Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/03/monstrous-mondays-ad-2nd-ed-monstrous_21.html

Today will cover the "others" in my Monstrous Compendium collections, but not ones I used regularly. Again the time these came out money was tight for a college kid needing to buy school supplies, food, and pay rent so choices were made. Ravenloft won, Dark Sun and Spelljammer lost.
Thankfully these days I can buy PDFs much cheaper and with little to no concern for storage space. Plus I have recently begun to explore Spelljammer and I have found it to be rather fun.

For these reviews, I am considering the PDFs only.

MC7 Monstrous Compendium Spelljammer Appendix PDF 64 pages (70 with dividers and covers), Color cover art, black & white interior art, $4.99. 64 monsters.

There was/is something very cool about the Spelljammer monsters. First, they were not afraid to try something new here. Which I like. Secondly, there are also some odd-balls here like the Giant Space Hamster. Oh well, you have to have some fun. There are some Star Frontiers aliens analogs here, so that made cross-overs a fun idea, but I have no idea if anyone ever did any.

A solid product let down by poor scanning. There's really no other way to put it. The creatures in this compendium are creative and interesting for the most part, though there are occasionally a few that are just plain silly. (A race of space gorillas? Really?) I especially like the Plasmoids--curious, blob creatures with human intelligence and some surprisingly interesting quirks. The infinity vine is another standout and demonstrates the neat mechanics that went into Spelljammer. Unfortunately, this entire product is let down by the quality of the pdf. Even at 100%, the text just doesn't look very clean. The pictures of the creatures that go along with each entry have also suffered and sometimes are so dark that it's hard to pick out the details that exist in the physical edition. To be fair, I know it's not always easy to scan a black and white document, but when comparing this compendium to the gorgeous scans of 3rd and 4th edition products on this site, the different really is obvious. Ultimately, I would only purchase this if you're extremely curious about Spelljammer or if you have fond memories of playing it back in the day.

As an addendum, if this product gets updated with a higher-quality scan, then my rating would rise to roughly a 3.5.