Volos Guide to Monsters (Dungeons Dragons, 5th Edition) by Wizards of the Coast

Volos Guide to Monsters (Dungeons Dragons, 5th Edition) Reviews

• 
  Mike

  A really nice supplement to the
  5th Edition Monster Manual. It provides a deeper look at some selected cultures (goblinoid, Mindflayers, etc) that offer a lot of good ideas for DMs (Dungeon Masters) to work with. I know I got a much better understanding of the humble, lowly Kobold and a greater appreciation for how Orcs organize their societies (much more complex than you would think). The nice thing about D&D is that nothing is set, so a DM can pick and choose what aspects of a culture they want to incorporate into their adventuring world.
  
  I think this is where this book really shines because it offers such an in depth look at a wide variety of creature cultures it is easy for a DM to mix and match different cultural facets. The addition of more monsters to draw upon is also welcomed, since you can never have too many monster options, as was the inclusion of specialized monsters that flesh out a given race's culture (like specialized Orcs or Kobolds that fill particular societal niches).
  
  This book wasn't quite as impressive as the Monster Manual in terms of the witty asides that pop up throughout the reading and some of the monsters added seemed like the junior varsity team that didn't make the cut in the first Monster Manual. Still, overall, this is an excellent resource to add to a D&D campaign.
• 
  Dan Schwent

  I spent a couple hours flipping through this last night. Monsters, monsters, monsters. Some popular monster species are put under the microscope, like Mind Flayers, Beholders, and various goblinoid races. Some new non-human player character races are introduces, like the Goliath, Firbolg, and Tabaxi. Other than that, it's page after page of monsters. My wife occasionally looked up from her phone game to marvel at the Flail Snail and other monsters and is pretty jazzed about playing a Tabaxi so the book did it's job. Seriously, who doesn't need more monsters in their game?
• 
  Diz

  This is a great book for both players and DMs. There are three sections. The first section provides in depth information on the most iconic monster types in D&D. This includes information about the culture and lairs, and it also provides information on role playing those monsters for DMs. The second section provides new races for player characters, including some monstrous player races. The final section provides new monsters to supplement the ones found in the Monster Manual. In general, I enjoy reading Monster Manual type books like this because it's fun to learn about the kinds of creatures that appear in the world of D&D. If you play D&D or just enjoy monsters in general, this is worth picking up.
• 
  Ryan Stewart

  Re-read: This is a phenomenal addition to any Dungeon Master's collection. Fantastic organization compared to other 5E books, too.
  New player character classes, a boost to the available NPC rosters, more than 100 new monsters, and--the best part-- an amazing deep dive into a handful of select monsters to understand how they think, how they strategize, where they live and their lore.
• 
  Pearson Bolt

  Hands down, Volo's Guide to Monsters is the best D&D 5e guidebook Wizards has released. Indeed, other than The Book of Vile Deeds, I'm hard-pressed to think of a better D&D companion. An absolute essential for DMs.
• 
  Sabrina

  Amazing.
  This book adds so much more for DMs to work with. Really amazing monsters, some maps, and some really cool new races that players can mess with.
  My only issue is that a cow has a higher HP and AC than my druid has... yeah... i'm jelly...
• 
  Timothy Boyd

  I don't think I have ever given a game book a 5 star rating but this is IT! Many of the longer race entries read like short stories. Tons of good information and ideas on every entry. A very enjoyable read overall even though it is meant to be a game reference book. Highly recommended
• 
  Roger Alix-Gaudreau

  I love all the in-depth monster lore on several archetypal monster types in the first chapter. I got several ideas for new campaigns just from reading that. (Of course, I will never have the time to run all the campaigns I have ideas for...)
  
  The chapter on new PC races was pretty cool, and I'm sure I'll see some of those options in future games. A few I wish were in there weren't, but that's not a huge deal.
  
  The final chapter -- stat blocks for a bunch of new monsters -- had some fun new things, as well as the return of some older monsters that I'm not a particular fan of, but no one's going to make me use them. :-)
  
  All in all, a great addition to the 5E source material.
• 
  Eran Weiss

  It's just wonderful. Everything about it.
  
