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List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition monsters

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ7158658 ↗
Source-derived summary

This is the Index of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition monsters, an important element of that role-playing game. This list only includes monsters from official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition supplements published by TSR, Inc. or Wizards of the Coast, not licensed or unlicensed third-party products such as video games or unlicensed Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition manuals.

Monsters in the 1st edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Encyclopedic cataloguing of monsters dates back to ancient times, for example Pliny's Natural History. However, 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to simulate monsters and magic. The "spread sheeting" of monsters in 1st edition was hugely influential not only for tabletop gaming, but computer games as well. Writing at the time of the 1st edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Ian Livingstone concluded in a comparison between contemporary role-playing games: "No other RPG has such a wide range of monsters, each clearly explained, as AD&D", from "humanoid creatures (ogres, goblins, etc.), and dragons and reptiles, right through to exotic and strange creatures." Chroniclers of the art of Dungeons & Dragons Michael Witwer et al. observed that the regular inclusion of images introduced in this edition "made the standard visualisation of monsters just as important as how they were specified and quantified". A.V. Club reviewer Nick Wanserski commented in 2016 on the depiction of monsters in this phase of the game that "pen and ink interior illustrations found in books like the original Fiend Folio [...] weren't nearly as polished as the contemporary art, but had an earnest strangeness that I tend to get sentimental about."

TSR 2009 – Monster Manual (1977)

This was the initial monster book for the first edition of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, published in 1977. Gary Gygax wrote much of the work himself, having included and expanded most of the monsters from the previous D&D supplements.

Editorial summary

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Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2016, 2009, 1977—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, Advanced and Dungeons can be independently traced.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition monsters” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.