When Gygax put together the Monster Manual, he unwittingly created a sort of “essential assortment” of RPG monsters derived from real world legend — they appear over and over again in other games as default opponents. Gygax selected those monsters from a wider pool derived from books of folklore and mythology that were available in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I’ve read a lot of those (and their descendants) and, well, there are a lot of folkloric monsters from all over the world that are just, continually overlooked. This is something came into sharper focus for me regarding regions outside of Europe thanks to A Thousand Thousand Islands and Other Magic 2: Monsters of the Americas, but A Folklore Bestiary (2022), from The Merry Mushmen, proves there are still plenty of interesting creatures to mine even from Europe (and the rest of the world, too).

Letty Wilson did all the art. The writing and selection was by a variety of authors, from a variety of locations and this provides GMs with a nice diversity of options. Some are already passingly familiar (dybbuk, Black Shuck, Jack-in-Irons), some are really more like NPCs (the Queen of the Fallow Field, who is a bit like Lady Midday, and Bad Paxti, a nefarious blacksmith). Many function as variants of more generic monsters (Tartaro are basically classic cyclops, with some tweaks, like the fact that they are numbered instead of named or that their eye can emit a blinding beam of light — they’re probably my favorite beastie in the book). Like the previous two books this week, this serves to reimagine and recontextualize familiar monsters, though perhaps more subtly than the other. I’ll tell you, though, I will always take another strange folkloric goblin over some of the eyeroll-worthy monster variants that have cropped up in official D&D. Winged gnolls, for Pete’s sake?