Wow, what can I say!

EnPublishing changes the game with their Monstrous Menagerie. Making all the monsters in this book feel special, and not just a rehash of claw and bite attacks. Adding information that is useful to the players about the monsters examples being...

• Legends and Lore of the monsters. (DC for finding information 10-20)
• Example Encounters
• Signs of this creature in area.
• Behavior of this creature.
• What this creature does in combat.
• Then the awesome statblock!

This is not a book you want to miss, even if you do not like the rest that Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition has to offer.

This is a great supplement to have. The creatures inside are all interesting and fit their theme well. Some of these figures might fit into a given campaign, but I'm looking forward to using them as ways to fill out sessions where some people have to miss a session that would be too story heavy to run without them, or when I haven't had time to prepare a full session for the week. What party doesn't want to find out if they could defeat Ghengis Khan or the Easter Bunny?

I rarely (almost never) run monsters right out of the book, instead taking a statblock and modifying it in some way to make the creature more interesting to me. The Level Up monsters are a lot more interesting, which means I'll likely have to do a lot less modifications in the future. The addition of tables for behaviors and signs also helps to make the creatures more real and gives them a greater impact on the world around them. The encounters table for each monster helps to scale encounters very well.

I will say that a couple of the new monsters in the book, by which I mean the ones that were intended to replace the monsters unavailable due to legal issues, feel a bit lacking. The khalkoi, for instance, has a fascinating concept but not enough is done to make them into a people with a culture of their own (and they're shown wearing rich clothing, so they must have some sort of culture); they feel like one-note monsters. This is the kind of creature that desperately needs an "Ecology of the..." article!

It's great if you want a bunch of NPCs (and you can easily just rename them if you don't want a historical or fictional character in your setting, which is what I plan on doing). However, because these are characters based in real-world history or literature, they aren't overly "fantastic" or magical in nature (except for the few monsters in there, like Black Shuck). In a D&D-type setting, which is usually rife with magic, that makes them fairly odd.

Also, despite what the table of contents says, the warlord Fighter archetype is not a playable archetype. It's actually a list of abilities originally from a warlord (class, I assume), "created by one of the 5e designers." I'm guessing they included that as a way of stating that the abilities weren't their own design. If you were looking for an additional Fighter archetype for your LU game, you won't get it in this book. (Of course, Level Up has the Marshal archetype, which is the Warlord under another name, so you won't be bereft.)

I adore the journeys and exploration section! It definitely made my last session come alive.

I find the system amazing. I've been able to use pieces in my existing 5e game with no problems at all, I can't wait to get my players to make characters in the system, and when I've made characters myself, I find that the heritage-culture-background-destiny divisions help make each character feel alive and unique.

I find the choices you can make for your characters to be extremely useful and flavorful without being overwhelming or leading into trap options, and there's a great emphasis each each class on both the social and exploration tiers. The expanded equipment section provides a lot of interesting and useful items, and the new weapons and armor properties make each of those items interesting beyond how much damage they do or what AC they provide.

Journey rules, a completed crafting ststem that doesn't require "ask your gm [to finish it]" as the cornerstone, exploration challenges your players will get to creatively leverage their abilities into solutions, interesrting diseases & maladies useful to me as a GM & so much more. Others have talked about those in detail so I want to cover a different area important to me as a GM for the rest of this review.

The biggest step up for both GM & players though is that the whole system is designed as a ciohesive whole rather than a bunch of isolated bolt on additions. Anyone who has run d&d5e(o5e) for a while has long since grown familiar with the laundry list of abilities that might as well read "yell skip at the gm when they start talking about this thing you autosucceed at" & similar. When you use this in combination with the A5e players guide all of those kinds of things are tuned to have their own costs to use & to be useful at helping with a problem rather than effectively skipping it.

With only a couple sessions under my belt running A5e I haven't yet reached a point where I can put my finger on specifics but between creatures themselves & variants along with templates I feel like there is a larger variety of monsters for me to work with as a GM without needing to scour the monster sections in a bunch of wotc's largely largely player facing books to find monsters close enough to my need that I can refluff. That saves mne a lot of time I can better spend preparing other parts of the game I expect to run.

