The OD&D list of monsters from the little brown books consists of the following.
- Animals: horse (light, medium, heavy, mule), small (wolf, centipede, snake, spider), large (giant ants, tryannosaurus rex)
- Men: berserker, bandit, brigand, dervishe, nomad, buccaneer, pirate, caveman, merman
- Humanoids: kobold, goblin, orc, gnoll, hobgoblin, ogre, troll,
- Giants: hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud
- Undead: skeletton, zombie, ghoul, wight, wraith, mummy, spectre, vampire
- Lycanthopes: werewolf, wereboar, weretiger, werebear
- Elementals: air, water, fire, earth, salamanders
- Slimes: ochre jelly, black pudding, green slime, gray ooze, yellow mold, gelatineous cube
- Greek myth: medusa, gorgon, hydra, chimera, minotaur, centaur, dryad, pegasus, titan, cyclops
- Nordic myth: wyvern, dragon, unicorn, nixie, pixie, gnome, elf, dwarf, hippogriff, griffon
- Arabian nights: manticore, roc, djinn, efreet
- Lord of the Rings: hobbit, treant, balrog [and orc, listed under humanoids]
- Barsoom: apt, banth, thoat, white ape
- Constructs: juggernaut, living statue, robot, golem, android
- Others: gargoyle, purple worm, invisible stalker
- Sea monsters
OD&D did not provide stats for the entries in italics, not even for animals that populate the encounter tables. It just indicated HD ranges and typcial AC. You had to create them yourself, which was not hard as there were few mechanics beyond just movement, AC and hit dice - to hit was a function of hit dice, and everything except giants dealt d6 damage. Here begins the deplorable tradition that there is no useable animated statue for early or medium levels.
The Greyhawk supplement added original and now classcial D&D monsters like the stirge, owl bear, rust monster and lich. It fleshed out the stats for titan, gelatineous cube, salamander and golems, and it added new animals that again were incompletely described, just number of attacks and damage/effect (in italics below). The thief class was added and showed up in encounter tables. Druids were combo clerics/magic-users that could shape-change. Hobbits and ents were renamed to halflings and treants, and the balrog removed for copyright reasons. (Also in later printings of the Little Brown Books).
- Animals: phase spider, blink dog, giant tick, giant slug; dire wolf, lion, sabre tooth tiger, crocodile, mastodon; giant: spider, lizard, toad, snake, crab, beetle, scorpion
- Men: druid, thief (multiple levels)
- Humanoids: bugbear, lizard man,
- Giants: storm giant
- Undead: shadow, will-o-wisp, lich
- Lycanthropes: wererat
- Elementals: salamander
- Slimes: gelatineous cube
- Greek myth: triton, titan, harpy, hell hound
- Nordic myth: dragon (brass, copper, bronze, silver, platinum, chromatic)
- Mesopotamian myth: lammassu
- Oriental: ogre magus
- Constructs: homunculus, golem (flesh, stone, iron)
- D&D Classics: carrion crawler, umber hulk, displacer beast, beholder; doppleganger, owl bear, stirge, rust monster
Beholder, lich and will-o-wisp were high end monsters, the lich a level 18 caster and with 10+ HD and paralysis touch that could not be saved against.
The Blackmoor supplement added loads of giant animals and aquatic creatures. It also reskinned creatures for use in water with a different name. Of all these, only the fire beetle and sahuagin are really memorable.
- Animals: fire lizard, minotaur lizard and giant: crab, octopus, squid, crocodile, toad, frog, leech, beaver, otter, wasp, beetle (stag, rhinoceros, bombardier, fire, boring)
- Aquatics: dinosaur (elasmosaur, mosasaur, lesiosaur), giant shark, whale, giant eel, lamprey, sea horse, man-o-war, dophin, pungi ray, manta ray, water spider, weed eel, eyes, morkoth, masher, poison coral, strangle weed; sahuagin, ixitxachitl, locathah
The Eldritch Wizardry supplement added the druid as a full class, demons (the balrog returns as type VI), and monsters in support of the psionic rules. What a pity that Gygax did not use the names like screeching, croaking, roaring or hissing demon as their main names - these are much more evocative, and would have become common usage.
- Demons: type I, II, III, IV, V, VI, succubus, Orcus, Demogorgon
- Mesoamerican myth: couatl
- Mesopotamian myth: shedu
- Oriental myth: ki-rin
- Medieval myth: su-monster
- Psionic: mind flayer, intellect devourer, brain mole, cerebral parasite, thought eater
The next major step was the milestone achievement 1e Monster Manual, which added too many new monsters to discuss here, among them devils, fungi, and D&D classics such as the mimic, trapper, roper, piercer, lurker above, dragon turtle, ghost, ettin, banshee, nightmare, rakshasha, rot grub, shambling mound, troglodyte, and xorn. And finally statistics for all animals.