  It has 3 parts:
  1. In-depth sections on various iconic monsters - Beholders, Kobolds, etc. - each enough for an adventure or a campaign around it. If you like reading about fantastic creatures, and if you're considering Volo's, you are, you'll have fun just reading it. For me, just this part was worth the entire book.
  2. Character races. Feel like you had enough of the standard ones? You'll find something to spark your interest here.
  3. Monsters - including NPCs which are basically bare-metal PCs like a warlock with a certain path.
• 
  Sean

  I wasn't enamored with Sword Coast or any of the modules 5E is peddling, but Volo's guide makes me look forward to upcoming 5E splat.
  
  The in-depth fluff for monster mythology is great and it clarifies or corrects mythology from previous editions.
• 
  Steven van Ens

  Volo's Guide to Monsters was the first supplementary book for 5th edition D&D. As such, it is a little outdated now, as it predates the changes following BLM and the revisited rules on alignments. Despite this, more recent editions of this particular book do include these changes, but I happen to own the older version.
  
  The book is a supplement mainly to the Monster Manual core rulebook. As such, it contains stat blocks for many monsters, both old favourites, new creations and different versions of monster from the MM. It also includes very expansive lore for six monsters central to many D&D adventures, including Orcs, Goblins, Hags, Kobolds, Mind Flayers and the elusive Yuan-ti. This lore is generalized and usable in any setting, though there are occasional references to the Forgotten Realms setting. On top of that, a small chapter is dedicated to new monstrous races for players to use in their character creation.
  
  The book is a fun and interesting read, although it must be said that the races and (possibly all) monster stat blocks now also appear in the recently published Monsters of the Multiverse. Despite this, the lore chapter still contains much information on these monsters, and is a good read for DMs.
• 
  Becky

  A great expansion/supplement. I use it all the time.
• 
  Chris Philbrook

  As an adopter of 5th edition in our gaming crew, I'm really enjoying all the new takes on old things. They're reimagining how things can be, without ruining how they were.
  
  To be honest, I wasn't impressed with this initially; the heavy-handed cultural approach to the monsters was meh for me. Lots of deity and god talk, etc etc. Neat if you're going all-in on an Orc campaign and want tons of motivation though.
  I was very impressed with the PC races and the rules for adapting monstrous races into PC roles. Those will come up in the campaigns we have, no doubt. I was also very happy with the monstrous additions, as I thought the Monster Manual left a lot out.
  
  Overall, a terrific addition to the 5th ed lineup.
• 
  Andrew Nguyen

  A superhero is only as interesting as the villain they are opposed to. Batman on his own isn't really all that interesting- just beating up nameless villains. Batman vs the Joker, on the other hand, really makes Batman a compelling character. And what makes a good villain? A good villain isn't just a caricature, but has deep, understandable motivations. This book explains the lore and motivations of monsters so well that I will never fight a lowly Kobold again without a tinge of sympathy.
  
  I picked up Volo's Guide to Monsters to help with some role-playing for a half-orc bard I am currently roleplaying. The details of orc life are so deep that the guide even delves into an orc's pre-bedtime superstitions.
  
  The first major-chunk of the book is Volo, the adventurer, going in to depth about the structure and life of nine common monsters: beholders, giants, gnolls, goblonoids, hags, kobolds, mind flayers (my favorite chapter), orcs and yuan-ti. And man, Volo hath seen some shit.
  
  In the introduction of each monster, a clear motivation is set out: worship of a destructive god, the desire to emulate their dragon ancestors or merely survival. Every part of the monster's society flows from this motivation. A detailed look at the progenation of the species, social structure, physical characteristics, battle tactics, creative variants of the main monster, layout of the monster lair, treasures the monster might collect and minions that might accompany the monster are laid out in every monster chapter. For dungeon masters, there are role-playing ideas, lair maps, and instructions for constructing a band of kobolds, orcs, mind-flayers, etc.
  
  The first part of the book makes the purchase worth it alone. As a kid, I really enjoyed reading Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them from the Harry Potter series. Volo's guide has a very similar feel, as if narrated by Sir David Attenborough himself. What makes this guide fun, is that someday my character could actually encounter a mind-flayer in the wild!
  
  Following with the theme of monsters, the guide also introduces a cast of new playable races with a beast-esque feel to them. None of these are likely to be as widely memorable as the elf, dwarf or any of the races in the core manual but they are all as equally well thought out. This chapter even includes bare-bones statistics for building a monster adventurer if you ever had a reason to play a bugbear or a full orc.
  
  What follows that chapter is a menagerie of new monsters. The most interesting monsters are described in the first chapters and are special variations of kobolds, yuan-ti, et al. The rest of the monsters, I feel much like the character classes; the monsters are fine but nothing to really write home about.
  
