Flee Mortals! The MCDM Monster Book Review

Produced by MCDM. Link to MCDM HERE.

I’m fascinated with this book, but maybe not as much as I am by The Lazy DM’s Forge of Foes. The funny part is both books have a lot of talent in common with one another. Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, and Teos Abadia worked on both. Other notables, among many designers, include Makenzie De Armas, Gabe Hicks, and Hannah Rose. The designers are a very healthy mix of newer gamers and more experienced designers. A+ for that!

Unlike many of the other titles I have reviewed, Flee Mortals! has a lot of positives and negatives associated with it. I have bones of contention with some of the disclaimers, power levels (CR of several creatures,) companions, and references to other MCDM books. I also have a distribution concern about MCDM in general I’d like to mention. On a positive note, they did an excellent job with many of the humanoid stat blocks, they’ve added several new creature types to the game, the overall creativity exhibited, and the art is phenomenal.

Cover to cover, it’s pretty good.

The overall look and feel of Flee Mortals! is excellent. The attention to detail, the overall layout, and the art is fantastic. If this is what we have to look forward to in the MCDM RPG, I’m elated. I have a few bones to pick with some of the writing and editing, but all-in-all, it’s pretty well written.

I absolutely love Warhammer Fantasy style artwork. I must confess I don’t follow the names of a lot of Magic: the Gathering and Games Workshop artists as closely as I should. I will say that the art in Flee Mortals! reminds me a great deal of Warhammer and M:tG. It might not be the same folx, but just looking at the goblins, lizardfolk, and some of the undead have a strong Warhammer vibe. Many of the dragons, elementals, Time Raiders, and Multivok look as though they came straight from a Magic card. (That is a compliment, btw.)

The many designers get high marks in creativity from me. The humanoids especially- Bugbears, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Lizardfolk, Angulotl, and even the Kobolds are so well done. They look fresh statistically. They have cultures and nation-building material plugged right into them. That part is awesome.

The deficiencies aren’t entirely their fault.

I bought this book with every intention of using it as fodder for Shadowdark RPG, Old School Essentials, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Nothing against Dungeons & Dragons 5E, but in some respects it is the weakest edition of the game to date. Flee Mortals! was built upon a weak foundation and they even admitted that is was intended to redesign or change the way we think about old monsters. We’ve been watching monsters in the core D&D Monster Manual get weaker and lowered Challenge Ratings for years now. It’s sad, but not MCDM’s fault.

Some of us veteran players and GMs have said for years that you can’t design a good game or supplement by committee. Obviously someone at MCDM missed that memo. There are definitely places this book seems scattered, almost completely disjointed. It suffers from a sort of continuity dissonance that can only come from a book that has around 30 designers and another half dozen Sensitivity Consultants. At some point during the design process someone needed to put their foot down and get everyone on the same page with some of this stuff.

Okay, here’s the negative bits.

For starters, the concept of companions is not my cup of tea. There have been entire third party books written on giving the PCs pets, companion animals, etc. I draw the line at mounts and companions that have petrification rays and breath weapons in the group. I think it was well executed and thought out. It’s just not my cup of tea.

Let’s talk about disclaimers and content warnings for a moment. My advice to the writers, designers, and editors of Flee Mortals! is to put them all in one place at the front of the book so people can see it early on and not get triggered. Splattering content warnings all over a book does not help anyone and adds a ton of clutter to an already busy layout.

I’m not saying content warnings are unnecessary, but what kind of book is this? The title of the bloody thing is Flee Mortals! The MCDM Monster Book. It’s not the My Little Pony Guide to Warm, Fuzzy, Loveable, Cuddly Friends. Seriously, what the Hell did you think you were going to get just based on the title and description of this book? Could there be spiders, snakes, and big nasty demons that should all come with some kind of content warning? Of course, there are! Again, family, a disclaimer belongs in the  front of the book within the first few pages. Buyer beware there could be some icky stuff in a book about monsters.

Other problems with this book.

