While it doesn't score gold in my book, the MM3 is a decent monster manual. After perusing the book, you quickly get a sense that the monsters within were not drawn from mythological origins so much as niche encounter fillers. From Arcane ooze to Cadaver Collectors, I really feel that the MM line is running out of juice. While most of the creatures are solid challenges for games, they mostly feel just like that - obstacles thrown in the way of characters and not creatures with a history and sense of purpose in the game world, despite the attempts to tie them down to specific worldsets.

This book simply throws ideas out that are simply ridiculous. I think I'll be lucky to make use of more than 2 or 3 of these monsters. The only ones that are remarkable are the new giants (and seriously you'd have to plan a whole campaign to make these fit somehow). Unless you like to throw random monsters at your players (which is a lame way to DM and is even more boring than fighting the same monsters again and again) this book is just too bizzarre. I'm agonna avoid MM4 too. With this trend, the new monsters could be nothing other than preposterous.

I enjoyed this book greatly, but it had some flaws. First off, It didn't have information on how to turn most of these monsters into PCs. Second, In place it had said, "Cadaver Collecters in Ebberon". SOME of us don't stage our dungeons in Ebberon, Faerun, or Greyhawk!. But apart from that, this book provided detailed information on how to run the encounter, beautiful pictures, and SWEET monsters! All in all, this book rocks!

This book has some pretty decent monsters, mostly for a higher level character, though. I'm a beginner, so I was looking for some lower level monsters, but they give a pretty good selection. This book would be excellent for a higher level character, like level 10 or higher.