Terrors Beyond Tyr

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition

by Anne Gray McCready (Editor)

Only the bravest -- or the most foolhardy -- would dare stand before the creatures included inside this MONSTROUS COMPENDIUM appendix. Encounter the shadow giant, the stalking horror, and the unique undead found lurking beyond the Tablelands as well as many other terrors. Containing 128 pages of full-color monsters, this accessory is designed for the DARK SUN campaign world but is adaptable to any AD&D campaign.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

Reviews

[Benjamin]

25/32 of my Dark Sun (re)read, the first product of 1995, on the downswing of producing Dark Sun material, and this is as good a place to put this per-year product number as any:

1991: 1 (the core box)
1992: 10 (6 accessories, 4 adventures)
1993: 9 (1 box, 4 accessories, 4 adventures)
1994: 4 (1 box, 1 accessory, 2 adventures)
1995: 5 (1 revised core box, 4 accessories)
1996: 3 (3 accessories)

And for one of the last eight products, this is kinda funny. I mean, a monster book is a guaranteed sale to a lot of people, I think. (Though do I have the data to support that assertion? No, it just seems reasonable that the DM might want new monsters to scare the players with, even if they weren't so interested in a particular setting.)

But what's funny here is that this book, subtitled "Terrors Beyond Tyr," presents

(a) some very core ideas (like entries for the standard demihumans -- your dwarf, elf, even human);
(b) some monsters that build on deep knowledge of the world which is only now revealed (like the "shadow giants," which are halfling followers of Rajaat from the Cleansing Wars who were forced into the Black with him -- which is a sentence that might make no sense to you and only made sense to me back in the day because of the previous release, City by the Silt Sea); and
(c) some new monsters that really are from beyond the Tyr region, like two species of nomadic lizardfolk who might be from beyond the mountains and some weird psionic worm-folk who live in the Astral Plane (but wait, wasn't Athas cut off from the Astral? sigh) -- so there's definitely some monsters here who are from beyond the Tyr region, and this is maybe the first hint of what's out there. Which has some precedent in RPGs -- monster descriptions as worldbuilding -- but feels a little funny, probably because we just got clarity about the history, and now we're getting some more mysteries about places distant in space rather than distant in time. In other words, this book sort of asks more questions than it answers. (And one of those questions is "why do we need two different types of nomadic lizardfolk?")

One thing I like here is that some of the monsters include specific example individuals, which is especially useful when we’re talking about intelligent undead from the past. For instance, there's an ancient undead lawgiver type of monster, and we get two examples, each of which has different spheres of law that they uphold, which feels like something I could drop into a game right now. (Of course, this being D&D, the way they uphold the law is through combat.)

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

You simply need this if you want to run any campaign in the desert world of Athas.
It includes some classic critters for Dark Sun like the kes'trekel and sandhowler and many more.
Easy resource if you want to convert to other editions of D&D like 3.5 or 5E yourselves.

[Abraham Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13792471