  One other bonus is the addition of NPC stats. This is really nice if you're building up a town to defend from an orc raid without building out a full cast of NPCs from scratch.
  
  The really tight focus on monsters and inspired lore make this is the best non-core book for DnD 5e.
• 
  John Campbell

  A really excellent supplement. So many things in here gave me awesome ideas for campaigns and encounters. I hope the new dungeon themed supplement is as good as this is.
• 
  Drew

  Volo’s Guide to Monsters follows the same format as the DM expansion books, with half the book being in-depth lore of some part of the D&D worlds, including new character options, and the second half of the book being a bestiary of new creatures, most of which relate to the lore from the first half of the book.
  
  This book adds lots of lore about some iconic D&D monsters like beholders, giants, goblinoids, etc. It covers their behaviors, abilities, how to role play them, and even provides fully-realized example lairs for these creatures. While this is super interesting and allows a DM to add depth to encounters, it’s also a LOT of information that would be hard to remember in the moment. Might just be me though.
  
  Here’s something I’m beginning to realize with these books: in general, lore like this is fun for its own sake, but only for the DM, with few exceptions. On the other hand, lore that lends itself to spontaneous discovery, especially via player interaction, is absolute gold in an RPG.
  
  For example, everything I learned about beholders is cool, but the only way I could share that with the players would be to expound on the lore myself, to info dump on the players if they ask. In contrast, there is a creature in this book that adds a throwaway detail in its description that is, in my opinion, the best thing in the book. The creature is called a cave fisher, a 5-foot-long pure white lobstrosity that secretes sticky filament to entangle prey. Not a high chance characters would ever see one, especially if the adventure takes place far from their favored lairs.
  
  But when a cave fisher is killed, their alcoholic blood is harvested as a powerful spirit. Their blood is literally powerful booze. This is an opportunity to add detail to the world that is interactive: the players could wander into a tavern and see a bottle of dark red booze behind the bar, labeled Cave Fisher Blood. A picture of a strange giant lobster is on the label (maybe with a warning on the label to take it easy with this stuff). Players will have questions, and the barkeep could provide answers—right before they buy a round of shots and you have them roll CON saving throws.
  
  It’s the difference between lecturing and discovering. Passive vs active. Expanding on the world should be possible through the everyday, not just via the crazy shit adventurers experience in faraway lands.
  
  Overall, a pretty cool book. I felt that it was an oversight to leave out player options to be a mindflayer. Given the lore in this book, it’s perfectly possible to be an adventuring ithillid, with built-in backstory to boot.
• 
  Scott Firestone

  The Lore section was easily my favorite part of the book. Even a “small” encounter with a hag can have new depth and life just by adding a few small details found here. I love it. I’m doing (very) advance prep for running the Storm King’s Thunder adventure, which is about giants, so that extra info on giants and their world will only help me flesh my world out.
  
  I have almost no use for the new player races at this point in my DM life, but down the road, they might be of more use. Still, something for players and not just DMs is a nice addition.
  
  As far as the Bestiary? Well, who doesn’t like more baddies to throw at the players?! And some of these look super fun.
  
  There’s not much to complain about here…but there is a bit to complain about, and that has to do with value. Volo’s clocks in at 224 pages, but it has the same $49.95 MSRP that the Monster Manual has—and that clocks in at 352 pages. So I feel like they could have easily included more monster lore, and more monsters. This is especially true since there are some monsters I expected to see here, and just aren’t there. Dragons, for instance. Or trolls. Or elementals. I have a hard time swallowing paying $50 for a book that has 125 fewer pages than others that cost the same. If you’re going to keep that page count, at least drop the MSRP.
  
  You should also know that almost all of the monsters here are level 10 or below, so if you’re looking for higher-level foes, look elsewhere.
  
  Volo’s Guide to Monsters is great. It’s not a must-have, but it’s the sort of addition that can truly increase the feeling that your world is alive and real—even the parts of the world where the players don’t happen to be. A key to world-building is convincing people that things happened before the events that you’re describing, and that things will happen after these adventurers are long dead. Volo’s helps with that. It’s an excellent resource.
• 
  Carlos Gutiérrez

  Interesante manual sobre todo en su primera parte, que permite conocer el modo de actuar, pensar y ser de monstruos clásicos, así como algunas razas nuevas muu interesantes que añadir a las clases básicas del manual del jugador. Recomendable.
• 
  Daniel A.

