A great way to buff up your beasts and enhance the enemies your players will face without breaking the game, making them undefeatable, or having to adjust their stats and abilities on the fly when you realise you've severely underestimataed your party's strength! Highly recommended for extending the lifespan and challenge of the enemies you have at your disposal from the various core monster manuals, and great for keeping higher level adventuring parties (who think they've seen it all) on their toes, especially those made up of experienced players (who are also DMs themselves) who keep trying to second-guess your moves.

This is a fantastic addition for any DM that wants to give their monsters a little more flair, or wants to throw off those players that know the MM forwards and backwards.

There are detailed rules for how many talents each monster should get, but unless you are using Player Talents as well, it will scale up the CR of the monsters to give them two or three talents. When I'm not using Player Talents, I still like giving significant monsters or "bosses" a talent or two.

However you use this publication, it will go miles in making your D&D combats more dynamic! As a DM that likes to modify monsters a lot, this saves me a ton of time. Absolutely a highly recommended product.

After watching Matt Colville's video of creating Villain Actions I was having trouble coming up with my own types of actions for monsters and then I ran across these talents which are basically the same idea. So I purchased the bundle figuring I could give the Player Talnts to my players as rewards. I also own both Expanded Monster Manuals, great quality work as well. Loving these talents though and I can't wait to use them in my 20 year long campaign finale coming in the next few weeks, it should make for an epic ending to my campaign.

And here I was racking my head on how I could make my monsters more interesting. This is like riding a car in comparison to running to a new place 5 miles away. Saves a lot of braincells for the stuff that actually matter when running a game. Oh, and great cover art! 1989, here I go again...

We covered this supplement on our podcast Crit Academy(http://critacademy.libsyn.com/episode-97-dm-options-monster-talents). This is product is bar none, one of my favorite non-adventure supplements. These awesome talents can not only make monsters feel new and different, it can catch players off guard when they begin to assume that the kobold they are fighting is same ol same ol. This is a must have 5 star product!

This is the best DM's guild product I've ever read. It makes all the monsters from the Monster Manual exciting again, both for the PC's and the DM! I've taken to reading through the MM just to see what monster sounds fun based on their description, rather than their combat abilities...because I can rely on this product (DM Options: Monster Talents) to make ANY monster I select tactically interesting to me and my players. WOTC should make these types of modular, thematic and FUN variant monster abilties a standard part of the game going forward. To the author - congradulations. You've made a DM's guild product equal to or better than any printed 5e product so far! Keep up the stellar work!

A definite boon for dungeon masters who are tired of players always predicting what monsters are capable of.

When I make my adventures, I always create special or unique boss-type monsters to throw at my players. It can be tedious doing this every time though and sometimes I get lazy and just give it extra hit points or damage bonuses. So I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw the preview of this book and the other reviews! But after purchasing it and poring through its contents, I can’t help but feel excited and amazed. The sheer number of customizations you can do with almost all the creatures in the first monster manual can overwhelm you – but in a good way! I’ve always thought some of the monsters, like the balor and the tarrasque, seemed lacking in power, given their history. So when I saw the various custom abilities you can give them, such as legendary actions, I couldn’t wait to use them in my high level campaign! This book singlehandedly opened a lot of encounter possibilities. Finally, this book just makes it a hell lot easier to build my boss monsters! Definitely worth the price tag! Looking forward to the next books (I hope the author will make) that cover Volo’s and Mordenkainen’s monsters!

My review of the product:

1. The cover artwork pays homage to the AD&D player's handbook cover, in a very amusing manner.
2. While I'm normally not a fan of the added crunch in more rules-heavy games, the extra firepower and variety in abilities is a welcome addition for those interested in giving their players extra challenges regardless of level. I'll try to update this review once I've playtested this with one of my groups.
3. I was confused as to how there are some monsters who have talents that count as two, yet only have 1 talent to them; turns out they're reserved for Elite versions, so that caught me off guard. Other than that bit, it's visually pleasing to go through in terms of layout.

For those who love crunchier monsters and combat, it's definitely worth the purchase.

Excellent work, and well worth the price tag. I'll definitely be looking at this every week while prepping games! (It's worth noting, I have not picked up the character talents books, this worked great as a stand alone DM creature resource.)

This is an astonishing supplement and a fantastic sourcebook to spice up your encounters, totally recommend it for the value it provides in comparisson to its price! 5/5

Today I will be reviewing the, at least for me, long anticipated Monster Talents book, published by Dragonix here on the DMs Guild. Most people should know of Dragonix by now, the creator of the best selling Player Talents series, which has had a huge impact on many games. Not least of which being my own, my players took to loving the talent system immediately, and its been a mainstay of my games ever since. However, I had to work particularly hard on ensuring that the monsters were up to the at times vastly magnified power of the player characters.

Monster Talents aims to fix these issues, but sitting at a pretty hefty price tag of 14.99 dollars means that some might be hesitant to buy it. Allow me to reassure any DM who might be wondering whether or not to buy this, this is probably the single best product for monsterbuilding I've ever encountered on this website, and I have scooped up pretty much every such product I could find with reckless abandon, including The Book of Dragons, Monster Warehouse and The Monsters Arsenal. Yet this easily blows them all out of the water in terms of relevance.

Even a casual skim through its contents made it clear that it was worth every penny I paid for it and then some. The Balor of the Monster Manual is a sad, sad creature, far from living up to their intensity in older editions they are weak enough that they've apparently been taken down by parties of seventh level characters. Indeed, its so pathetic that its most threatening trait involves its death. It is a monster I had up until this point sworn to never use.

But this book changed my opinion on this matter entirely, for the Balors talents are simply stellar, allowing a DM to not only modify it into a Legendary Creature, but make it unique by mixing and matching fourteen different talents, making it so that its possible to have several entirely distinct and unique Balors in the same fight if you so desired. This inclusion of much needed new options has turned the Balor into a force to be reckoned with, and a creature that truly lives up to its hype.

Not all Monster Talents in this book are as brilliantly done as those of the Balor, but rest assured that there are no duds here, all talents are more or less universally good, and succeed at what they are meant to do, spicing up your monsters and balancing against the players talents. The talents range from good to exceptional on the whole.

Hopefully Dragonix continues to improve upon this book to make it the best it can be, but even as it is right now I'd say that its an excellent product worthy of consideration. Assuming that you are DM, that is, if you are a player this book holds very little for you, and if I were to level a criticism, it would be that Dragonix chose to include some racial talents in this book rather than update one of the other Player Talents books with that information, books that are geared specifically towards providing character options.

There's still loads more I'd like to see from this product, including improved talents for dragons, and perhaps a simple guide on how to create talents for custom monsters. But the final verdict is that Monster Talents is an exemplary product, and I'm already looking forward to the second book, whenever it might arrive, because I can guarantee that I will buy every single one of these in the future, and if you are a DM who wants to improve your monsters, I cannot reccomend this book enough. I award it five stars, because its few shortcomings are not enough to decrease the value of this product.