Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes

Happily, my copy arrived six days earlier than it had first been suggested (yes, I feel guilty getting it online rather than from a local game shop.) I've done a brief skim of it, naturally searching through the Bestiary for cool stuff.

So, what do you get in the new D&D book, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes?

On the most practical level, there are stat blocks for high-level monsters here. In addition to the Demon Lords reprinted from Out of the Abyss (no new ones, but we got a pretty decent selection in that, so it's not too bad,) we also get a number of Archdevils - though some of the main movers and shakers of the Hells aren't here. Still, we get Moloch (he of the famous statue from I want to say the 1st edition Player's Handbook,) Geryon, Zariel, and a few others. These guys are generally in the 20-ish CR range. There's also a ton of new demons and devils that aren't individual legendary creatures.

We also get some higher-powered Drow and Duergar creatures, with other assortments. Notably there are a lot of constructs, like the terrifying-if-you-get-it-on-your-bad-side Marut, a Lawful Neutral contract-enforcer that, for example, automatically hits a target for 60 damage any time they attack.

There are a lot of super-creepy critters here, with a whole slew of Shadowfell entities (including the pants-shittingly terrifying Nightwalkers, who are technically from the Negative Plane,) along with a group of explicitly Lovecraftian "Star Spawn" creatures that, tragically, only have one illustration amongst them. On the plus side, like for those of demons and devils, there are special cultist abilities for some of the Elder Evils (my interpretation is that Elder Evil falls within the category of Great Old One, but that GOOs could include beings of any alignment, or more frequently, unaligned entities.)

There's not much in the way of good creatures here - which I actually think is a bit of a shame, as I think fleshing out the potential conflicts between, say, Celestia and Arborea, would be a cool idea. Not every creature in the book is a towering monster, but the focus here is clearly on providing challenges for higher-level adventurers.

Much like Volo's Guide to Monsters, there's a great deal of lore in this book, focusing its first chapter on the Blood War - the conflict between the Hells and the Abyss, as well as having chapters on Elves (including the Drow and the Eladrin,) the Dwarves and their conflict with the Duergar, and then some races that don't tend to find much in the way of conflict, namely the Halflings and Gnomes.

For DMs, I think that this book serves as a pretty high-priority acquisition. Like Volo's and Xanathar's before it, this book is going to give you a lot of fuel for multiple campaigns.

Now, I just need to get a bigger bag to hold all my freaking books!