Monsters in Dungeons & Dragons

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Dungeons & Dragons introduced its first monster catalog in 1974, calling it Monsters & Treasure, a name later replaced by Monster Manual. That original bestiary held creatures borrowed from folklore and legend alongside others invented purely for the game. Dragons, ghosts, and animals both mundane and fantastic filled its pages. Each one was built to stand in a player's way, an obstacle to overcome rather than simply a story detail.

  Where did these creatures actually come from? And why have so many of them become recognizable even outside the game itself, shaping video games and fiction well beyond the tabletop?

• 2. Origins

  ›

  Scholar Mauricio Rangel Jiménez has argued that keeping up with Dungeons & Dragons requires a working knowledge of mythology, religion, and fantasy. The game's creatures, he notes, were originally unbound by time or place, each pulled from a different corner of myth or invention. Co-creator Gary Gygax then made them, in his own words, 'coexist in a single aggregate world.' Real-world animals, medieval bestiaries, science fiction, fantasy novels, and film all fed into that world alongside myth and religion.

  Scholar Laurent Di Filippo has pointed out that D&D's creators rarely draw straight from medieval originals. Instead the material passes through what German philosopher Hans Blumenberg called 'work on myth.' That process runs continuously, translating and adapting medieval sources into the productions of modern cultural industries. That mixing of borrowed traditions has led some to call D&D's monsters a pastiche of sources, pulled together rather than invented whole.

  Names taken from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien had to be changed after copyright disputes. That kind of legal battle showed that borrowing so broadly from existing fiction was not without cost.

  Game manuals paired each monster with an illustration, a set of game statistics, and a written description. That format let writers add combat abilities an original myth or story had only implied, never stated outright. Illustrations were part of the game from the very start, working as a central tool for pulling players into the fiction.

• 3. Cataloging The Monsters

  ›

  The game sorts its monsters into broad groupings: humanoids, monstrosities, dragons, giants, undead, aberrations, fiends, celestials, elementals, constructs, oozes and plants, and beasts. These categories are not rigid. A creature can slide between undead and construct, for instance, depending on how it was made or reanimated. The 3rd edition of the game added a broader type called 'outsiders,' covering any creature native to the Outer Planes or Inner Planes.

  The Monster Manual arrived in 1977 as the first bestiary for the newly launched Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, published by TSR, Inc. Gary Gygax wrote most of it himself, expanding monsters already published in earlier D&D supplements. He also drew on material from The Strategic Review and early issues of The Dragon. This edition was the first to put a monster's stat line on the same page as its description. It also added more statistics, lengthened most entries, and illustrated nearly every creature. A treasure chart and an index of major listings rounded out the book.

  Four years later, the Fiend Folio: Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign became Advanced Dungeons & Dragons' second monster book. Most of its creatures came from submissions to White Dwarf magazine's 'Fiend Factory' column. Its entries followed the same format as the Monster Manual, illustrations included.

  By 1983, Monster Manual II closed out the first edition's run of monster books, with the largest page count of the three. Gygax again wrote most of the material, mixing creatures that had circulated in limited release with content that was entirely new. Formatting stayed consistent with its two predecessors.

  That same book also gave the game its most notorious monster: a gigantic, lizard-like creature later called one of its plane's most feared inhabitants.

• 4. The Fiends

  ›

  Chaotic evil by nature, demons make their home in the Abyss, a realm the game treats as infinite in both size and population. The dominant demon race, the tanar'ri, includes the six-armed serpentine mariliths and the balors, creatures originally called Balrogs before the name changed. Demon princes such as Demogorgon, Juiblex, Zuggtmoy, and Graz'zt are said to rule entire layers of the Abyss. That rule holds only so far as anything truly chaotic can be governed at all.

  Where demons scheme in chaos, the devils of the Nine Hells of Baator run a strict hierarchy under lawful evil rule. Their ruling type, the baatezu, answers to the Lords of the Nine, or Archdevils, among them Baalzebul, Mephistopheles, and Asmodeus. Pit fiends rank as the most powerful baatezu beneath those archdevils. Devils are described as backstabbers just like demons, but ones who keep their word closely enough to exploit every loophole a contract allows.

  Neutral to every side but their own, the yugoloths of the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna and the Gray Wastes of Hades work for whoever pays best. Called daemons in the 1st edition of the game, they act as manipulative, secretive mercenaries. They sometimes serve as soldiers for deities, or slip onto both sides of a conflict not their own. The 4th edition folded them into the demon category and renamed them accordingly. The 'loth' suffix became 'demon,' turning the Mezzoloth into the Mezzodemon. The 5th edition restored their original names, listing them as neutral evil fiends.

  The kythons trace back to the Galchutt, a group of fiends from Monte Cook's Chaositech and Ptolus material who became trapped on the Material Plane. Unlike most fiends, they never originated in the underworld at all. Trapped there, they bred a new race of their own through magic. Eyeless, reptilian, and insectoid, kythons rank from broodlings up through juveniles, adults, impalers, slaymasters, and slaughterkings as they mature. Reviewers have noted their resemblance to xenomorphs.

