Monster Volume 6

[Hadi Sapre]

Monster was licensed in North America by Viz Media, who published all 18 volumes between 21 February 2006 and 16 December 2008.[1] Starting in July 2014, they published a re-release of the series in nine two-in-one volumes, titled Monster: The Perfect Edition, with a new volume published every three months.[1] The series has also received domestic releases in other countries, such as in Germany by Egmont Manga & Anime, in France and the Netherlands by Kana, in Spain by Planeta DeAgostini, in Brazil by Conrad Editora and later by Panini Comics, in Argentina by Larp Editores, in Taiwan by Tong Li Publishing, in Mexico by Grupo Editorial Vid, in Poland by Hanami, and in Portugal by Devir.

The Volume Monster program was born from the need to train like a monster, but with a methodical method of doing so with ample recovery. In my years of powerlifting, I was always known for the amount of volume that I could program and recover from, and the truth is, you too, can train like this.

This program is a blend of powerlifting and bodybuilding, also known more commonly as powerbuilding. We use big exercises for strength (squat, bench press, deadlift) and bodybuilding based exercises and programming for size and conditioning.

When I first got this latest volume of First Love Monster, I honestly thought this was one of those. Volume 7 is super thin. First Love Monster has never had volumes with high page counts, but this one looks even shorter than Kaz does when surrounded by his best friends.

This book contains 6 new monsters designed by kids. They submitted drawings and descriptions, then Wizards of the Coast brought them to life with stat blocks and professional artwork. Now you can enjoy them in your own games!

Purchasing a digital copy of this book unlocks it for use in the D&D BEYOND compendium and toolset. D&D BEYOND is the official digital toolset for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. Create characters in minutes, play directly on your character sheets with digital dice, and prep less and play more with Dungeon Master tools like the Encounter Builder and Combat Tracker. Unlock Maps, D&D BEYOND's virtual tabletop, with a Master Tier subscription. Host game sessions on dozens of official maps, or make your own and use our player and monster tokens to take your gaming to the next level!

I am intending to run Wolves upon the Coast and had originally planned to write about this short OSR-compatible monster manual in the context of that campaign but I have now been living with this book for close to a year and I can honestly say that not a week has gone by without my thoughts returning to it by one path or another. This little book has not only re-wired my brain and changed my approach to the fantastic, it has also fundamentally altered how I approach RPG supplements.

Vol 2 Monsters & is like the Necronomicon for roleplayers: To read it is to be altered and while some of will run screaming into the night clawing hopelessly at empty eye sockets with bloodied fingernails, others will absorb its power and transform themselves into degenerate sorcerers.

The physical version of Vol 2 Monsters & from Exalted Funeral is an unprepossessing little thing: 52 tiny pages with a satiny minimalist cover whose monochromatic austerity is disrupted only by a blood-red slash across the middle of the page. The internals are deceptively straightforward: A two-line D&D-compatible stat bloc accompanied by some descriptive text, and the name of the monster repeated four times in a distressed font. The placement of these elements varies from page to page: Sometimes the page is white, sometimes it is black, and sometimes it is augmented by some abstract patterns that pick up on some of the themes and images associated with the monster. The words are by Luke Gearing, the layout is by Bonito, and the editing is by Jarrett Crader.

I remember once walking into an RPG shop in London and buying two books for the same game that had been produced by the same company. One book got so much use that all of its pages fell out and I wound up porting it across to a binder. The other book, I never finished reading and it lived on a shelf gathering dust for decades until moving house prompted me to sell it on.

Sometimes the supplements provide additional monsters to fight, sometimes they introduce new character-types to play, sometimes they introduce new spells, and sometimes they introduce whole new rules. The quality of these kinds of supplements may vary but they are easy to metabolise as their mechanical nature means that you just plug them directly into your game.

