Free (the) Monsters

Monsters!

One of the guilty pleasures of D&D is encountering - and often slaying or being slain by - monsters.

Every iteration of the game has its own Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, and the like.  Official bestiaries feature the current version of classic monsters.  Those monsters and monster books are fun, though I admit a preference for older versions and the wide variety of art.

Regardless, official books mean that monsters are known.  This becomes such an issue that common (and useful) advice is to still keep these iconic monsters and simply change their names.  

Other people are fully in the other camp, utterly discarding old ideas (even if keeping names) and homebrewing their own creatures.  These can be found in any number of blogs and individual adventures.

Myself, I love new monsters, but am terribly lazy.

Luckily, I have found three legitimate bestiaries online for the low, low price of free.

Ford's Faeries: A Bestiary Inspired by Henry Justice Ford - 116 pages of monsters inspired by the artwork of Henry Justice Ford.  This will need converting to your favorite ruleset, but that is worth the work.  A few of these reside in my Ironguard Keep campaign.  Others will see light in the megadungeon.

A Hamsterish Horde of Monsters - 87 pages of fanged, furred, and clawed goodness, with bonus magic items.  At a surface glance, this is formatted for B/X and similar rulesets.  I'm looking forward to a more thorough read to find just the right creature to inflict on my players.

The Book of Beautiful Horrors - this one is formatted in 5e and is over 200 pages of goodness.  

Goblin Punch Bestiary - I don't know what exactly to call this, but I like it.

I could list the wide variety of unfree bestiaries available, both as hardbacks and as pdfs, and they are great to browse and use, but that is not the purpose of this post.

The purpose is to get more nonstandard creatures in your games, and the best way to that is for free.