You know what the world needs right now? Another blog – especially about Dungeons and Dragons.

No, seriously – we need more of these to keep the hobby interesting, to share ideas and, for my purposes, to help work out those kinks in the ol’ brain that helps me come up with new ideas and adventures, rather than depending on others to do it for me or, gods forbid, asking AI to do it for me.

So, here’s what I want to do here: The new Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual came out just this month (as of the time of writing), with an absurd number of creatures, complete with stats, lore, and artwork.

I think I could, if I really, really try, come up with at least an encounter or even an entire adventure about Every. Single. One.

That’s right. From Aarakocra to Zombies.

Now, a few caveats:

1. You know how blogs are. The big challenge will be actually continuing through this thing and not just dropping it when things get tedious or tough. So, I’ll need to come up with a schedule. Weekly, perhaps. We’ll see. I just set up this site and it’s making me write a post.
2. I can’t share a whole lot of mechanical details of most monsters, I think. At least not until the new SRD comes out and I can see which ones they’re letting people use for free. Until then, I’ll have to be a bit cagey about stats and things like that.

That’s it for now! Let’s see how this works….

A QUICK EDIT: It occurred to me, lying in bed, that if I do this from beginning to end, not only will it take nearly seven years, but if for some reason I can’t make it through the whole thing, I’ll have missed a lot of good creatures.

So I’m randomizing it in a Google Sheet. I may still miss good monsters, but at least I’ll miss them randomly.

Also, there are some entries in MM24 that are grouped – the dragons, for example, have their four age levels listed under “X Dragon”. I’m going to do those all at once, mainly because it feels like it makes sense to do so.

Finally, I thought it would be fun to, maybe once a month, do a Monster Mashup, wherein two monsters are randomly chosen to go in an encounter or an adventure together. This could get weird (think Banshees and Purple Worms), but that’s the fun of it! Do they team up? Do they fight each other? Does one side with the adventurers to destroy the other and then turn on them? Let’s find out!