Tome of Beasts

Of the three 5e core rulebooks, my favourite is the "Monster Manual", which has a great set of monsters, lovely artwork, and just the right amount of lore. If the MM has a weakness, however, is that it is a very 'classic' set of monsters: giants, and dragons, and orcs, and beholders, and so on and so forth. This pretty much had to be the case, of course, but it did leave me looking for something new.

Consequently, my most-wanted supplement for 5e for a long time was simple: a "Monster Manual 2", which could be crafted very easily - take the MM, remove all the monsters, replace them with other monsters, and we're done.

And that, right there, is "Tome of Beasts", a third-party book of monsters by Kobold Press, published under the OGL. It's basically another "Monster Manual", vastly expanding the range of available critters. And, at $50 for 432 pages in hardback and full-colour, it's a heck of a buy.

The book isn't quite perfect - I noticed at least one monster missing from the Table of Contents, there were a few cases where a sub-heading wasn't correctly bolded, or the chapter heading was offset by one, or a wrong word was used. (And I'm sure there are at least a few mistakes in the stat-blocks.) But those are mere quibbles. Likewise, it would have been really nice to see a table similar to the one in the DMG indicating how all the various creature traits affect the monster's effective stats, so that a DM building a variant had a good place to start. Again, though, it's always possible to find more that could be included!

This is a great, great buy - I recommend it above any other supplement for 5e to date, including both those from WotC and over other third-party producers. (If you can buy both this and "Fifth Edition Foes", then do so. But if you have to choose, this is the one to go for.) This book also probably satisfies my desire for any more 'general' monsters for 5e - I'm now potentially in the market for setting-specific books, and there are some WotC-IP monsters I'd be keen to see updated, but I'd probably not buy a simple "Tome of Beasts 2" or similar.

One last thing: I have "Volo's Guide to Monsters" on pre-order from Amazon and due to arrive in a couple of weeks. It's really going to have to go some to compete!