We thank Legendary Games for sending us Mythos Monsters, a new bestiary for D&D5e, in order to write this review. It allows us to further expand our wide range of monsters and antagonists to always amaze our players. This manual features more than 40 beasts that draw inspiration from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. So monsters with a capital M, things is to better not to dream at night!
Mythos Monsters was born thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign. It is now available on the official store in PDF for $15 (about €14), in the physical edition for $20 (about €19) and in a bundle that contains both for $25 (about €23.50). It exists in the PF2 version (also in a ready-made format for Foundry VTT), albeit at a slightly higher price. If you use the code NDU10 at checkout, you will get a 10% discount on your order!
I should also point out Legendary Games’s account on Patreon, called Legendary Loots, offering daily rewards with D&D5e material.
Mythos Monsters is the last add-on in the Beasts of Legend series, that includes other products as Coldwood Codex, Boreal Bestiary, Construct Codex and Beast from the East.
The content of Mythos Monsters
These monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos cannot all be contained in a single manual, since there are so many of them. Blood of Yog-Sothoth, hounds of Tindalos, flying polyps, migo, even a few Ancients. They are of various levels of danger to allow you to find ideas for every difficulty and every level.
Mythos Monsters is a very practical manual. There is a brief introduction: it mostly deals with the label “mythos” as a subtype of monsters and the creation of xenoid creatures. Okay, xenomorphs are not part of the Cthulhu Mythos corpus. But their roots go deep there and a guide to their creation certainly adds value to this manual. Then, from page 5 to page 69 (out of 70), there are monsters upon monsters, each occupying a page or two.
While I love Lovecraft’s stories and have the complete bibliography on Kindle, my knowledge of these monsters is not so extensive as to allow me to scrutinize the purity of the content. Putting myself in the shoes of the average user, I found the descriptive part well done and exhaustive and the mechanical part balanced and functional.
Art and layout
Creating a Cthulhu Mythos products requires a certain quality of art. As can be seen from the images in this review, Mythos Monsters largely satisfies this prerequisite. The graphic choices for the monsters offer a good mix. On one hand, they represent horrifying alien creatures; on the other hand is the need to adapt them to the fantasy style of the most famous RPG in the world. While I understand that this is a deliberate choice that is found in many Legendary Games manuals, I would have liked a more attractive cover image. Even inside there are no full-page images to stoke the reader’s imagination, but the graphics are very strong.
The layout I mention only to underline its perfect uniformity with the classics of the genre. Every reader will find themselves at home on every page. It is worth highlighting the fact that the digital file has hyperlinks: internal from the index to the various items and external to the 5eSRD (the official OGL regulation of D&D5e).
Final considerations on Mythos Monsters
This product has a very centered focus. It aims to supply D&D5e with a large number of creatures related to the Cthulhu Mythos and I believe it manages to do so with a good balance between quality and price. There aren’t many visual frills, but each monster is represented with quality and vividness. There is no additional content to the monsters, but each page adds a serious and well-crafted resource for the dungeon master. I’m pretty sure you will hardly be disappointed if you are interested in what Mythos Monsters proposes.
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