The Beholder is, I think, a very good choice for the Monster Manual cover, as it is one of the great iconic D&D monsters, and one we associate with D&D far more exclusively than some of the other popular monsters of the game. The book is a hardcover with a very well-rendered image of a Beholder (in a fight with what we can presume are some player characters) featuring prominently. The book is 350 pages long, jam-packed with text and images its interior is full-color with very impressive art. Suffice it to say, like all 5e rulebooks, the Monster Manual is actually a supplement/expansion of the core Basic D&D rules, which are available for free download on PDF from the Wizards website. I'm not going to go into the usual level of detail for this book, seeing as how most of you reading will already be familiar with D&D in general, and 5th edition in particular.

It was published by Wizards of the Coast, and Chris Perkins was the lead designer (out of what appears to have been a large team) for this particular book. So, this is a review of the new Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Even so, as far as I recall I had no role whatsoever in the design of the monsters (there may have been some very brief chat about design goals, but absolutely nothing to do with the concrete mechanics of the thing), and I think I can be relatively objective within the boundaries of my biases here. I'll note, thus (as if anyone out there still didn't know this by now) that I was involved on the 5e project, and that bias should be kept in mind. I got the Monster Manual and the DMG for 5th edition last week, after some mailing mix-up, as part of the compensation for my Consulting on 5e.

This is a kind of mini-review, by my standards, anyways.

D&d 5e monster compendium