Available now on D&D Beyond, Tome of Beasts 1 by Kobold Press is packed with over 400 monsters to fuel your encounters. From demon lords to fey nobility, dragons and drakes, and eldritch horrors beyond imagination, this book contains more monsters than a fighter can shake their sword at.

All of these monsters have been integrated into D&D Beyond’s suite of tools, so let’s take a look at what this tome has to offer!

• What is Tome of Beasts 1?
• The Monsters You’ll Find Within
• How Tome of Beasts 1 Helps Build Your Encounters

Add a Massive Amount of Monsters to Maps

Populate your encounters quickly and prepare for epic battles with D&D Beyond Maps.

Maps is a VTT where Master-tier subscribers can easily add monster tokens and maps from their D&D Beyond library to a digital playspace. They can then invite their players and run their encounters with fog of war and other useful features.

The monster tokens from Tome of Beasts 1 have been integrated into Maps, so they’re ready to use in your game today!

What is Tome of Beasts 1?

Artist: Bryan Syme

Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts 1 is a massive compendium of monsters designed to make your encounters more exciting. It features over 400 new monsters, ranging from CR 1/8 critters all the way up to CR 27 world-shaking entities.

Whether you need disposable dungeon denizens, monstrous wildlife, or a terrifying boss, Tome of Beasts 1 provides a veritable dragon’s hoard of creatures to fill your games.

To accompany the stat blocks, this book provides art and lore for most of the inlcuded monsters. These additional resources offer helpful cues for both Dungeon Masters preparing encounters and players when they’re fighting the creatures.

Beyond dangerous monsters, players will also find new creatures to aid them on their adventures! Characters seeking a companion to share in their journey will discover new familiars they can bond with, some of which can offer unique abilities to their bonded player.

The Monsters You’ll Find Within

From haunting Aberrations to mind-breaking Monstrosities, Tome of Beasts 1 contains countless creatures that can expand your encounters. These creatures hail from a vast array of terrains, creature types, and challenge ratings, allowing you to tailor encounters to perfectly suit your campaign's needs.

On top of entirely new, unique creatures, the book’s bestiary contains reinterpretations of classic foes like skeletons, oozes, and vampires. It also expands the offering of some classic creature types, adding to your selection when preparing encounters using monsters from within these categories:

Artist: Marcel Mercado

Fey Folk and Nobility

The lands of the Feywild are confusing and chaotic to outsiders from the Material Plane, and the fey lords and ladies contained within Tome of Beasts 1 embody the quintessence of the realm in which they rule. They are capricious, mischievous, and often dangerous rulers of the various domains spread across the turbulent Plane of Faerie.

Tome of Beasts 1 contains 7 stat blocks representing the nobility of the fey lands, ranging from the bold CR 12 Bear King to the terrifying CR 21 Queen of Night and Magic.

These legendary creatures are just a portion of the Fey included within the pages of Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts 1. You’ll discover all sorts of Fey folk to use in your campaign, whether your party has stumbled upon a duskthorn dryad in a druid’s grove or comes face to face with a blood hag while traversing a foreboding swamp.

New Drakes and Dragons

Tome of Beasts 1 also introduces players to an array of new dragon types:

Artist: Roberto Pitturru

• Cave Dragons: Masters of subterranean domains, cave dragons are eyeless predators that emit darkness from their black-spiked bodies.
• Flame Dragons: These dragons are embodiments of spite, greed, and vengeance. With a scorching breath weapon that can send its victims into a bloodlusted rage, they inhabit volcanic regions or scorched landscapes and plot their hot-blooded schemes.
• Mithral Dragons: Sparkling silver-white like the precious metal they are named after, mithral dragons have a slender frame and temperamental youth. In their early years, they seek to amass a worthy hoard at the expense of others, but in their adulthood, they become peaceful arbiters. Their hides make them resistant to magical effects, and older mithral dragons can reflect spells back at their caster.
• Sea Dragons: Sovereigns of the ocean depths, sea dragons are some of the fiercest creatures beneath the waves. Their shark-like heads taper into an eel-like body with fins that can double as wings, and their breath weapon unleashes a crushing torrent of frigid water.
• Void Dragons: Dwelling in the emptiness between stars, void dragons are as mysterious as the cosmos they inhabit. With scales that shimmer like the night sky, they possess abilities to manipulate gravity and star fire—and the aura of vast nothingness they emit can drive lesser-minded creatures mad.
• Wind Dragons: Masters of the skies, wind dragons glide effortlessly among the clouds. These creatures are as arrogant as they are powerful and seek to subjugate entire populations from their lofty thrones atop mountains.

