Last week we took our first looks at the Menagerie as a whole, this week we begin a more thorough exploration of what it has to offer. Of the twenty-four base creature types included in the core rules for monster and NPC creation, all but four are given their own dedicated chapters in the Menagerie. What isn't included in a supplement can be as important as what is. Humanoids and Goblinoids, for example, tend to be more appropriately built as Non-Player Characters with class perks and abilities, and so don't quite fit nicely into a book of monsters. Any yet, while there is no chapter dedicated to Humanoids and Goblinoids, there are a few that have found their way into the book smuggled in other, composite creature types like Giants.
Haunts, on the other hand, while similar to Undead but yet possessing their own creature type, don't really fit into the Menagerie either. Each Haunt is a unique expression of the circumstances and location in which it belongs, and aren't really a one-size-fits-all solution. Haunts are much more likely to be written directly into an adventure module as appropriate, carefully crafted from scratch each time one shows up. Finally, the Outsiders type is more of an umbrella type. There is no one chapter dedicated to these beings from other planes of existence. Instead, there are chapters for the most common sub-types of Outsiders. In this way, despite having no single chapter with their label, Outsiders are perhaps the most represented creature type in the book.
This still leaves twenty chapters of creatures, plus an extra chapter of templates to add unusual twists to those already laid out in the book. Each chapter has a wealth of varied and interesting monsters of escalating rarity, and a few boss monsters as well. Rarity has a few important rules interactions with the mechanics of the core rules, including setting the difficulty to Identify a monster, but since the Menagerie is written in a level-agnostic format, rarity can be considered a sort of substitute for difficulty. The less common a monster is, the less finely balanced it is forced to be, and the greater the challenge. Boss monsters, in particular, are not intended to be balanced at all and can present a challenge at whatever level they may be used. While the overwhelming majority of the entries in the book fall neatly into the Common, Uncommon or Rare categories, a small cohort of monsters dispersed throughout the Menagerie are Unique. While not all boss monsters are Unique in rarity, all Unique monsters are bosses.
Since none of the monsters in the Menagerie have a specific level, the monsters in each chapter are instead organized alphabetically for overall consistency. To make navigating these chapters a little easier, each one starts with a list of the monsters included, sorted by their individual rarities. Like the core rules, the digital version of this supplement makes liberal use of helpful hyperlinks to assist in quick navigation. Just two clicks is sufficient to get from the table of contents to any individual monster in the book, saving a great deal of time when looking up statistics. These lists can also be helpful for deciding what encounters a GM wants to place in front of the party, if you already have an idea of the creature type you want to use and the relative difficulty you're looking for.
Even if you don't know what you're looking for in advance, the Menagerie itself can help you decide. The chapter dedicated to biomes lists thirty-five different types of regions, ranging from deep caves to high peaks, desert dunes and ocean depths. There are several biomes included for each type of terrain included in the core rules, and each one has an exhaustive list of the monsters in the Menagerie which can be found there. These lists are all hyperlinked to the individual monster entries, and the lists themselves are linked by an overview at the beginning of the chapter which sorts the biomes by the terrain they belong to. Picking an appropriate encounter with the desired difficulty can be accomplished with just a few clicks on the fly. Like the chapter overviews, these biome lists are sorted by rarity, with bosses given their own separate list to prevent accidentally choosing an encounter that might be too resource intensive for the purpose at hand. And, if all else fails and no inspiration strikes, it's easy to choose one of the creature types at random by rolling a d20 and go from there.
Next week we'll start looking at the individual creature type chapters themselves, and some of the diverse monsters within that make each one stand out.
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