  The hecatoncheires borrows its name directly from Greek mythology. Early editions gave the creature one hundred arms and fifty heads, capable of hurling a barrage of boulders at enemies. Later material described it instead as an abomination fused from one hundred separate beings, while another version scaled it down to a mere four-armed giant. Screen Rant's Marley King recommended the creature to dungeon masters as a threat that avoids feeling 'too cliché.' He cited its 'incredible martial prowess' as a callback to the value ancient Greek culture placed on skill in battle. The Gamer's Nicholas Montegriffo called the fusion-form monster 'worthy foes for epic heroes' but found the reduced-arm version disappointing.

  Introduced in the 1st edition Monster Manual II, the three demodand types were named tarry, slime, and shaggy. The 2nd edition's Monstrous Compendium Outer Planes Appendix renamed them gehreleths. The 3rd edition Fiend Folio then reintroduced them as demodands, now called farastu, kelubar, and shator. Hordlings form roving hordes across the Gray Waste of Hades, preying on everything in their path, hordlings included. According to game lore they evolved from larvae whose hatred grew so distinct that each one developed an individual soul. An artifact called the Bringer of Doom can summon them, created around the time of the Invoked Devastation of Greyhawk.

  Half-fiend hybrids called cambions typically result from a fiend and a mortal, most often a human or other humanoid. Few survive being born at all. Those that do usually inherit wings, claws, and fangs alongside a mortal parent's face. That mix marks them as outcasts, feared by humans and scorned by full-blooded fiends alike. A variant called the durzagon, the pairing of a devil and an unsuspecting duergar, appears in the 3.5 edition Monster Manual II.

  Night hags trafficked in mortal souls from the Gray Wastes of Hades in the 3rd edition of the game. 5th edition moved their origin to the Feywild instead, before exiling them to that same wasteland. Rakshasas, often tiger-headed, were said to hail from Acheron in 3rd edition sources and from the Nine Hells in 5th edition. Slaadi underwent the largest shift of all. Every edition before the 4th portrayed them as chaotic neutral natives of Limbo, not fiends at all. The 4th edition recast them as chaotic evil creatures born of the Elemental Chaos instead. Lycanthropy spreads by contact rather than birth. Any humanoid bitten by a werebear, wereboar, wererat, weretiger, or werewolf can be infected and gain the ability to change shape at night. Each type carries its own transformation language.

  None of it explains why the demons and devils, fierce rivals among fiends, have spent ages locked in a war neither side can fully win.

• 5. The Blood War

  ›

  The year is 1991, when new background material for the outer planes first laid out this rivalry in full. That material appeared in the Monstrous Compendium Volume Outer Planes Appendix. Game texts describe the conflict as an all-encompassing, nearly eternal war of annihilation between the baatezu and the tanar'ri. Arcane magazine's Trenton Webb wrote that 'the fate of all the planes hangs on its outcome.' The fullest treatment came in 1996, in the Planescape boxed set Hellbound: The Blood War. The 4th edition's Manual of the Planes later downgraded that all-out war to a smoldering cold war.

  Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss traces the war's origin to primordial battles between law and chaos. That fight, the book says, continues now out of pure sadistic stubbornness. Game books disagree considerably on the cause, though. Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells tells a very different story. It depicts Asmodeus as a once-angelic being assigned to fight an eternal war against the demons. He and his followers took on demonic traits to fight more effectively. Those transformed angels, now called devils, were either exiled to their own plane or granted it, depending on who is telling the story. There they could fight on without disturbing the primordial lords of order. The book itself hints this account may be self-serving historical revisionism. The Guide to Hell offers yet another account. It paints the war as a distraction Asmodeus engineered to hide his real goal: seizing divine power and reshaping the multiverse. Later materials add that Asmodeus holds a fragment of the primordial chaos Tharizdun once used to create the Abyss. The demons want that fragment back.

  ComicBook.com's Christian Hoffer called the demon-devil conflict one of the defining struggles of the entire D&D multiverse. Bleeding Cool's Gavin Sheehan went further, naming it one of the most glorified battles in all of D&D. He praised the depth Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes brought to its causes through a Ken Burns-style narrative. Black Gate's Andrew Zimmerman Jones described the conflict as an eternal fight 'for who gets claim on being more evil.' He also praised it as a backdrop that puts player characters squarely between two warring fronts.

  That same demonic and diabolic cast, so central to the game's lore, would not survive every edition unscathed.

• 6. Shifting Names And Rules

  ›

  TSR pulled most occult symbols, demons, and devils from the game entirely in its second edition. That removal followed controversy the creatures had stirred among the game's critics. When the creatures returned a few years later, they came back under new names. Baatezu, tanar'ri, yugoloth, and gehreleth replaced devil, demon, daemon, and demodand outright in the Monstrous Compendium supplement MC8: The Outer Planes. None of this changed what the creatures actually did in play.

