A Horde of New 5th Edition Monsters!
DM: “Hundreds of eyes float down the corridor toward you, trailing ganglia and dripping caustic fluid that sizzles when it hits the ground. What do you do?”
PLAYER: “I retire and become a farmer.”
This conversion for Foundry VTT includes:
- Fantastic Creatures: Over 400 unique critters with unique portraits, tokens, biographies, and lore to expand your world. Every piece of art is high resolution and optimized for delivery over the web so it looks as good as your imagination.
- Details At Your Fingertips: Every attack, ability, resistance, vulnerability, and special feature available in full detail with a click from any character sheet.
- Build Your Own Baddies: Easily select from the over 2,700 features, items, or abilities available from existing creatures, drag and drop them onto a new critter, and build out your own fantastic creation.
- Wide Variety: Many longtime Kobold Press favorites such as clockwork creatures, drakes and dragons, devils and arch-devils, dangerous flavors of the fey, loads of undead, and much more!
- Easy Summoning: No more rooting through the Tome of Beasts to find the creature your character is summoning. Just click on the creature from the description and it pops up!
- Dynamic Abilities: Toggle certain effects on or off—change AC, add a d4 to rolls, and much more.
- Speed Up Combat: With just a few clicks, you can make an attack, roll for damage, request a saving throw, and apply damage or healing to a creature. You can even automatically track resource usage for things like legendary actions and resistances.
- Spend More Time Roleplaying: Nothing breaks immersion quite like having to find the right die and remember the correct modifier in the middle of a tense scene. With a single click, you can roll any ability check regularly or at advantage/disadvantage and it automatically adds the correct values.
- Meta-Gaming Protection: Easily send descriptions of abilities to the chat that don’t give away the mechanics or roll privately to keep your players waiting with bated breath.
Use these creatures in your favorite published setting or populate the dungeons in a world of your own creation. Pick up Tome of Beasts and give your players an encounter they won’t soon forget!
Requirements: A licensed version of Foundry Virtual Tabletop and the DND5e – Fifth Edition System game system installed in Foundry.
What is included? A premium content registration key. See https://foundryvtt.com/article/premium-content/ for details.
Foundry Conversion: Matthew Haentschke, Matt Ryan, and Andrew Clayton
Ben Johnson –
Well, it IS very nice to see prodcuts like this for Foundry.
Any way to infuriate, murder, torture or just plain old surprise my players is always welcome at my (virtual) table. I’m one of the Covid-crew, returning to a hobby that I’d always meant to pick up again “at some point” and I’ve taken to 5e like a duck to water. However, there have been some sore points with 5e, a lack of monsters being my personal biggest issue, so again – this is a very welcome addition to my library.
There’s a mix of “classic” D&D monsters that I remember from older editiions and there’s an awful lot of new stuff. Very nice to see monsters that could fit into any of the campaigns I’m considering running (stealing from). Plenty of monsters contained in this book could easily slot into Frost Maiden, Tomb of Annihilation, Storm Kings Thunder or the upcoming Feywild adventure. There’s an awful lot of variety and I can sit and go through this Tome and get ideas for encounters and one shots quite easily – it IS inspiring and that’s always a sign of a good D&D product. Very well done to the authors, very well written and laid out.
Cons – well, I should have paid the additional $10 for the pdf, that would probably have made my life a bit easier, but I didn’t – you live and learn. Mainly, my biggest issude is that the art hasn’t added into the monster “profiles” on my Foundry, none, nada, nothing at all and that is kind of annoying and I’ve been going through manually adding images in off google, very time consuming, but I am a nerd AND it’s made me much more familiar with this product… so, I don’t mind (that much). There’s also the issue of whether this is a Foundry issue or a Forge issue, or my rural internet, but it would be nice to have an art package to download from here or somesuch – as the official art I have seen is generally gorgeous, with a couple of overly “cartoony” ones here and there.
All in all, a great purchase. Lairs isn’t really my thing, but I would be ecstatic to see more Foundry-able products from KP in future and consider my money well spent here. That one star this review lost is purely down to the art not down/uploading into my Foundry.
dseacord17 –
I just bought this and after playing around with it for a bit, it’s fantastic. Essentially, it works exactly the way I hoped it would: When you enable the module, it just dumps all the monsters from ToB into a Compendium for easy access. I’d been manually creating ToB monsters in D&D Beyond to then import into Foundry, and while that’s workable, it’s hugely tedious and sucked up way too much of my prep time. $40 seems steep but it’s a lot of monsters… In terms of convenience to me, I think it’ll be worth it for this book, but I might be more cautious at this price point for other purchases.
I did not have the issues with artwork mentioned in Ben Johnson’s September 17, 2021 review. I use the Forge hosting service.