I thought the layout was a bit sloppy. We’ve got entries for demons and some of the accompaniment types of monsters listed all over the place. For example, rather than putting Worgs under “W” like we learned watching Sesame Street, the editors decided to put them with the goblins, since no one would ever use them for something other than goblin mounts apparently. It’s my opinion that this is a bad editorial decision and reflects a book that was designed by committee.

While I liked some of the lair and terrain encounters, it’s another example of disjointed layout that is ultimately confusing. Ankheg is listed under “A,” right Elmo? Nope. Ankheg is on Page 315 where most people wouldn’t think to look for it. I think they could have gone a more traditional route with the design of that chapter and just put the monsters in alphabetical order with the rest.

Here’s a silly one: The nomenclature used in this book looks like someone vomited a bag of Scrabble tiles. The names of dragons and certain other creatures are almost unpronounceable. No, “Bob the Dragon” doesn’t sound very intimidating, but neither does “Xaantikorijk.” Ease up on the random syllabic fantasy name generators, y’all. If I can’t pronounce it, the players won’t even take it seriously.

Also, randomly inserting the word “death” into a creature’s name doesn’t make it sound more intimidating. It can just be called a goblin archer. It doesn’t need to be a “Goblin Death Archer.” (Not a direct example, but it’s an example similar to what they do in the book in places.) It seems so petty for me to mention that in a review, but with as many people as they had involved, you’d think someone would notice.

The trouble with humans.

I think Flee Mortals! would have been a better, more concisely written book without an entry for Humans and the chapter on creating Villain Parties. Maybe the Villain Parties was a Kickstarter addon? I didn’t back it on KS, so I have no idea. If I were a “Design Director,” I would have taken the entry for humans as well as the chapter on Villain Parties and dropped them in their own, albeit thin, sourcebook. I’m sure they probably could have found people to assist them in padding it out, though.

There are already entire sourcebooks filled with human retainers, human NPCs, etc. We didn’t need that entry in Flee Mortals! They didn’t have entries for Elves or Dwarves. Why do we need humans in a monster book? Yes, humans do some terrible things out in the real world, but c’mon. I don’t need more human drama in my fantasy game. I need big, nasty, scary monsters in my book about monsters.

Last of the nitpicky stuff

I don’t care for Psionics in my D&D games. I think Flee Mortals! went too far overboard in promoting this and other MCDM books, especially their psionics thing. The psionics also go to my other gripe, which is the excessive number of frivolous mechanics added to this book.

There are some pretty fluffy parts of Flee Mortals! The minions rules are pretty cool, but I think I’ve seen them before somewhere or something pretty similar. If I think companions are frivolous, the rules for Ferocity are likewise overkill. The spreadsheet is a nice online resource, but I think it eats up too much space in the book for all the more useful it is.

Had they been more efficient with the layout and design, I’d dare say there would have been even more reason for the mortals to flee in terror. Disclaimers at the beginning, Villain Party, as well as humans out, and a major rework of some of the bits at the beginning would have left room for at least five or six of their sizeable monster entries with art. Not my call, not my company I guess.

Onto the good stuff.

My book traveled a hard road after it was launched into the back of the mail truck by trebuchet. It weathered any amount of battering and was likely used as a shield by the New Jersey Spartan as he bravely fought the Viking hoard determined to stop him. Then it made its long, arduous trek to Iowa and while it may have been used as the Donner Party’s dinner plate, it somehow arrived at my house. Sadly, it did not weather the trip well.

Why am I leading with a downer? Fair question. I contacted MCDM via email on Saturday. Their happiness engineer responded the same day and assured me they would send a replacement copy. Thanks, Geoff, for your timely response. You rock!

The content of Flee Mortals! is nothing short of outstanding. I’m very passionate about monster books and so are they. (Maybe that’s why I took so many notes on this one.) Even with all of the writers and a fairly light hand in direction, they pulled off an incredible book.

The first thing that stands out to me is a throwback to 4^th Ed D&D with the assignment of monster roles. This was a useful feature for DMs of that era. It also appeared in Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM’s Forge of Foes. I really enjoyed that book, too.

I really fell in love with the Angulotls right away. I don’t know about playing them as an ancestry, but I think they’d make for spiffy NPCs. I can’t really turn down cute little Poison Dart Frog dudes. Whoever came up with these guys, great job!

