Tome of Beasts II

This post may seem somewhat familiar...

I was all set to skip this book - as I said in my review of "Tome of Beasts", I really have enough monsters for 'general' use, and wasn't really in the market for a sequel. However, a lack of ideas for a good Christmas present brought this book to my attention.

As the third monster book from Kobold Press, this one follows a very familiar format - 400+ pages of monsters, rendered in glorious full colour, and all at a fairly competitive price. So if you liked "Tome of Beasts" and "Creature Codex", you'll probably like this one for the same reasons. If you didn't like those books, don't bother with this one. And if you don't have those books, then get "Tome of Beasts" first, "Creature Codex" second, and then decide. (Each book assumes that you have and can reference the earlier ones. They can certainly be used by themselves, but do work a little better taken together.)

If making recommendations for 'monster' books for 5e, my order of recommendation is as follows: "Monster Manual", "Tome of Beasts", "Monster Manual Expanded", "Creature Codex", "Monster Manual Expanded II", "Tome of Beasts II", "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes", "Volo's Guide to Monsters", and finally "5th Edition Foes". Indeed, at this point I would stop well before the end of that list - I don't regret any of the purchases, but I just don't need all these monsters.

My recommendation here is necessarily conditional. If you're looking for even more monsters, this book is an excellent buy. If you're looking for specific WotC-owned monsters, then of course this won't do the job for you. Likewise, if you're looking for monsters that will appear in WotC products, or on the DM's Guild, this book isn't going to help. And if you're looking for anything other than monsters, this isn't the book for you. It does one thing, but does that one thing extremely well.

And that's that. As I said before, I'm now not in the market for any more 'general' monster books. I may pick up another "Guide To..." book from Wizards of the Coast, depending on the specific monsters that are present, and would certainly consider a 'themed' book of monsters. But for general use... well, I suppose there's always Christmas...