Monsters, Monsters, Monsters..... you always need foes for you PCs. As a long time DM I am glad that there are so many monster book out there as you need to throw something unexpected at PCs.... especially with a long time group that is use to the usual encounters.

Octavirate provides a nice little compendium with good artwork and some gems to throw at your party. Heck, not only is this book great for a DM, but as a spellcaster... cough "Summoners/Necromancers"... you may find some creatures you might want to add to you lists.

On page ten of Octavirate Presents: Lethal Lexicon Volume 1 there is an illustration that, I think, nicely summarizes this product. The picture depicts a cartoonish adventurer attacking what appears to be a beholder. Honey drips from the beholder-like creature's mouth while a swarm of angry bees zero in on the unlucky adventurer's nose. I can imagine this scene playing out at the gaming table. The cruel GM smiles as the PC buries his pole-arm in the "beholder." With a sickening feeling, the player realizes that the monster he's attacking isn't a monster at all, but a very elaborate beehive shaped like one of D&D's most famous monsters. As the poor hero is stung again and again, the GM lets slip the creature's name. It is, in fact, a bee-holder.

The player groans, but it is a groan of death.

There is something of a tradition, especially among the old-guard designers who pioneered the early RPG games, of not always taking the game too seriously. What better way to keep things light than with the occasional goofy (but deadly) monster? The great thing about this collection is that, despite the inherent silliness in these monsters, the whole thing is really clever.

Take, for example, the bear-owl. This monster is comprised of the parts of owl and bear that weren't used by whatever mad-wizard first created the famous owl bear. In other words, its an owl with a bear's head. I'm actually a little frightened by how much sense this makes. Its a bizarro, wahoo kind of sense, but sense nonetheless.

What about the biclops? This hideous giant has TWO eyes! Or the bipolar bear, a two-headed arctic dwelling ursine with two distinct and opposite personalities. How about the militant vegan ape, an obvious homage to the carnivorous ape popular in many 1st Edition adventures? Or the Children of Amon-Kor? These walrus-headed humanoids serve a most obscure and insignificant deity: Amon-Kor, Egyptian god of ice-cold winters.

Another favorite of mine are the Scientifically Inaccurate Dinosaurs. These are dinosaurs inspired by scientific and cultural misconceptions. Ripped from the pages of cheesy B-movies, the dinosaurs are "uniformly aggressive and do not hesitate to engage in battle." Examples include the Brontosaurus, which doesn't technically exist, and the Spiked-Thumb Leaping Iguanodon. The latter, according to my limited knowledge, is based on changing paleontologist opinion on just where the iguanodon's spike-like bones were located; its head or its hands. This version of the monster tosses out all the boring fossil evidence in exchange for a mighty leaping eye gouge attack. Take that, science!

There are, of course, monsters that I didn't care for. The various Endangered Dragons, while a neat idea, are either too mundane (the Cobalt Dragon) or too goofy (the plaid dragon) for my tastes. The Bonacon, a magical cow with a flaming manure attack, sinks too low for me. Evil clowns, on the other hand, are well done, but something I've seen before.

Each creature's stat block contains information for those players using common variant rules such as wounds/vitality, armor as damage reduction, or 3.0 style damage reduction. I'm not sure how many people utilize these alternate rules, but their inclusion was a nice touch.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: I'm not usually in the market for humorous RPG products, but the Lethal Lexicon Volume 1 is so well done, it really rises above my expectations. When it comes to stupid humor, there is a fine line between clever and dumb. Thankfully, this book stays mostly on the right side of that line. It helps that many of these monsters are deadly enough to be remembered beyond their pun-ridden names and strange attacks.

I'm tempted to take away a few points because this book is so silly. Doing so would be unfair to the spirit of the product, however, so I can't do it. The author sets out a pretty clear mission statement in the opening pages: to capture the kind of don't-take-yourself-too-seriously fun often present in the glory days of D&D. This goal, I believe, is achieved rather handedly.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: I mentioned earlier that I don't care for the cobalt dragon. That isn't entirely true. I actually think the cobalt dragons are really cool. They aren't, however, funny. Nor do they strike me as particularly silly. I guess the joke lies in the fact that cobalt is a bit of a strange mineral on which to base a dragon. Fair enough, but it doesn't jibe well with the rest of the book. Radioactive dragons may be over the top in a ?ten years old in your cousin's basement? kind of way, but they're in an entirely different category than cows with flaming poop attacks or super-intelligent space apes.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br><BR>[THIS REVIEW WAS EDITED]<BR>

Octavirate Presents: Lethal Lexicon Volume 1 is a d20 monster book from Octavirate Games. The zipped file is just over nine megabytes in size, and contains a single PDF. This PDF is sixty-four pages long, including a single page each for the cover, introduction/legal, credits, and OGL. Full bookmarks are given for each header monster entry.

