Flee, Mortals! Impressions

 I made something of an impulse purchase, even on the same day I pre-ordered Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants from my friendly local game store. I got the pdf for Flee, Mortals! - the MCDM-produced monster book.

It might be underselling it, though, to simply call it a new monster book. The attitude and intention here is to create monster - and specifically full monster encounters - that are more dynamic and interesting than what you might find in the basic stat blocks you get in the Monster Manual.

Indeed, the intention here is to more or less allow this to take the place of your Monster Manual as your primary monster book. Playing into that, many of the monsters here are staples of D&D-like RPGs. There are varieties of orcs, goblins, gnolls, devils, demons, undead, etc. We get, for instance, from-the-ground-up redesign of the Lich. There are also a number of "Brand X" versions of monsters that are WotC-owned IP. The "Voiceless Talkers" are clearly MCDM's take on Mind Flayers, and the "Overminds" are its Beholders.

But the book goes beyond touching up and tweaking these stat blocks. Every single one of them has something interesting going on, and there are a few ideas that MCDM introduces that I think could be a real boon if WotC were to implement something similar in 5.5E/One D&D.

First off, monsters are given broad categories telling you what role they play in a fight. Your Soldiers and Brutes are front-line fighters, with Brutes being more hard-hitting sacks of hit points while Soldiers are there to draw the attention of players much as a group's tank would attempt to do. Controllers have powers that buff, debuff, or move creatures around the battlefield.

But there are also some fun, extra-special types. Solo monsters are there to make good on the promise of legendary monsters - something you can truly have the entire party face on its own and have it still put up a good fight. The intent with these is that they have enough multi-part actions, bonus actions, reactions, and "villain actions" (which are similar to, but different from, legendary actions) that they can continually put the pressure on a party.

Then, there's basically the opposite - the Minion. These are creatures designed to be used in huge numbers, and do things like taking collective actions (five of them can attack at a time, letting you speed through the 20-30 you might have on the map) but also getting killed if they take any damage from an attack or a failed (but not successful) saving throw, and even allow "overkill" where a player can kill multiple minions even with a normally-single target attack.

The monsters are organized into categorical groups - your demons, your hobgoblins, your vampires (all the undead creatures are grouped together, but that part is divided into things like incorporeal undead, lesser corporeal undead, mummies, vampires, etc.) and each of these groups has a single named monster, which is typically either a solo or leader monster, who is there to be the big boss.

There's also new encounter-building guidelines, which I believe will make for more challenging fights, but also is built around the patterns of modern players who tend to be less into slow dungeon-crawls and more into climactic clashes at a good story beat. These I'm going to test carefully in my campaign (skewing toward the easier side of things).

Also, there are many Companions and Retainers, which can be allies for the party - so if you want some of the monsters on your side, you can with these.

There are elements of the book that I'm not 100% convinced by - while the main "monster" chapter has tons of stat blocks, there are also a lot that are buried in adventure environments and a big chapter on rival, evil adventuring parties - I wonder if, at least in the former case, these might have been put into the main monster bulk of the book.

Right now, I'm really impressed with what I've read, but I haven't actually seen these monsters in action, so I'll be working them into my ongoing campaigns and getting a feel for whether they're significantly more deadly or just more interesting.