The problem is that while the RPG hobby may have its roots in wargaming, it does include aspects and facets of play that are not purely mechanical. Some supplements are neither supplemental rule mechanics nor conventional adventure modules. Instead, they try to provide the kind of background/setting detail that either add a bit of colour to an existing adventure or inspire GMs to write their own stuff. These are the types of supplements that tend to be wildly hit-and-miss as different GMs have different styles and very few supplements reflect the existence of differing creative approaches.

Some people do want that level of detail because they want to be able to plug stuff directly into their game. They no more want to make creative decisions about what the streets of Arkham might look like than they want to busk or hand-wave the differences between taupe, beige, and jitney dragons.

I think that the number of people who want to be able to buy a supplement and drop it directly into a game-world massively outweighs the number of people who want something different out of the supplements they buy. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that buying a supplement full of facts and choosing to ignore most of them is a weird and illogical thing to do but some people do exactly that because supplements can work differently than by providing a list of facts that can be dropped into a game world.

For me, the best kinds of supplements are those that are evocative. Being evocative is less about about flooding the zone with game-relevant facts, and more about presenting information in such a way that I start asking the kinds of questions that move me to start spitting out facts of my own.

Vol 2 Monsters & is an extraordinary piece of game-writing as it strips out the kinds of facts that you normally get in monster manuals and provides nothing but a short stat bloc and some really evocative writing that is designed to provoke a creative response rather than fill a need for content.

The entry for goblins is a great example of how this supplement works as it is only two lines long but those lines include a lot of really interesting ideas about the world the supplement describes. Are we meant to interpret the text literally and assert that Goblins are literally mutated children? If so then what caused them to mutate and what did they mutate into? Or, maybe we are meant to approach the text less directly and assume that Goblins are magical creatures that are born of the fallout from city-killing magical WMDs. These are not facts, these are questions and every single entry in this book provokes you into asking the kinds of questions that can only be answered creatively and from that creativity fictional worlds are born.

While Monsters & is very good at getting its users to ask questions, you cannot ask a question without narrowing the scope of the inquiry just enough to smuggle in some assumptions about the world. Thankfully, the assumptions are just as revolutionary as the way in which the information is framed.

One of the recurring motifs in Monsters & is the idea that monsters are made rather than simply found in the world. While D&D has always allowed for the possibility that some monsters are products of magical experimentation or design, it has historically tended to present monsters as fictional creatures that just happen to not exist in our world. Hence also the weird obsession with habitats and ecological niches.

Quite a few of the entries in Monsters & present monsters as states that humans enter as a result of either extreme obsession or a kind of twisted spirituality. This is the range of ideas that have been living in my head since I first purchased the book. My favourite is undoubtedly the Gnoll:

I love this idea so much that I have been living with it since I purchased a copy of this book. I want an entire World of Darkness line of Urban Fantasy games where the various Fantastical beasties are all different flavours of spiritual pervert who have chosen to live not only as different species, but as members of species whose monstrous appearance shatters any sense of native empathy that one human might naturally feel for another. These are people who have rejected what we are at such a primal level that they have incurred a form of social death. There is so much thematic richness to that idea that I cannot help but keep interrogating it and each interrogation encourages me to be creative.

Obviously the stuff about people making themselves into monsters is what lit up my brain but there are so many ideas in here that anyone with an ounce of creativity will find reading this book to be an intensely satisfying experience. I have been playing RPGs since the early 1990s and I have simply never encountered an RPG supplement as powerful and evocative as Vol 2 Monsters &.

I would argue that you can be very creative and skilled at self-expression but if you are denying your players a sense of agency by forcing them into a linear plot or having them be up staged by your own NPCs then you are a bad GM as RPGs are collaborative undertakings and having a feel for the medium involves knowing how to weave together player-facing fun and exploring the stuff that you want to explore.

I've only ran Cairn and EZD6 and plan to read Black Hack and White hack to learn about bare-bones osr approach, Basic Fantasy to learn about what community can achieve and Shadowdark to learn at least one 5e-adjacent system that's not slow, bloated or corporate.

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