Journeying and Explorational rules, combined with regions, make the Explorational pillar one to behold, finally restoring the third pillar of D&D. Journey activities give players something to do while traveling, Exploration challenges set up unique activites that dont have to purely be combat. I love the fact that not everything is combat, and they still handle combat very well!

This book has plenty of tables to roll on to make each exploration very uniuque and fun, including Social Encounter tables, travel scenery, weather, region tiers, its really incredible. Combined with long term effects like Fatigue and Strife, it works to make your A5E D&D experience extremely memorable, and is equal parts preparation and improvisation.

Great book.

As a gm this solves many of the complaints that I have with d&d5e (o5e) and really does a great job of rebuilding 5e to the point that it sets a very high bar for what wotc's anniversary edition needs to meet if it came out now rather than years from now.

So far I've run oa couple sessions od this & here are some of my big take aways in no particular order.

• Players of mine who play the same thing all the time quickly started looking at playing new things even when the old was still an option. "oh my god if I play x & y I can do this & that to ooooo I'm going to play $differentThing"
• Players are making plans for how their character will develop & trying to play their characters in ways that might mesh with those goals.
  • Oh boy there are reasons for that & not just the old school" if your gm allows" type ones. Classes have choices that they can make as they level & as a gm I'm not concerned about any of them. I as a gm also have tools at my disposal like prestiege ratings possible followers & possible strongholds I could award or have player's actions impact even if they purchased them with gold.
• With all of o5e's automagic ""I just obliviate that problem automatically" like the outlander feature &the various spells that do the same I as a GM don't need to resort to fiat & mindless combat slogs to challenge the group
• exploration challenges & diseases are a very powerful tool for us GMs , there's a little in this about them from a player standpoint but the brunt of the gm facing stuff there is intrials & treasure. Unlike PHB+DMG the two very much work together to empower the GM in useful ways.

(My first language isn't English so this review will sound somewhat awkward, pls bear with me)if you are someone like me with backgrounds of pfrpg and other 3ed iterations but want to try out lighter, narrative oriented game for a change, and if you never tried out 5e in its original format, this game is for you. Me and my team find the game quite delightful. But If you are people who want 5e to be more lighter than it already is, you might want to go back, never look back. However, there's good reason why my friend who GMs 5ed reconsidered. There are quality of life changes to some of the magics classes and other options originally rooted in 5ed alongside bevy of great new options you can glean from this tome. you should pick this up just for the sake of plug-and-play in your original 5e game and take a gander at numerous changes. It is almost fully compatible with various 5e supplements In itself. Also new spell-less ranger and adepts which are basically diversified monks as a beginner class without losing compatibility with many archetypes that are available on the market. How can you pass that up?

I give this 5 stars for the Encounter Design, Exploration, and Exploration Challenges sections alone. That's about 120 pages of content that any GM could use - and a lot of it could be used in games that aren't strictly fantasy; the Regions and Explorations Challenges could be put to use even in sci-fi games. there's also 13 pages on worldbuilding, and sections on Maladies, Adventuring Rewards, and Enchanted Gear.

I bought this as a resource rather than with the intention to play LevelUp as a game on its own right, so I can only review the part of the rules I used - the encounter tools. Each creature in this book has a number of example encounters it often appears in, and also has a table to randomly determine what the creature happens to be doing at the moment. Both of these resources are hugely useful, especially in concert with the random encounter rules from Level Up: Trials & Treasures.

Three subclasses - Cleric (Spirit Domain), Paladin (Oath of Couage) and Rogue (Witch Hunter archetype). All good ideas and workable, would have liked more, but good value for money.

A horrific adventure for 5e D&D. Contains an area map, details of a village (random determination of villager details) and map of a wizards tower and dungeon. An extremely appropriate title if using lower level PC's and with the possiblity of loosing a great evil on the land.