As a Dungeon Master, my go-to tool is the monster book. I can wing just about everything else in a session—NPCs, plot twists, you name it—but when it comes to monsters, I need the stat blocks ready to go. Over the years, I’ve built up a solid collection of monster books. After digging through the good, the evil, and the ugly, I’ve put together a guide to help you find the best monster books for your DM toolbox in order of experience level.
The Cornerstone: Sly Flourish’s Forge of Foes
Forge of Foes is not a traditional monster book. Instead of giving concrete stat blocks it instead gives DMs the tools to build their own monsters and modify them to match whatever theme they want. Alongside of this there is advice for building encounters, creating bosses, and running minions and hoards to really challenge your party.
I say this book is a cornerstone because it should always be in your DM toolkit no matter what experience level. There will always be a moment where a party attacks someone you didn’t expect or goes to a location you didn’t prep for and you may need a statblock. Rather than digging through an existing book you can instantly have a statblock ready with Forge of Foes.
It also is a bonus that the most important tool in the book, the “Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating” table was released for free in this resource document: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_5e. So if you want to try building a monster before purchasing the book you can by using that doc.
Beginner: Level Up A5e’s Monstrous Menagerie
This is the book to use for your first campaign. When I say this book is for beginner’s I do not mean to disparage it for experienced DMs. I still use it to this day and will continue to. I rather look at this book and see the work it takes out of the hands of beginner DMs. Every monster in this book comes with suggested encounters based on CR, lore that players might get based on rolls, and treasure that might be in the monster’s hoard. This takes a significant amount of work away from the DM and allows them to focus on other parts of the game.
While I do think a pdf or physical book purchase is very worth it, all of the statblocks from this book are also free in various places including here: https://a5e.tools/monsters. There are also initiative trackers such as https://improvedinitiative.app/ that have these available if you mess with the sources.
Intermediate: Tome of Beasts 1 (2023) and Tome of Beasts 3
The main reason I love the Kobold Press books is the pocket edition they release. This makes it so I can easily transport their monster books to sessions and even have multiple in my bag at once without it being super heavy. In my opinions these 2 Tome of Beasts books are the best of their catalogue and work very well as supplementary monsters to your primary book. There are some weirdos in these books so they can really spice up an encounter if used alongside more generic statblocks.
You can also sample some before buying because the statblocks are available for free in plenty of places such as Open5e or https://improvedinitiative.app/.
Experienced: Flee Mortals by MCDM
Flee Mortals is my favorite monster book. This book introduces a lot of new rules that can spice up your game and better ways to run more strategic monsters that will really challenge your players. I recommend this book for experienced DMs because the monsters within are highly interactive, often utilizing reactions, bonus actions, and synergies with other creatures to create dynamic encounters. If you are still not great at tracking everything in combat they might overwhelm you a bit. However once you are ready to take that next step I would say it is well worth it.
