September 22, 2008

Monsters, Terrain, and Histograms...


After a stupidly huge amount of time devoted to late night (and very early morning) data entry - the new version of Monsters & Terrain Core List is now completed (version 2). Both an online version and a downloadable Excel file is available. The new table includes the following information on 671 monsters from 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Name, Level, Group Role, Combat Role, Leader, Size, Origin, Type, Keywords, Climate, Terrain, and Source Material.
The climate and terrain data was pulled from previous editions of D&D (3rd edition and even older), and I used my best judgment for this information whenever a monster was truly new to 4E (i.e. no previous info available).

The source material for Version 2 of this Core List is derived from the following materials (with a count of the number of monsters for each):
  • Adventurer's Vault (11)
  • Dragon #364 (19)
  • Dragon #365 (6)
  • Dragon #366 (5)
  • Dragon #367 (6, incomplete - the issue is not fully released yet)
  • Dungeon #155 (11)
  • Dungeon #156 (12)
  • Dungeon #157 (19)
  • Dungeon #158 (10, incomplete - the issue is not fully released yet)
  • Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (55)
  • H1 Keep on the Shadowfell (3)
  • H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth (14)
  • H3 Pyramid of Shadows (11)
  • Monster Manual 4E (489)
Finally, (ok here comes the REAL geekery) ever wonder what the distribution was of monster levels in Dungeons & Dragons? Well, now this - and all kinds of other useless statistical analysis - can be done with ease. Viola:
Heh... how about that...

[1] The image of the kir-lanan was done by James Zhang in the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for doing this.

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  2. @ Ostar : No problem, my pleasure! Heck... i was going to do it anyway becuase I needed the information parsed and formatted in this way for adventure / campaign development. I just hope people make good use of it.

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  3. Yea...suspected it might look like that perusing the MM...hopefully we'll get more higher level monsters as time progresses...

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