Something else that stands out a great deal is the amount of culture built into the various humanoid creatures. I mean, how cool is it to have Romanesque Kobolds? Of course, the Lizardfolk have kind of an Aztec, Inca, Mayan vibe to them. Orcs are just unique in Flee Mortals! I have to again compliment the artwork on Bugbears especially.

The animals listed were pretty darn cool. I totally wanted artwork for the snowfox. They would make for super cute familiars. The Blood Hawk would go well with any Ranger character. The artwork for the Wildcat with the gnome… there had to have been a conversation in character for that one somewhere.

Demons are where the book makes a dramatic departure from the usual Monster Manual faire. While I’m not too thrilled with the soul mechanics because I’ll never use them, the concepts and art for the demons themselves are pretty darn cool. Wobalas is my vote for monster of the year. The art is amazing and statistically it’s above par.

Other than having names that look like someone dropped a box of Alpha Bits cereal down the stairs, the dragons in Flee Mortals! are freakin sweet! They don’t have the normal chromatic tendencies that we’re used to in D&D. (I suspect it’s for OGL reasons.) They all have ludicrously high CR values, breath weapons, and special abilities. They’re everything I ever wanted in dragons and more.

Likewise, the elementals section is something to take a look at. Like the dragons and elsewhere, elementals break from the normal D&D aesthetics we’re used to. The art in this section would sell me on this book if I knew nothing else about it. Statistically, creatively, and artistically the elementals really are worth the price of admission. Force of Blood will be coming to my next campaign just for the name alone.

I could really carry on about specific creature types and specific monsters all day. Please bear in mind if I skip something, it’s probably still pretty cool. There are just so many specific creatures to talk about in Flee Mortals! that truly do stand out from the usual critter. I’ll probably end up doing Creature Feature articles about some of them because they’re as cool as the Wobalas.

I’m probably going to get some mileage out of the goblins from this book in the Shadowdark RPG campaign because they’re a player accessible ancestry in that game. There are a lot of entries I’ve earmarked for other games besides 5E. Change up the setting for some of the monsters in Flee Mortals! and they become downright terrifying.

Hags have almost a Shakespearean quality about them. They’re another monster entry I’m dying to play around with somewhere soon. Lightbenders are another creature I’m anxious to try out. What a unique concept. Converting from 5E to OSR and OSR adjacent games is pretty simple.

The Slaughter Demon was misplaced in with the Hobgoblins in my opinion. It’s definitely getting used somewhere in my games. The thing is too cool not to get used. I have to pull the mimics into something just for the memes. Again, please let me say, “Art sells books.”

I wasn’t even halfway through the monster entries when I realized how long this review is getting.

There really are a lot of appealing monsters in Flee Mortals! from a DM/GM perspective. There’s also a great deal of what I call “cool factor” in some of these monsters between the art and the stats that make them incredibly appealing to me and I’d say most DM/GMs.

I want to specifically mention the Time Raiders and the Multivok for a couple of things. First, I think they port to Dungeon Crawl Classics very well. Second, they definitely have a Magic: the Gathering vibe in terms of the artwork.

The only thing that really stuck out in my mind looking at the Undead section is the Flesh Mournling art. It has a very World of Warcraft feel to it. (Think Stitches, Butcher, or Patchwork.) It’s odd because the rest of the Undead have a very Warhammer Fantasy feel to them.

Some of the most unique and interesting creatures in Flee, Mortals! are in the environment section. I can’t wait to play around with the Lamasombra sometime. A lot of the forest entries look like fun as well. The Empyrean Stag reminded me a bit of Princess Mononoke, one of my favorite anime of all time. The Rotbeast seems to have a similar origin now that I think of it. Lightthief in Shadowdark. (Shudder.)

Overall, I think Flee, Mortals! is a good investment for the DM/GM who really digs monster books like I do. I’m definitely going to get a lot of mileage out of it in one campaign or another. The high points of this book more than make up for the shortcomings. I’m interested to see what the $4.6 million Kickstarter monster book is going to look like now.

Thank you for stopping by and hanging in there. I know it was a long review. I appreciate you for being here.