NOTE FROM DAVE: In 1979, I was nine years old. I began playing this ridiculous AD&D game with my brother Steve (he was 12). After a few years, I quickly decided it would be fun to make my own monsters, adventures, magic items, etc. for the game, instead of using the provided ones. I got a lot of friends involved, too...creating and submitting creatures to my quickly ballooning compendium that I called "Dave's Book of Beings." Beginning in 1988, I wallowed in the dorkish pleasure of going through this volume of 300+ utterly silly creatures, updating all the artwork, stats, and text for the better creatures (around 110), to make the BoB a little bit closer to a useable AD&D supplement. I never actually played the game but still enjoyed making these monsters! By 1991 I was updating less and less, giving up on designing stats and text descriptions and just drawing the pictures instead. Each year I'd make another one or two, but just for the heck of it. So now, in 2002, comes this effort to finally share my Book of Beings with internet users. Maybe there's still some "1E" die-hards out there who might be able to adapt and use some of these monsters for their own campaigns. WRITE ME if you do! Enjoy, but please note that the quality of the art and writing herein might reflect badly on me, since I was much younger when I originally created most of these monsters. Check out my Art Gallery for more recent artwork. -- Dave

UPDATES

06/04/07: Today, after almost three years, I added a new monster: the FULGURATAUR!It's half-minotaur, half lightning bolt! I was going through some old drawings and found this one from back in 2001, so I took a few minutes to "monsterify" it! 07/27/04: The BoB, a.k.a. "Monstrous Tome II," is at last available for download in PDF format at Dragonsfoot! With this final step having been achieved, these pages on umop.com will not likely be updated any time soon, but will nonetheless remain online for your personal use.