Monsters & Creatures Offers a Perfect Entry Point for Budding D&D Adventurers

August 17, 2021

Books/ Dungeons & Dragons/ Monsters/ Previews/ Reading List

Have a young adventurer in your life? There is a set of Dungeons & Dragons guides specifically catered to younger readers. One of these is Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide by Jim Zub, Stacy King and Andrew Wheeler. This guide is part of an officially licensed D&D set called The Young Adventurer’s Collection. Monsters & Creatures is a total of 105 pages long and is fully illustrated in full color.

Legendary and magical worlds of D&D

This book has a lot to offer and it is great to get your family into roleplaying games. Sure, some of you D&D players have monsters memorized but if you are one of these walking guides you have most likely been playing for quite some time. Monsters & Creatures provides an easy and concise read on some of the more common, unusual and epic D&D monsters and creatures. The guide is written to capture the readers’ attention from the start. This pulls you in and illuminates all the possibilities for creatures in D&D adventures.

You can read Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide in its entirety or keep it on hand as a reference. The monsters and creatures are organized by environment and are easy to find. Each monster or creature has about two pages of information and an illustration. The pages show the threat rating and give tips based on the monster or creature for how adventurers might proceed. There is a description of the monster or creature’s features with fun facts and what to do if you encounter the monster or creature. The guide also breaks down the meaning of threat rating in a clear and easy manner, which my nine-year-old understood after he first read the guide.

Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide is packed full of amazing and colorful art that really brings the monsters and creatures in the book to life. D&D is all about imagination but sometimes a picture is worth 1000 words and believe me — my child was in awe and had well over 1000 words of excitement telling me all about every single monster in the game. As gamer parents this is exactly what we want. We want to be able to share with our little nerds this beautiful game of imagination with our loved ones.

The great news is Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide will not break your bank. It’s about 8 bucks or you can get the entire Young Adventurer’s Collection that includes four additional guides for around $20. You heard this correct — four books for $20, and all books a little nerdling will actually read? It gets better. I have found these books at the library in both digital and physical versions. Of course, we have the hardback version because we love this book so much.

My absolute favorite part of this book is not a hard question despite me loving so many elements of Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide. I absolutely love the range in a variety of the creatures spotlighted all the way from flumph to dragons and all sorts in between. I’m a big dragon fan in particular so the whole section on different dragons is also a big win.

My son’s favorite part of Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide is he can read it over and over again. There are also creature encounters that pose scenarios. According to my son, he plays the scenario in his head differently each time he reads one. Interestingly his favorite creature is the flumph. He likes the idea of a nonhostile creature, one you can communicate with telepathically.

My husband, who is an artist, loves the art in Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide. Who is going to not like a full color guide? Sure, there could be more words instead of illustrations but with new and young adventurers the art really inspires creativity and ideas. My husband’s favorite creature featured in this book is the rust monster, the terrible horror for D&D adventurers wearing metal armor or wielding metal weapons.

It is also worth noting Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide includes D&D encounters in the book. These encounters challenge readers to think as a character and get those roleplaying gears turning. The character is in a situation with a particular monster or creature and the reader must decide what the character will do based on the description and the information they have read about said creature or monster.

In summary Monsters & Creatures: A Young Adventurer’s Guide is a great book for many different types of player — new and young players or even those of us who simply collect cool D&D reference guides and books. The art alone is worth the cost by far. The hardback version is smaller but not quite the size of the Player’s Handbook. The book is slightly bigger than a standard book size but it fits in standard bookshelves nicely.

I bought the remaining two guides that we did not have in this series so we have the full collection and I can preview them all! Next up I’ll take a closer look at Beasts & Behemoths: A Young Adventurer’s Guide. Beast & Behemoths does not come in the four book set, which contains includes Monsters & Creatures, Warriors & Weapons, Dungeons & Tombs and Wizards & Spells.

*Featured image — It’s very important for young adventurers to learn all about the monsters and creatures found in the worlds of D&D. Take the good old mind flayer here showing off its Elder Brain master. What youngster wouldn’t want to learn about extraplanar tyrants rebuilding an empire of brain sucking aberrations beneath the surface of the world? [Art by Conceptopolis]