  I've been duly impressed by the job Wizards of the Coast has done on 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. By this time in the evolution of every previous edition of D&D—and certainly 3rd/3.5 and 4th edition, which were the first editions for which I experienced their original release—Wizards of the Coast had released any number of additional sourcebooks (and even more-or-less essential core manuals) with additional rules and inclusions for gameplay that, while not exactly vital to effective roleplaying, were sufficiently important that it was somewhat better to use the books than not. Compare this phenomenon with 5th edition's
  Volo's Guide to Monsters: Not only is it the first book with major new rules material for 5th edition—roughly 2½ years after the initial release of 5th edition!—but the rules it presents are either not essential for rich gaming, or, if they are, presented elsewhere as needed. Volo's Guide to Monsters thus wins on most counts.
  
  Written primarily by WotC workhorses
  Mike Mearls and
  Jeremy Crawford (and credited to the
  "Wizards RPG Team"), Volo's Guide to Monsters is just that—a valuable exploration, wider than in the
  Monster Manual, of the plethora of beasties available to DMs and PCs in 5th edition D&D. Why PCs? Because one of the best parts of Volo's Guide is its options for PCs who want to play monster characters such as goblinoids, orcs, or even a few other harder-to-play monster races. (Volo's Guide also provides extensive details for playing a few additional, "new" races [one or two of them already presented in later 4th edition books], but more on that below.) Given that goblin or orc PCs are among the classic "advanced" (no pun intended) options for D&D roleplaying, this aspect of Volo's Guide is a very nice addition to the rules. And the parts of the book that appeal most to DMs—the highly detailed ecologies of some of the iconic monsters in D&D, as well as stat boxes for dozens of others—are well-thought out enhancements as well.
  
  It may be a quibble, but the stats for playing some of the more . . . exotic races specific to PCs (tritons, goliaths, and—my favorite—tabaxi) make them somewhat overly powerful for a properly balanced game, or at least too quirky for a run-of-the-mill adventure. That being said, that just may be the point: Wizards of the Coast seems very much to want to limit primary gameplay to what can be derived from the three core rulebooks, and the semi-subtle hint from Volo's Guide is essentially a "well, you asked for it . . .". The new information for PCs contained in the book is designed both for advanced PCs and for advanced DMs, and that's the beauty of Volo's Guide.
  
  Indeed, one of the key points that makes this sourcebook so good is that it leaves enough unsaid for a skilled DM to make hay of the material within. (In fact, I've already used a couple tabaxi for notable color as NPCs. I make no assessment of my skill as a DM, though.) A DM can use the ecology of mind flayers, kobolds, and yuan-ti as written and then build this information into their own campaign in whatever form it may take. A good D&D sourcebook offers guidelines rather than hard-and-fast rules, and Volo's Guide offers this in spades. I highly recommend it to D&D enthusiasts.
  
• 
  Raz

  I love the additions. The new monsters and ideas, the new player races, etc.
• 
  Hazel

  An excellent resource to help you flesh out monsters a little more. I've started a whole campaign based solely on the content in this book.
  
  The descriptions of the monster races are really the most valuable part. The additional pc races and monster stat blocks are cool, but the monster lore is really the most useful tool in this guide.
  
  The only thing that I don't really like about this guide is the inclusion of the Goliaths as a player race. It seems a little cheap to include them in this book, when they already have them in Elemental Evil for free.
• 
  Peter

  If you ever wondered how beholders are born and what drives and motivates them this is the book to go for. Not just that but the book gives a rich description of goblinoid, orc, gnoll, kobold, giant, mindflayer societies among many others. Spectacularly imaginative and thrilling to read it is a resource that any dnd enthusiast will appreciate.
• 
  James

  This has a lot of material to improve your gameplay with many monster races. Some of the best fleshing out of monstrous society that I've seen in a long time. Many of the outlines can be applied to any edition of D&D.
• 
  Brian

  Very odd choices. Some monsters.
• 
  Nico Meyering

  A stunningly quick read. Hopefully I can ask around about making an aasimar monk who follows way of the sun soul.
• 
  E.W. Pierce

  Fun, fresh take on a monster manual, with insightful lore on some of D&D's standard creatures. This will get your world-building muscles moving.
• 
  Michael

  Interesting, but just not first edition quality.
• 
  Chris Jackson

  Very informative and gives some new races and more back story into some of the more common races as well as new variants to change things up a little