This array of dragon creatures includes a variety of lesser dragons called drakes. These creatures usually have two legs, instead of the dragon's four, and use their clawed wings as their front appendages. Drakes aren’t as magically powerful as dragons and don’t grow to the potency of older dragons, but they can be plenty dangerous in their own right.

Among the drakes in this book, you’ll find cute, friendly varieties like the CR 1/2 lantern dragonette and CR 1 alehouse drake, as well as more dangerous foes like the CR 7 elder shadow drake.

Demons Lords and Devils

Artist: Roberto Pitturru

From demon lords and archdevils to the star-spawn of Cthulhu, Tome of Beasts 1 features plenty of creatures embodying the essence of eldritch horror and cosmic malevolence. While these chaotic evil denizens of the Abyss and lawful evil inhabitants of infernal planes don’t often see eye-to-eye, they’re both more than willing to corrupt a mortal's soul if they get the chance.

Among all the twisted Fiends found in Tome of Beasts 1, the Demon Lord Qorgeth stands among one of the greatest threats. This demon lord appears as an impossibly massive, pale-fleshed worm and claims dominion over worms and decay.

At CR 23, this demon lord of the Abyss is a challenge for even the most legendary heroes and makes the gargantuan purple worm pale in comparison.

How Tome of Beasts 1 Helps Build Your Encounters

Need help coming up with an encounter that thrills your party? Are you stuck at a mental roadblock and can’t find the right creature for your campaign? Tome of Beasts 1 on D&D Beyond is DM alchemist’s fire for when it comes time to create engaging encounters for your game:

Refine Your Monsters

Inside Tome of Beasts 1, you’ll find tables that categorize monsters based on terrain, creature types, and challenge rating. These are crucial tools to help DMs filter which monsters will be applicable for specific encounters.

Whether your adventure leads through fey forests, desolate wastelands, or beneath the waves, these tables enable DMs to swiftly generate random encounters from the swathes of available monsters that are thematic to the environment your adventurers are exploring.

Adding this book to your collection on D&D Beyond means you can refine your search even further! Do you need to find a CR 10 Fey creature from Tome of Beasts 1 with an Armor Class between 14 and 17 that has blindsight and is proficient in Wisdom saving throws? Plug these criteria in and find your perfect monster!

Lore to Help Your Encounters Write Themselves

The lore attached to each monster’s stat block allows DMs to prep narratively satisfying encounters. These tidbits can also help you dictate how monsters will act in battle, allowing you to plan tactics ahead of time.

For instance, knowing that wormhearted suffragans are zealous followers of Qorgeth, or that bearfolk warriors are unwaveringly loyal to the Bear King, means they would do anything to protect their ruler, including sacrificing themselves. This knowledge can turn a simple random encounter into a nuanced, story-driven battle with lasting implications on the campaign.

Plan, Balance, and Run Your Encounters With D&D Beyond’s Tools

To help utilize the massive compendium of creatures available in Tome of Beasts 1, DMs can easily design encounters that are perfectly balanced to their party's level with D&D Beyond’s free Encounters tool.

Once combat begins, everything needed to manage the encounter—from rolling initiative to tracking the monster’s health—is accessible directly from the built-in initiative tracker. Plus, you can roll for monster attacks or abilities straight from their stat blocks and send the results to players using the Game Log!

In addition, Master-tier subscribers have access to D&D Beyond Maps, a VTT that seamlessly integrates with your D&D Beyond digital library. This enables you to easily populate encounters with tokens of monsters from Tome of Beasts 1 and invite your players to play along.

Get Your Copy of Tome of Beasts 1 on D&D Beyond Today

Teeming with over 400 new monsters, Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts 1 offers an abundance of options to populate your encounters.

Pick up your copy today on D&D Beyond’s marketplace and start incorporating this extensive compendium of new and unique foes into your encounters today!

Mike Bernier (@arcane_eye) is the founder of Arcane Eye, a site focused on providing useful tips and tricks to all those involved in the world of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time playing games, hiking with his partner, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants that have invaded his house.