I still really like Level Up: Advanced 5E. I originally bought the A5E Monstrous Menagerie by accident, thinking this was a normal 5E Bestiary, but then I found it was for another version of 5E, and I felt I wasted my money. Then, I got the other two books...
And happily, I was wrong.
The Monstrous Menagerie is not a clone of the Monster Manual with extra pages. It is the best monster book you can drop onto a 5E table right now. Every creature has something to do besides soak hit points and wait for its turn. They have motivations. They have signs and foreshadowing hints that they are already in the area before anyone ever rolls initiative. They have behavior lists, so you know what they actually do when the party is not looking.
Unlike D&D 2024, which generalizes everything and strips the lore right out of the monsters, A5E’s creatures have ecology, motivation, and personality. The dungeon is not a video-game instance. The orc is not a bag of numbers. You hear the drums. You see the tracks. You smell the campfire. Then you decide whether you want the fight.
That is old-school thinking. Once I had the Menagerie, I picked up the Adventurer’s Guide and Trials & Treasures. Same pattern. They did not “power up” the game. They stayed inside the original 5E math and then gave every pillar something to do.
Exploration is no longer a montage. There are journeys. There is terrain that matters. Exhaustion is not a joke. Gold actually has places to go besides magic shops. Martial characters get maneuvers instead of “I attack again.” Heritage and culture are split so a character is more than a race line on the sheet. Destiny gives you a reason to care about the story that is not just another subclass feature.
None of this breaks compatibility. You can run any 2014 adventure, any 2024 adventure, any third-party module. The numbers still work. The difference is that the referee now has procedures instead of vibes.
That is what I have been chasing on my blogs for years. The 10-minute turn. Mapping. Resource tracking that actually hurts. Player skill instead of “I roll Perception.” A5E already has most of those tools printed and playtested. You do not have to invent them in the margins of your 2014 books.
I still run Greater 5E. Characters from 2014, 2024, Tales of the Valiant, and A5E sit at the same table. But when I want the game to feel like 1980 instead of 2014, I reach for the Level Up books first. The Menagerie sits next to my other monster books and gets used more than any of them.
I thought I wasted money on a book for “another version.” I ended up with the version that actually remembers why we sat down at the table in the first place.