Classical Monsters, Please
Notable is how few newly invented mosters appear in the OD&D brown books. None of the "product identity" monsters: no carrion crawler, displacer beast, or beholder. The list consists of creatures from mythology and fantasy fiction. Many of the monsters in classical mythology were unique, like the pegasus, minotaur, medusa (which was one of the only three gorgons). But of course there must be multiple ones if you want to use them as opponents in a fantasy game.
There are only a couple unusual ones:
The gnoll, after Lord Dunsay, here still a crossbreed between gnome and troll, not a hyena-like demonspawn. The purple worm, likely inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune. The slimes, which seem to lack both pulp or mythical paragons, and seem to be Gygax's inventions (the black pudding came from Arneson).
The dragon types (white, black, green, blue, red, gold), except maybe the fire spewing red or gold dragons that are similar to Smaug. They may have corresponded to the four energy types the game had at the time (acid, fire, cold, electricity), but the green chlorine gas breathing one does not really fit.
The invisible stalker that was created by a level 6 spell -- the highest spell level in the game back then. He was some terrifying extradimensional horror. There was no strict time limit on the service, so it was the ideal spell for nasty wizards to protect their towers for a bit or to enact revenge on a foe.
The gargoyle was creative use of medieval architecture, and provide a good low-level animated statue, if you ignore the flight aspect.
Simpler times
OD&D was minimalistic: All monsters had darkvision. Monster stats were just hit dice, movement, and AC. All hit dice were d6, and determined the attack bonus. A combatant had a single attack, and nearly all attacks dealt d6 damage.
The individual monster descriptions add special abilities like regeneration, immunity to non-magical weapons, modifiers to damage or attack, extra damage dice for huge monsters, multiple attacks, and special attack forms like poison or petrification, which were save-or-die effects and made these monsters much deadlier. For intelligent monsters, there was guidance how to construct a larger group, with sub-chieftains, chieftains and so on.
For wilderness adventures, the table listed a number appearing and probablity to run into them in their lair, with treasure type if encountered in lair. (A similar number encountered was sorely missed for the dungeon encounter tables, and has been speculated to imply d6 by default).
Additional complexity was introduced in Greyhawk via number of attacks and damage/effect per attack, also inflating power. Still, most monsters fit on a single line of text.
Power Inflation
Over time, there has been a constant power creep in D&D with ever more damage, hit points and abilities. The Greyhawk Supplement introduced different dice for character hit dice, weapons damage, and monster damage.
This power inflation is of course on both sides of the fence -- as characters got stronger, monsters got stronger, to continue offer a challenge.
Monster hit dice upgraded to d8, to match the increased damage of weapons like the sword that also now dealt d8. Many monsters like the minotaur, gargoyle, chimera, manticore, ghoul and troll got multi-attack routines, which made the ghoul very deadly in combination with paralysis. Giants got one more d6 of damage by category, up to 6d6 for cloud giants.
Strongest Monsters in OD&D
In OD&D and its supplements the largest monsters on the list (10 or more hit dice, bold from OD&D, the rest from supplements) were
- 24 iron golem (from hit points)
- 20 tyrannosaurus rex (mention only), titan
- 18 stone golem (from hit points); large roc
- 16 large elemental
- 15 purple worm, sea monster (could be up to "double or treble" that); storm giant, (giant fish)
- 12 large dragons, hydra (12 heads), medium elemental, cloud giant; flesh golem (from hit points), beholder, dragon turtle, (mastodon)
- 11 fire giant
- 10 efreet, balrog, black pudding, frost giant, hydra (10 heads); lich, roper, ettin
We are more interested in monsters deadliness than hit dice number. Delta ran a Monte Carlo simulation to find out which of the monsters were really the deadliest. He calculated equivalent hit dice (EHD), i.e. how many hit dice of fighters would it take to have even odds in a fight (averaged across a range of figther levels from 1 to 12)? The top of this list are:
- 98 iron golem
- 39 large earth elemenental
- 38 vampire
- 37 stone golem
- 35 large sea monster ("treble")
- 34 dragon turtle
- 32 large fire or water elemental, treant
- 31 medium earth elemental
- 28 purple worm
- 27 red dragon, will-o-wisp
- 25 basilisk
- 24 medium sea monster ("double"), large roc
The golems, large elementals, sea monsters, dragon, vampire, will-o-wisp, basilisk and roc top the charts. Instant kill petrification, breath weapon and swallow attacks make them more dangerous than just HD. He did not use the largest dragons, they would score even higher. Giants drop off. He could not score the lich, beholder, titan, gold dragon, black pudding due to their unusual powers, but they likely would be up there, too, for example the gold dragon has the same strength (more, due to spells) than a red dragon.
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