So, the big caveat here is that I haven't actually used any of the monsters out of this book yet. Granted, I haven't run a Planescape campaign (though I did have a little side quest interlude, but that was before the box set came out) nor have I run Turn of Fortune's Wheel, so all of these impressions are coming from a kind of theoretical side of things.
The monsters presented in Morte's Planar Parade, which is the Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse monster book, come in what I'd call three broad categories: there are "outsiders" native to various outer planes, with an emphasis on avoiding the categories plentifully found in previous 5E books (no devils, no demons, and only a couple Yugoloths, one of which is an individual legendary character). The next category is NPCs that belong to the various Sigil factions, typically giving us one or two for each faction. The last is the broadly weird stuff that may not be tied to particular outer plane (there is one being that's from the Shadowfell, an inner plane) along with stuff you'll encounter only in Sigil or just generally in weird locations.
Of note, these stat blocks skew toward higher CRs, with the median being around 7 or 8. While I would encourage DMs to run a Planescape game at any level, even level 1, you'll have lots of stuff to use when you get into those higher levels with these creatures.
Let's start with the planar beings:
We get three kinds of Demodands from Carceri, the hideous jailers of the prison plane. We also get a number of Guardinals, the animal-like celestials of Elysium, and some Archons (two of three of which are also animal-like) of Mount Celestia. There's also the Baernaloth, a CR 17 legendary yugoloth from Hades, which I think could play a strong role as a major villain, but could also be a great enigma to throw at your party. The Rilmani give us celestials native to the Outlands themselves, and as a note, Celestial as a creature type seems to more broadly refer to outer-planar or just otherworldly beings that don't have an obvious other type. We saw a bit of that in the errata for Spelljammer, such as when the Mercane were made into Celestials, but I think this is actually a smart choice so that we can actually find more opportunities to fight them (granted in Planescape the nuances of good and evil get complicated enough that fighting off an angel is not unlikely).
Of interest to me is that we also get our second Inevitable, after the Marut was introduced I believe first in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. The Kolyarut shares the Marut's ability to automatically hit with its attacks. It's not quite as deadly, but still very powerful.
If you ever felt that the Modrons from the Monster Manual were cool, but you hit a point where you felt that your players were just too powerful for them, good news: there are a ton of new big, high-CR modrons, capping at the most powerful being a Hexton Modron (for these, the number is more like a rank, so the lower the number the more powerful,) which is a CR 13 non-legendary creature (well, sort of, it has legendary resistance - and actually four of them) that is huge in size.
Also, if you felt Githzerai were left out when we got some new Githyanki stat blocks in Spelljammer, here we get a trio of new, powerful Githzerai. The surprising thing is that the Githzerai are listed as aberrations, which... they sure aren't in the Monster Manual, Monsters of the Mulitverse, or as a playable race.
There's nothing here below CR 1 other than a couple of CR 0 creatures, so you'll want to look elsewhere for most of your tier 1 monsters. But this is Planescape, where literally anything is fair game.
The faction members go from CR 3 to CR 12, and can be of any alignment (though you can probably imagine that, for example, most Fraternity of Order members are likely to be Lawful). Like in Monsters of the Multiverse, the spellcasting NPC statblocks are streamlined to make them easy to run. As a particular note, Doomguard NPCs can essentially disintegrate anyone they kill (though they have to kill them, not just knock them down to 0 HP) so be wary of the potential for permadeath if you want to go hard with these guys.
Among the "miscellaneous," we have of course some staples of Sigil, including the Dabus - silent servants of the Lady of Pain who telekinetically maintain the city and speak in floating speech-bubbles with their messages worked out as rebuses.
Another fun note here is that Cranium Rat Squeakers, which are explicitly not connected to Mind Flayers, gain the ability to cast Sending at will when in a swarm, and that this fact has been used by the inhabitants of Sigil to, in my interpretation, use Cranium Rats as cell phones.
