Rounding out this week with both Spelljammer Monstrous Compendium appendices.

First, this features two of my favorite Spelljammer paintings on the color divider cards, both by Brom. I often wonder how different Spelljammer would have been with Brom helming the aesthetic design the way he did for Dark Sun.

A lot of the monsters follow the equation “what if D&D Monster X, but in space.” Others focus on synthesizing ideas from science fiction into the fantasy space setting. There are a lot of planetoids with faces (the one pictured is an Astereater – I kid you not). It is maybe redundant to point out after that last sentence, but I see a lot of Jack Kirby influence, too.

As with a lot of Monstrous Compendium appendices keyed to specialized settings, I have never found a use for any of these monsters in my own campaigns. They sort of illustrate design problems for the Spelljammer setting, too – while many are cool, none of them have a clear use to me the same way that devils and demons do in Planescape. If I wanted to run Spelljammer tomorrow, none of these monsters inspire a plain way of how to do so.

On the plus side, it does have stats for the Giant Space Hamster of the Tinker Gnomes, a concept I still find hilarious in a Monty Python-esque way. And without them, we would never have Minsc’s famous miniature giant space hamster, Boo, in the Baldur’s Gate series.