The rust monster and owlbear, for instance, were based on toys purchased at a discount store. Monsters such as the gelatinous cube have been described as "uniquely weird," inspired by unusual sources or designed to suit the particular needs of a role-playing game.
Original monsters have also been included in Dungeons & Dragons, and these are among the game's most memorable. Monsters are adapted to fit the needs of the game's writers and publishers, such as by describing combat abilities that may have been absent or only implied by an original source. In game books, monsters are typically presented with illustrations, fictional elements, and game statistics. Mauricio Rangel Jiménez goes so far to say that a basic knowledge of mythology, religion and fantasy is required to keep pace with the game. The sources of Dungeons & Dragons monsters are diverse, including mythology, medieval bestiaries, science-fiction and fantasy literature, and film. įor publication history, see Monster Manual. The term monster in Dungeons & Dragons can refer to a variety of creatures, including traditional monsters such as dragons, supernatural creatures such as ghosts, and mundane or fantastic animals-in short, "an enormous heterogeneous collection of natural and monstrous foes." While many monsters are adapted from pre-existing myths and legends, others have been invented specifically for the game, sometimes having characteristics specifically suited to the mechanics of the game. Described as an "essential" part of Dungeons & Dragons, the game's monsters have become notable in their own right, influencing fields such as video games and fiction, as well as popular culture. Since the game's first edition in 1974, a bestiary was included along other game manuals, first called Monsters & Treasure and now commonly called the Monster Manual.
Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, "monsters" are generally the antagonists which players must fight and defeat to progress in the game. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.
The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.įor printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching.
Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.įor PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition.