Draft talk:List of Dungeons & Dragons monsters (1977–99)

Books

Many basic D&D game books have featured monsters over the years, and listed below are only just a few! If you want to add the templates to any of these books and move them to the main list page, feel free!  :)

Monster books

• TSR 9438 - DMR2 - Creature Catalog (1993) - ISBN 1-56076-593-3

Books with monsters in them

• TSR 2014 - Dungeons & Dragons - Basic Rulebook (1981) (pB29-B44) - ISBN 0-935696-48-2
• TSR 2015 - Dungeons & Dragons - Expert Rulebook (1981) (pX28-X42) - ISBN 0-935696-29-6 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vulcan's Forge (talk • contribs) 00:23, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
• TSR 1011 - Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (1983) (Dungeon Masters Rulebook, p22-39)
• TSR 1012 - Dungeons and Dragons Expert Rulebook (1983) (p45-57)
• TSR 1013 - Dungeons and Dragons Companion Set (1984) (Dungeon Masters Companion, p28-42)
• TSR 1017 - Dungeons and Dragons Immortals Set (1986) (DM's Guide to Immortals, p27-50)
• TSR 1021 - Dungeons and Dragons Master Set (1985) (Dungeon Masters' Book, p24-44)

etc...

Cool.  :) I'm sure there are quite a few more books from this edition with monsters in them, but if you can hit at least the major ones we'll be in business! BOZ (talk) 19:31, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Various Updates

In the process of a major overhaul of this page. I have copies of the 1981 Basic and Expert Rules, modules B3, X1 and X2, and the 1984 Companion Set. I've added the tables for the 1981 Basic Rules and the Companion set so far; Expert Rules and the modules should be added soon. I do not have copies of the Basic and Expert 1984 sets, or the Master's or Immortals sets, so I can't add those; I may add stub tables with an appropriate Wikipedia "help wanted" template. I've also cleaned up the wording, syntax, punctuation and capitalization of the Description entries.

BTW, the B3 module I have is the download "original" from the WotC website; this is the version which was recalled from stores, so I don't know if the monster list is different from the version which actually ended up being sold.Vulcan's Forge (talk) 02:33, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe, though I do not know for certain, that B3 had some differing critters from one version to the other. BOZ (talk) 02:46, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

According to this and various external elements linked from it, the only monster to survive between the original and revised editions was the Decapus. That is almost certainly not true, because I played B3 (the revised version) once a very long time ago, and I remember the Archer Bushes as well. However, personal experience doesn't make it encyclopedic. I'm not sure how I am going to address this one yet; among other things I haven't been able to find an ISBN for it yet which I can confirm to be valid for both (there is an ISBN on the original but I don't know if it's the same number). The Expert Rules and X1 and X2 are done, and I've reorganized the page to match the actual revisions of the rules. I still need to stub out the 1983 revisions for the Basic and Expert rules and the Masters and Immortals sets as well.Vulcan's Forge (talk) 21:52, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

What's Next

I've gone as far as I can go with this; I don't have access to any additional material at this time. The following things are left to be done:

• any B-series modules which added new monsters; I know B2 did not, but I believe some of the others did.
• any X-series modules which added new monsters; I know X5 did but I don't have access to a copy of it.
• TSR 1011 - Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (1983) (Dungeon Masters Rulebook, p22-39)
• TSR 1012 - Dungeons and Dragons Expert Rulebook (1983) (p45-57)
• TSR 1017 - Dungeons and Dragons Immortals Set (1986) (DM's Guide to Immortals, p27-50)
• TSR 1021 - Dungeons and Dragons Master Set (1985) (Dungeon Masters' Book, p24-44)

These last 4 should probably go in the same major section as the Companion Rules. I'd recommend that any cross-referencing be done between entities of the same era (i.e. the Basic/Expert/Companion/Masters/Immortals sets should cross-reference to each other, but not to the 1981 versions), otherwise the other appearances sections will get awfully big.

Vulcan's Forge (talk) 02:03, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I've recently gotten access to a large quantity of D&D material; so far I've added modules B4, B5, B6 and B1-9, confirmed that the 1983 Basic edition basically (pardon the pun) reprinted the 1981 rules as far as the monsters go, and done a lot of cross referencing for other appearances. Will continue in this general vein as time permits. I've also gone through and switched all the descriptions to variants, as appropriate.Vulcan's Forge (talk) 03:52, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

What about the Bullet?

Not sure about the spelling (Bullette?), but what about it? I remember it from the original Monster Manual. There was even one in S3! — Frecklefσσt | Talk 17:42, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Bulette probably never made it into Basic D&D, but it should be on the AD&D lists. 204.153.84.10 (talk) 17:49, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

To my knowledge, the Bulette was never included in the D&D (vice AD&D) "world". It is present in the 2nd edition list here.Vulcan's Forge (talk) 02:25, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Other Appearance

The "Other Appearance" section seems inconsistent. There could be dozens of sources where these monsters are mentioned. The 1977 Basic Rulebook mentions the OD&D books and supplements, which is appropriate. However, the Moldvay Basic Rules and the Cook Expert Rules from 1981 refer to the later 1983 red and blue books. To me, it would be more logical to always refer to the first mention of the monster in D&D books. If the first mention was in the Greyhawk Supplement, then say that in the column. If we want to stick with "other appearances", I believe it would be less confusing to only mention older ones. — Parsa (talk) 21:14, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

The cross-referencing of appearances has been and is a work in progress. When I started the cleanup on this page some time back, I set myself a few ground rules:

• no cross references outside the D&D universe (as opposed to the AD&D universe). I figured that would be too confusing.
• cross reference from the editions I "knew" first - this meant everything from the 1981 editions up.
• where appropriate, include the link to the referenced module. This is something of a variation from the normal "no duplicate links" policy, but given the size and organization of some of these tables it seemed appropriate at the time.
• cross reference as time and effort permitted.

Since there's a lot of material not covered here yet (the Basic, Expert and Companion sets and all the Basic modules are done, but the X module series is only partially completed, none of the Companion modules are done and the Masters and Immortals sets and series aren't touched yet), cross referencing is going to take some time and effort, and should probably be done in stages. At the moment the only thing I can guarantee as correctly cross-referenced is the Basic Modules listing. I've found a few errors in the Basic and Expert listings and I'm not sure if I've missed anything else.Vulcan's Forge (talk) 04:05, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Self Note: the Companion and Master rules tables are correctly cross-referenced; so are the B, X and CM-series modules. the Basic and Expert Rules are not completely cross-referenced with the Creature Catalogue and the Rules Cyclopedia Tables. Nothing is cross-referenced with the 1977 edition.Vulcan's Forge (talk) 02:56, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Draftification and changes in 2022 through 2024

Saw that User:BOZ had recovered this to draft space sometime in 2022 and got interested in some cleanup at the end of 2023. Some comments:

• I've started removing the Page Number column. This is done for all the modules and the Companion/Master/Immortals rules. It needs to be finished for the rest of the page. This should go a long way towards dispelling the myth that the tables are "just a copy of the table of contents" - not that most of these *had* a table of contents to begin with, but anyway...
• I think we should take a serious look at making the Variants and Notes/Description fields optional, and removing them. There's a lot of empty space in the tables because there are no variants and no interesting or important notes - especially in the tables for the various modules. (I think I may have done part of this in the Template a loooooong time ago, but have no idea how to do it now.)

• As a subpoint to this, we need to stanardize on a table header: we seem to flip back and forth between Notes or Description as the column header (which is probably my fault...mea culpa).

