Some oldie old school stuff this week. First up, The Book of Monsters (1976), from Little Soldier Games.

A little bit about Little Soldier Games first. It was a publishing imprint that spun out of a Maryland game shop called The Little Soldier. They produced four or five volumes of the digest-sized “Book of” series before the founding of Phoenix Games (which would put out the original editions of Bushido, Aftermath and some neat generic science fiction supplements in its brief lifespan). After that point, Little Soldier Games continued as an imprint of Phoenix, producing one or two more “Book ofs” before the whole venture folded.

So, The Book of Monsters is the first book published by Little Soldier. It also looks like it might be the first RPG supplement entirely dedicated to monsters, beating out 1977’s All the Worlds’ Monsters from Chaosium (which already beat out the D&D Monster Manual). That right there is pretty neat. The descriptions consist of brief, system agnostic paragraphs for each of the 124 beasties, drawn from folklore. Their manticore, I am pleased to note, does not have wings. There is a three-page table that delineates the monsters’ attributes in a way the book claims is easy to adapt to you game of choice, but I can’t really make sense of the notes, I think because I already have too many D&D monsters blocks rattling around my head.

Interior art is all historical, which is fine. Nice cover by Bob Charrette.