List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition monsters
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Monsters are an important element of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition, a role-playing game.[1][2][3] The ones listed here are only those from official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition supplements published by TSR, Inc. or Wizards of the Coast, not licensed or unlicensed third-party products such as video games or unlicensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition manuals.
Monsters in the 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
[edit]The second edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game features both a higher number of books of monsters[a]—"many tied to their growing stable of campaign worlds"—and more extensive monster descriptions than both earlier and later editions, with usually one page in length.[4]: 221 [1][5][6][7][8][9]: 106–107 Next to a description, monster entries in this edition contained standardized sections covering combat, their habit and society, and their role in the eco-system.[5][6][10] While later editions gave the various creatures all the attributes which player characters had,[8][11] 2nd edition only listed intelligence,[5][6] a characteristic important for creating challenging encounters in the game.[12]
The 2nd edition also uses a unique format in the form of Monstrous Compendiums of loose sheets that could be collected in a folder, allowing for a combination of monster books together with individual monster pages from boxed sets.[5][9]: 106–107 [1] This "unruly" format was abandoned again in 1993 in favor of bound books.[4]: 247 [6][13]: 83 In parallel with this change, the 2nd edition introduced colored images for each monster, which became standard in later editions of the game.