The Lethal Lexicon is a book with plenty of artwork throughout. The cover is the only instance of the art being full color, but almost every monster (save for some of the scientifically inaccurate dinosaurs) has a black and white picture, and a few supplemental pieces of art can be found here and there. There are no page borders to be found, though amusingly, the font style for the text is the same as that of the First Edition Monster Manual. While it may be something of a chore for your printer, the lack of a printer-friendly version isn't too heavy a blow here.

The idea of humor in a role-playing game product is always a tricky balancing act, and this is even truer where monster books are concerned. Humorous monsters are hard to pull off, partially because of the perception that making them funny impacts on their usefulness (that is to say, the mechanics are compromised in favor of the joke), and partially because a lot of joke monsters just come off as being stupid. Trying to make a book of funny foes is a hard line to walk, but Octavirate Games has managed to pull it off in the Lethal Lexicon.

A clear play on the Monster Manual, the Lethal Lexicon contains thirty-six monsters, though half of these fall under the last two entries in the book (the scientifically inaccurate dinosaurs and the endangered dragons). All of these monsters have humor value in some way, from the bear-owl (the opposite of the owlbear) to the bipolar bear, to the evil clown. Arranged alphabetically, the monsters here only go from A to D, meaning that we'll likely see more of these creatures in future volumes.

While the monsters may seem ridiculous, much care was given to their stats and mechanical information. The bee-holder may seem silly, but make no mistake, its numbers crunch as well as the most serious of foes, and it can still be a threat to the party. It takes very little work to remove any humorous elements from these creatures, which is probably the best way this sort of work could be done. Of course, all of the monsters have the set of variant d20 rules that Octavirate Games is famous for a well.

An appendix rounds out the book, covering these creatures in alternate genres. Each monster has a listing of several different alternate genres they could be used in, from space opera to post apocalyptic to Octavirate's campaign setting ExorSystems Inc., with a paragraph dealing the flavor changes made to fit the creature in there.

While quite excellent in what it offers, the Lethal Lexicon is not free from errors. For example, many of the tables for the endangered dragons (all of which are true dragons) have the headers left off, meaning that you'll need to check other tables to be sure what the listed information is for, or the cerebrosaurus having "psionic resistance" instead of "power resistance." However, all of these are relatively minor stylistic problems, and won't impact actual game play.

Altogether, the Lethal Lexicon gets it just right in offering a variety of monsters with serious abilities but funny presentation. After all, being attacked by a huge loaf of animated bread is funny until it starts eating you. Players will doubtlessly enjoy fighting these monstrous rejects almost as much as Game Masters will enjoy springing them on the hapless PCs. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: The monsters weren't just innovative, but quite funny as well. Ever wanted to see the opposite of the owlbear? It's here in the bear-owl. The entire book is funny like that.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: The book lacked both a printer-friendly version, and a list of monsters by CR, which would have been nice to have. Also, a few stylistic errors pop up throughout.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

I think I was born in the wrong era. I like the classic guitar sounds of the 70s and can not get enough of the TV land specials a bit too much. I used to think it was just music and television, but after reading through the first volume of the Lethal Lexicon by Trent Troop of Octavirate Games, I can?t help but think that the Iron DM would have found gaming in the 70s a hilarious amusement ride of an experience.

Apparently, before the time of PHB toting rules lawyers, there was a time when a DM could stat up any goofy old monster that spilled from his imagination and throw him at a party whenever he liked. This was before CR and ?player/DM fairness.? If a monster was too tough, you just got more people to play D&D with you (of course this was when the maximum player size was 16 people). All that mattered was the monsters was fun to battle, not what degree of 5 their DR was.

Lethal Lexicon is a book filled with the goofy monsters of the Gygaxian generation. Though the monsters are all 3.5 statted and assigned traditional crs, each one has a differential goofy charm that makes them very useable in a traditional game, even if you do have humorless Rules Lawyers in your game. The 64 page book contains nineteen different monsters that play off of puns we have all come across before. My only complaint is that there is no gazebo as I would have loved to have seen the authors take on this.

As usual with Octavirate?s products, the monsters include alternative stats such as vitality and wound as found in the unearthed arcana.

For the DM This is a great tool for inserting a little humor in your campaign, especially if the PCs have been going through your personally designed version of hell. Each monster includes abilities that are not only unique to them, but unique to dungeons and dragons. I can not say I have ever seen a monster have the ability to frost you like the Animate Bread does or Clown Equipment, like the Evil Clown does. Though the word Evil clown is a bit of an oxymoron.

The Iron Word If you are getting that feeling that monster books have begun to lost their innovativeness (I mean they are starting to try to pass off leveled up old monsters as new monsters now) This is the kind of PDF you should add to your arsenal, though use sparingly. Part of the fun of this book is surprising your party every now and then with the absurd. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: - creativity, Todd's brother, the author's sibling whom inspired most of the monstrosities, is a sick genius

• the uniqueness of the abilities is impressive. So many monster books regurgitate the same old stuff <br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: - the artwork was bland. Not the usual detailed stuff from other booksby the company
• some of the crs were a little suspect after looking at their abilities, maybe a few are off by 1 or 2 <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>