Monstrous Mondays: The AD&D 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendiums, Part 6

Back to the business at hand.  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.  I have the published ones, but not all of them, and the one I do have (Spelljammer 1) is incomplete.  No idea why.

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.

MC9 Monstrous Compendium Spelljammer Appendix II

PDF 64 pages (70 with dividers and covers), Color cover art, black & white interior art, $4.99.  61 monsters.

Like the first Spelljamer MC this one gives us some fairly unique and interesting monsters.  The one I recall the best is the Scro or the "Space Orcs."  We also get a trio of celestial dragons which is fun. 

There is also a collection of MC-formated monsters in the Spelljammer: Adventures in Space set.

MC12 Monstrous Compendium Dark Sun Appendix: Terrors of the Desert

PDF 96 pages, Color cover art, black & white interior art, $9.99.  92 monsters.

Moreso than any other campaign world, Dark Sun is the most foreign to me.  I *like* the idea of it. I have even since adopted some of the notions of it into my regular game world.  Plus there is a solid message here; exploit the environment and eventually, you will screw it up for everyone.  But many of the monsters are very new. 

This MC does adopt a different accent color for the pages.  A nice touch that again I would have liked to have seen for all the others.  Pretty much all of these creatures are new for me.  I would like to use them in a desert game, but I think a few might be a bit of work to remove them from their background.

Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium Appendix II: Terrors beyond Tyr

PDF 128 pages, Color cover art, color interior art, $9.99.  105 monsters.

This one was published as a softover volume.  It follows closer to the Dark Sun trade dress as opposed to the Monstrous Compendium one.  This does mean that monster pages are full color. 

Interestingly enough for me, this one has monsters I am more familiar with.  Also, given the nature of the campaign world, many of these creatures can be used as player characters. So details are given for that.