  Wizards of the Coast eased that stance considerably in the third edition, restoring many of the references TSR had cut. The company kept the substitute terms already in circulation and used them alongside the older names. That choice was meant to satisfy longtime players and newcomers at once. Only the name for yugoloths never reverted: every edition after the first has used that term, even though 1st edition AD&D had called them daemons.

  Renaming a devil never fully answered the deeper question of why demons and devils belonged in the game at all.

• 7. Influence And Criticism

  ›

  Fantasy fiction beyond the game absorbed D&D's monsters early and thoroughly, with commentators comparing their reach to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. In a 2005 interview, author China Miéville said, 'I use AD&D-type fascination with teratology in a lot of my books, and I have the original Monster Manual, and the Monster Manual 2, and the Fiend Folio. I still collect role-playing game bestiaries, because I find that kind of fascination with the creation of the monstrous tremendously inspiring.' Shows such as Adventure Time have echoed the game's creatures directly, and other creators have built tributes that alternate between celebrating and mocking them.

  A 2013 io9 piece rounded up the game's most memorable monsters. Retrospective coverage like this kept multiplying through the rest of the decade. In 2018, SyFy Wire published its own list of 'The 9 Scariest, Most Unforgettable Monsters From Dungeons & Dragons.' That same year, Screen Rant ranked the '10 Most Powerful (And 10 Weakest) Monsters.' Other outlets went looking for the game's oddities instead. Geek.com highlighted underrated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons monsters. The Escapist compiled 'The Dumbest Dungeons & Dragons Monsters Ever.' Cracked.com ran its own list, '15 Idiotic Dungeons and Dragons Monsters.' The creatures crossed into merchandise too, turning up as LJN action figures and even as candy.

  The presence of magical and demonic monsters, alongside other game elements, provoked moral panics among religious conservatives. Not every reaction to the game was so alarmed, though many were still critical. Critics also took aim at the game's core premise of slaying monsters for reward. One line of commentary called that premise a promotion of 'sociopathic' violence, in which the dungeon master 'merely referees one imagined slaughter after another.' Nicholas J. Mizer offered a counter-reading. He framed combat experience points as a game variant of Thorstein Veblen's theory. Applying a 'predatory spirit' to warfare, Veblen argued, could raise a person's social standing. Environmental humanities scholar Matthew Chrulew summed up the disagreement. He noted the violence has long been judged both 'inciting' and 'cathartic,' depending on who is doing the judging.

  Philip J. Clements raised a narrower objection, aimed at the game's female-coded monsters. He pointed to creatures such as the nymph and the succubus as evidence of a sexist tendency in the game. That tendency, he argued, portrays female sexuality itself as inherently dangerous.

  Scholar Fabian Perlini-Pfister has placed fiends among the 'standard repertoire' of D&D monsters, a fixture rather than a novelty. Black Gate's Andrew Zimmerman Jones praised how thoroughly Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes filled that fixture out in 2018. He wrote that the book makes it 'easy to treat demons and devils as villains just there to be killed' until deeper reading reveals them as 'unique creatures, with their own goals and motivations.'

  Whatever critics said, the game's own defenders pointed to sheer variety as its own reward. With so many different monsters in play, players are pushed to think through a different strategy nearly every encounter.

• 8. The Tarrasque

  ›

  Fifty feet tall and 70 feet long, this creature is built loosely on the French legend of the tarasque, but shaped along Tyrannosaurus rex lines. It is broader and more muscular than that model, with a differently shaped head. Its brown skin carries scabs, warts, and crusted patches of grey dung. A glossy, caramel-colored shell protects its back and tail. Spikes run along its chin, the sides of its mouth, its neck, and its elbows. Two horns project forward from the top of its head. Its skin is thick enough to resist most offensive magic, and its wounds close almost as fast as they open.

  Killing one, in the second edition of the game, came with a reward: rules exist specifically for extracting treasure from a tarrasque's carcass. The Spelljammer accessory Practical Planetology places the species' true home on a planet called Falx. Several hundred tarrasques are said to survive there by feeding on a native lizard-like creature called the Imbul. The 4th edition recast the tarrasque entirely, listing it as a 'Gargantuan elemental magical beast.' That version describes it as an abomination built by a primordial race as a weapon meant for use against the gods themselves.

  Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition For Dummies placed it 2nd on a list of the ten best high-level monsters. Reviewers have consistently ranked it among the game's deadliest creations ever since. io9's Rob Bricken named it the 10th most memorable D&D monster overall. Screen Rant's 2018 ranking of the game's most and least powerful monsters called it one of the strongest. The outlet wrote that it 'can crush entire cities in a single rampage.' Backstab reviewer Michaël Croitoriu flagged it among monsters that grew stronger moving from 2nd to 3rd edition. He wished good luck to any adventurer bold enough to attack it.

  Inverse reviewer Corey Plante went furthest of all. He named the tarrasque the single most powerful creature in the 5th edition, ranking it just behind the god-like aspects of Bahamut and Tiamat.