Perhaps the best monster book I have seen over the past few decades is “The Monster Grimoire” from the Grim Hollow campaign setting. This campaign setting comes to us from GhostFire gaming and it is a work of art. It clocks in with 423 pages of pure creativity and malevolence in the form of opponents/NPCs in a dark fantasy / horror campaign setting. For those of you interested in numbers – that amount to 392 new monsters for devious Dungeon Masters out there. Although some of these are variants of traditional monsters, all of them have a new twist, backstory, or context that makes them truly unique.

The art work in the book is wonderful and the creativity of the monsters may be just what your campaigns may be looking for. A subset of the monsters can be found on DnDBeyond with the “Lairs of Etharis” source book. I highly recommend checking it out if you are on DnDBeyond and want to see the types of new monsters that are available.

This book is a must-have for homebrew Dungeon Masters that are looking for something new and original to use in their campaigns even if you don’t want to run a full game in the Grim Hollow setting. The book provides a exhaustive selection of dark fantasy monsters with new races of NPCs for your campaign. To top it off, chapter two delves into all different types of vampire creatures to once again challenge what you thought you knew about vampires.

The book concludes with chapters on:

• Chapter 3 : Mastering Intelligent Monsters

• Chapter 4 : Magic Items and Salvage

• Chapter 5 : Monsters as NPCs

Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.