• When I did the original construction of these tables with respect to cross referencing them, I did not uniqify the cross references within each table. Again, that should be done all the way through to match expected wiki style and to save bytes. There is also some standardization which should be done across the entries in terms of wikilinks and naming conventions (Sets vs Rules comes to mind); I haven't necessarily done that all the way through.
• I think the Basic Rules tables for the 1981 and 1983 editions should be merged; there's no need to have them separate. Same for the Expert Rules 1981 and 1983 editions. This will also save space and make it clear we're not simply parroting tables of contents. (We never were, but that's the argument that keeps getting used.)
• Again, when I originally did the cross referencing, I made an editorial decision to deliberately not cross reference to the AD&D versions of the same creatures in *any* of the AD&D editions. At the time it was to keep the cross references separate; however I think now there is value in this because the two games are in fact significantly different - and calling attention to that difference supports the argument that this list should be reinstated because it is separate from but related to the AD&D games' editions. We could address the fact that there was significant overlap between the D&D creature list and the later editions in text in the lead or elsewhere within the page (in particular referencing the Mystara Compendium for 2nd ed).
• In terms of submitting the page again...I don't know how this is done, but there should be a way during the submission for the submitter to respond to the comments from the last failed submission (and also from the original deletion discussion) - and we should do so specifically addressing the arguments for rejection at the time.

Thoughts? Vulcan's Forge (talk) 01:57, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Followup to this, I've gone ahead and:

• merged the 81/83 tables for the Basic and Expert sets
• fixed the Notes/Description discrepancy, changing everything to notes
• removed most (not all) of the page columns in the tables (and while I was at it, removed most textual references to page numbers in the descriptive blocks of each book/module).
• generally tweaked and cleaned up the cross referencing, although that is still a work in progress.

All of this has reduced the overall size of the page by somewhere north of 30 KBytes.

Vulcan's Forge (talk) 01:22, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

@Vulcan's Forge: Thanks a lot for your work on this! For submitting the page, I guess one could go through WP:AfC. That was done for List of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition monsters sucessfully, but also has been unsucessfull a number of times for the list. I expect if it were restored to all the same arguments come up again like in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition monsters (2nd nomination). The result there was "At the very least, this article needs some editing, trimming and a possible renaming." I would love to see this list restored, but I also think the pressure to possibly merge with and/or very significantly cut down this list and the two lists currently in mainspace would increase. One criticism I see coming up more is that secondary sources on individual monsters will be duplicated independent of edition. Which is fine for me based on WP:NOTPAPER, but will probably not satisfy critics. Those sources could be sorted by edition as far as possible, but that would of course significantly reduce the referenced and non-plot content within each list. No solution on that for my side, sorry :-(.

The argument on the differences between original D&D and AD&D/D&D 3rd edition and onwards could be a good one. But again, one would need to see which secondary source could be identified for which of them. More generally, what I can think of as a further improvement here, are general comments what is specific to D&D monsters of that edition, like we have to a very limited degree in the introductory paragraph of List of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition monsters and little bit more in List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition monsters#Monsters in the 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The argument raised was: "all the comments stating that this list has sources outside of official gamebooks, and thus passes WP:LISTN are flawed, as most of those non-primary sources are really not on the concept of 3rd Edition D&D monsters at all. Some very specific entries (and, considering the immense number of entries in this list, a relatively small number) have sources discussing them or their origins, and that's it. And on top of that, those sources are generally not on their 3rd Edition incarnations specifically, but just the monster in general as its appeared throughout D&D as a whole." I guess there are some sources on this edition specifically, this being where it all started, but I don't have an overview. I expect Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: a visual history to have some commentary on the art side of things. Daranios (talk) 11:22, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not terribly worried about satisfying all critics; it's not going to happen. You just need enough support to keep it from getting deleted or moved back to draft space, as it what happened with the 3rd edition list - and the 2nd edition list for that matter, which is what had kept it as the only surviving edition list for years - and not having enough support is the only part that worries me. I'm with Daranios on needing sources that specifically discuss the Basic D&D version of monsters as a whole or in chunks (like, "in this version, undead are...") if we want to get more support. I'd say submit to AFC when you're done to add some legitimacy on getting it republished, even though that didn't stop the 3rd edition list from getting back to AFD. Keep up the good work! If we can get one more list published again, then I think we can ultimately get all of them. BOZ (talk) 16:59, 30 December 2023 (UTC)