Monster Ecologies: A Bevy of Beasties

Easily the best thing about any fantasy game, whether it be an RPG, minis game, or even video game, is without a doubt the monsters. Aside from being named after like the biggest-deal monster in fantasy, Dragon magazine has been synonymous with monsters for decades with their monthly monster ecologies series—articles detailing the lives, habits, prey, and powers of some of the coolest creatures from mythology, legends, and the twisted minds of DMs the world over. One of the most popular and easily the longest running series in the 32-year old (but, sadly, terminally-fated) magazine, these pseudo-scientific explorations are finally getting their own book from Paizo Publishing.

Monster Ecologies is touted to cover eighteen of D&D's deadliest beasties, expanded from their original articles with new rules, art, and other stuff. A bunch of gaming-industry and fiction-writing celebs also contribute stories about their favorite D&D monsters, from Gary Gygax, to Margaret Weis, to China Mieville (!). An index of every ecology ever printed in the magazine’s more than three decades, art gallery-histories of D&D's longest-lived monsters, and a page of "Monsters of Suck," the lamest monsters ever to appear in D&D, flesh the rest of the book out. You can check out a few more details on Monster Ecologies on Pazio's main page, or hunt it down at your local game store as it hits shelves this month.

Sounds like rules-light reading for gamers who prefer more to their monsters than statistics and claw/claw/bite attacks. Here's hope "The Ecology of the Lightning Zombie" made the cut!

(HAH! You can't really see it too well here [you can on the Paizo page], but the book just the the lower right of the blue dragon's jaw on the cover is a Player's Handbook.)