Retrospective: Monstrous Compendium

Though it's not an absolute rule, one of the guiding principles behind my selection of a gaming product for discussion in a Retrospective post is that it was originally published during the first decade of the hobby, which is to say, between 1974 and 1984. Obviously, if you scour the more than 300 entries in this series, you'll find plenty of examples of things published outside that time period, particularly when it comes to companies like TSR, GDW, and Chaosium, all of which published games I continue to hold dear. Nevertheless, I still try to stick to that ten-year period, if only to narrow my range of options.

Every now and then, though, events suggest a subject for a post that is very much beyond the scope of this blog. That happened the other day, as I was re-arranging some shelves and set my eyes upon the oversized white binder of the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D Second Edition. Unlike my copies of the 2e Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, which are within easy reach, the Monstrous Compendium binder is placed up high, buried under a number of other books and boxes. I put it up there a few months ago, after briefly looking at its entry on giant centipedes, which was probably the first time I'd done so in years. 

As I pondered this fact, I started to think that I ought to write a post about the MC, even though it appeared in 1989 and was published for an edition of Dungeons & Dragons that I usually don't cover (usually). 2e occupies a strange place in the pantheon of D&D editions. A TSR edition bearing the unmistakable DNA of its more celebrated predecessors, it's rarely mentioned in most discussions of "old school D&D." The reasons for that are many and probably worthy of a separate post (or posts). Suffice it to say that I don't presently have any plans to expand Grognardia's ambit to include much 2e content. However, I do reserve the right to talk about it from time to time, as I have already done, when I think the edition touches on a topic worth discussing.

In the case of the Monstrous Compendium, there are at least a couple of topics worthy of examination. The MC was conceived as a successor to not just the original 1977 Monster Manual but to all the monster books previously published, as well as the sections at the back of many adventure modules that detailed new foes. The Big Idea of the Compendium was that it was tedious, not to mention unwieldy, for the referee to be forced to consult multiple books and supplements in the course of a game session. Wouldn't it be better, went the logic of 2e's designers, if the Dungeon Master only needed to look at the handful of pages containing the game statistics of the monsters he needed for the session?

That's why the Monstrous Compendium consisted of a large binder, complete with cardstock dividers festooned with D&D art. Monster descriptions appeared on loose, three-hole punched sheets that could then be added to the binder. The idea was that, before playing, a referee could simply remove those sheets he needed and leave the rest in the binder, thereby lessening the burden of carrying multiple reference works. As expansions of the MC appeared, each with its own set new loose sheets, they could be added to the binder, too, slotted in alphabetically so that the end result was, if you'll pardon the expression, a truly monstrous compendium of all the game's foes.  

It's frankly a great concept and one that sold me on the Monstrous Compendium sight unseen. Unfortunately, the actual design of the loose sheets left much to be desired. First and foremost, very few monsters have descriptions lengthy enough to occupy both the front and back of a single sheet. This means that, for example, "goblin" is on one side of a sheet and "golem, general" – the first part of a three-page spread – is on the other. While there are a few monsters that do have entries that cover both the front and the back of the same sheet, this is uncommon. This arrangement makes it impossible to add new monsters from expansions into the alphabetical order of the initial release, not to mention undermines the notion that the loose sheets give the referee the ability to choose only those monsters he wishes to use.

Being a lover of order, I can't tell you how much this drove me up a wall. As I said, I was completely sold on the idea of the Monstrous Compendium. Truth be told, I still am. However, as released, it simply did not live up to that promise and indeed worked against it. The situation was only made worse with each new expansion, since my binder grew ever more full with more loose sheets, each of which had to go in its own separate section segregated by one of those cardstock dividers. Eventually, I had to buy additional binders, since I believe TSR only ever released one more of them (with Dragonlance monsters). In the end, I had just as many "books" to lug around as before and these were nowhere near as sturdy as the older AD&D volumes.

This brings me to the second topic I briefly wanted to discuss in relation to this product: the ever-greater commodification of D&D (and RPGs more generally). One of the "problems" with roleplaying games, from the point of view of their publishers anyway, is that, once one owns the basic rules material, there's never any need to buy anything more. That's why, since fairly early on in the history of the hobby, publishers have contrived ways to extract more money from players. I suspect that the design of the Monstrous Compendium was at least partially intended as a way to get players to buy more stuff – regular updates and expansions, more binders, etc. 

That intention was hampered by the shortsighted design of the MC itself, resulting in TSR's eventual abandonment of it with the release of a hardcover volume called the Monstrous Manual in 1993, followed by a number of softcover appendices to it in the years that followed. I'm amazed that TSR didn't course correct sooner than this, but the management of AD&D in the '90s was haphazard at the best of times. It's a shame, because, as I noted earlier, I think a more "user friendly" approach to monsters has a certain appeal. Alas, the Monstrous Compendium did not provide that approach, which is why it remains, to this day, one of the most disappointing D&D products I've ever bought.