Dungeons & Dragons: Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse: 1

Product Information

During a press briefing last week, Crawford noted that lots of attention has been paid to how player character (PC) races are being presented in the book. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.

The overhaul not only makes its melee attack worthwhile, but lets it combine spells and attacks, while swapping its big damage spells for field control effects.Just look to the various “edition wars” that have cropped up over the years when the franchise transitioned from 3rd edition, to 3. An emphasis on making these stat blocks as easy to navigate as possible will help streamline your sessions but also show that someone up top is thinking about how you as a DM and player will use this book, not just as a stack of information, but as a tool for facilitating storytelling. Then in the rest of the product description it even clearly states it is “Compiling and updating monsters that originally appeared in Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes.

But there’s a downside to breaking ties with nearly a decade’s worth of products — adventures, settings, rulebooks, and licensed accessories, some of which are just now trickling out into the hands of a mainstream audience — and starting fresh.

Each of those races will be presented in a revised format, first seen in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (2020), that formally separates ability score increases (Strength, Constitution, Wisdom, etc. For Crawford, this didn’t just mean iterating on rules for streamlining or change’s sake, but making creatures feel like they’re at their maximum potential. Unlike games like Warhammer, RPGs have the characteristic that really only 1 person needs to have all the material to play. Suggested moral alignments for certain species have also been removed for Monsters of the Multiverse. In fact, I think a bigger objection than whether they can be counterspelled is that they’re just not that interesting.

As part of broader, incremental changes to Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards of the Coast is looking to address the issue, stripping out ideas related to race essentialism. So, if you’re a player looking for some cool races, feel free to grab this one once you have had a look at the Players Handbook, and for DMs, this one will be great to build upon what you’ve already learnt in the Players Handbook, Monster Manuel, and Dungeon Masters Guide. And when I say "premise", I don't mean the text I linked above, I mean the idea that the book represents. But at the last minute I realised that all the monsters lore when out of the window, which was a good third of the previous books.But DMs who aren’t trained editors may not notice other small improvements, like the fact that the names of attack actions are now always capitalized within stat blocks—it’s always “Bite,” for instance, never just “bite”—and lair actions and regional effects are named the same way traits and actions are. Since I do happen to be pushing a book of tactical recommendations based on the stat blocks as they appear in Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s, I’m sure readers are wondering (a) what I think of the changes in Multiverse and (b) whether my tactical recommendations hold up after the changes. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to see “(as a 5th-level spell)” after just one spell in a warlock stat block.

With Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse, however, it definitely sounds like the company got caught with its hand in the proverbial cookie jar. There are still a few little categories—those are in the table of contents and will become clear when you go through the book—but for the most part, when you think of Just how Fizban's took Dragons and made an entire book about Dragons, this book could have expanded on the different monsters from the sourcebooks and provided new versions of those monsters. With that in mind, they worked to make sure each one lived up to their Challenge Rating, no matter which attack Dungeon Masters used. The types that were originally detailed in Volo’s are as follows; Orc Blade of Ilneval, Orc Claw of Luthic, Orc hand of Yurtrus, Orc Nurtured One of Yurtus, and Orc Red Fang of Shargaas.To compensate, you’ll want to swap out that ancient bronze dragon to something with a lower challenge rating. Having balanced races is essential for a thriving story; players should be able to choose a race for their mechanics and story-telling capabilities, not because one overpowers the rest. I’m pretty sure that Wizards of the Coast never represented it as anything other than a revision of previous content, so don’t get mad at your own poor reading comprehension, and No. Plus, all races have been carefully balanced to be more compatible with your table, no matter the story you’re telling.