blow-up quotations, a lot of the text was not given the proper attention. Planescape didn’t really do dragons, which is probably why it made no further appearances.Īll this makes PSMC1 a dissonant book. Its breath weapons are the traditional cone of flame, and a time stop effect. The adamantite dragon is also native to the Twin Paradises. The air sentinel is basically an off-brand djinn native to Bytopia (or the Twin Paradises as it’s still known at the time), and the other two are what it says on the tin. Only the air sentinel, the celestial lammasu, and the adamantite dragon didn’t make further appearances. Of the remaining 20, most resurfaced in Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II and Planes of Law (notably the archons). ![]() By a quick count, 71 of these were carried over. MC8 has 91 monsters, while PSMC1 has 105. There’s a convenient Wikipedia page that lists the critters and where they’re originally from (while it’s generally bad form to use Wikipedia as a source, but I did check, and at least now in late March of 2020 it was valid). And when I say “a lot”, I mean “nearly all”. ![]() Well, by the time this book rolled around the second time.Ī lot of Planescape Monstrous Compendium Volume 1 - or PSMC1 - is actually recycled content from 1991’s MC8 Monstrous Compendium Outer Planes Appendix. Anyway, by the time this book rolled around, that concept was dead and buried, and thus in 1994 we got this lavishly illustrated 128-page book and its sequels. While I like the idea, they’d have needed something in place to address the issue of new monsters that fall alphabetically between two creatures that are on different sides of the same sheet. The first printing of the AD&D 2E Monstrous Manual was a big binder with loose-leaf monster entries, running off the idea that additional monster supplements could just be slipped in and you’d have all your monsters in the same place. ![]() They eschew the product numbering of the rest of the Monstrous Compendium line, which was a mess anyway. There were ultimately three monster books released for the Planescape setting, the Planescape Monstrous Compendiums I-III.
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