I think of particular note here is the Ancient Time Dragon. We're given the four normal age groups for Time Dragons - wyrmling, young, adult, and ancient - but the Ancient Time Dragon has the only ability I'm aware of in 5E that can truly enable time travel. Time Gate allows the dragon to create a 20-foot radius portal that will lead to a precise location of the dragon's choice on any plane of existence up to 8,000 years in the past or future.
Now, my hubris has made me want to run a time-travel campaign at some point, and WotC just said I can, so there!
It can be difficult to really assess how good this is as a group of monsters, having not run any of them. A stat block is of course just one piece of a larger puzzle, and while I haven't clocked any glaring problems (like how the hell does a Mummy Lord have a CR of 15 with less than 100 HP and vulnerability to fire?) that sort of thing is easy to miss (I'm not sure I ever noticed that a Mummy Lord had fire vulnerability, on top of a +0 to Dex saves, meaning that a single Fireball is probably going to put them below half health).
But I will say that, conceptually, this feels like some good stuff to work with. I really appreciate the effort to expand on beings from Outer Planes that aren't The Nine Hells or the Abyss.
That being said, I'd also be very open to a larger monster book that continues to look to these more obscure planes. For example, I think the only Acheron-specific stat block in 5E is the Cadaver Collector. It was definitely cool to get some Upper-Planar stat blocks.
There are some odd inclusions here, and I think that in some cases we're sort of looking at creatures that had to be included because they popped up in Turn of Fortune's Wheel, such as the Vargouille Reflection, which is cool and all, but if this were purely a Planescape monster book, I'd be happy to just use the one from Volo's/Monsters of the Multiverse and have some more plane-specific creature here.
I've not made it a secret that I'm not really a fan of the new format for campaign settings that Spelljammer and Planescape have introduced. While I think the Planescape set has delivered on what it is meant to in a way that Spelljammer didn't, I still far prefer the way that the previous campaign setting books worked as jumping-off points to inspire DMs to come up with their own stories.
There's a certain economy of detail here - Sigil and the Outlands gives us a few interesting sites and NPCs for each gate town, and wouldn't you know it, on the adventure hook tables each entry ties directly to those elements.
Matt Colville, a person who, it must be said, does have an incentive to point out the flaws in the way WotC is doing D&D given that he runs a company that is working on a game that could become a competitor (though I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his perspectives are motivated more to just generally improve the hobby,) has talked about how the move in a lot of today's increasingly corporate world, there's a strong urge to create narrowly-defined experiences, to really "own" one's brands. Part of that would be an impulse to make D&D players play through published adventures rather than campaigns devised by DMs and players. He argues this is less about profitability than simply maintaining control.
And I have to say, my impulse has always been to create my own campaigns. In Ravnica, Eberron, Theros, and Ravenloft, the "adventures" are quick introductory things that typically end with the players hitting level 3. Wildemount does this as well, but gives you four of them, one for each of the four major regions of Wildemount. I think the purpose of these adventures was to give you a feel for the kind of stories that the setting is meant to serve - Eberron has a noir-ish investigation into powerful families in Sharn before going full pulp-adventure, Ravenloft gives you a prototypical haunted house.
By contrast, Light of Xaryxis and Turn of Fortune's Wheel take up a much bigger chunk of their products' total word count, and furthermore kind of bend the rest of the product to serve the adventure.
And, cynically, you could argue that the intent is to get people to "use up" these settings and move on to the next one by having them play through the adventure.
Notably, as well, we didn't get a Dragonlance setting books, but Shadow of the Dragon Queen kind of came at this from the other side, giving us a fair amount of "setting" as background for the adventure, but not enough to satisfy people who wanted to make their own campaigns.
Just as a note, these more critical notes are not really directed as Morte's Planar Parade. In terms of new monsters, this might not hit Ravnica levels, but it's got more than appeared in Eberron. And even though we usually get a number of cool monster stat blocks in a setting book, they aren't dedicated to that purpose like Volo's or Mordenkainen's were. (And Monsters of the Multiverse, while mostly revisions of those books, has a total of 261 stat blocks, dwarfed only by the Monster Manual's 450).
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