A bestiary of wondrous friends and foes for the world's greatest roleplaying game

Sparkling with the musings of the wizard Mordenkainen, this tome features a host of creatures for use in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Compiling and updating monsters that originally appeared in previous D&D fifth edition releases, these creatures represent some of the most benevolent and malevolent forces that D&D heroes might face.

The book also gathers together fantastical peoples from many different worlds. Each of these peoples represents a race option when you create your D&D character, expanding on the choices in the Player's Handbook.

• Includes more than 250 monsters--updates to the monsters include making spellcasters easier for Dungeon Masters to run, giving many monsters more damage and resilience, and improving the organization of the stat blocks themselves

• Includes more than 30 playable races--brings the game's setting-agnostic races into one book, complementing the races in the Player's Handbook

• A multiverse of lore--includes updates to monster lore that refocuses their stories on the D&D multiverse, rather than on any particular world

From the clouds came the giant airships that laid waste America with an incredible new fire which nothing could extinguish! In the flaming cities, now ravaged by a ruthless, invincible invader, Operator 5 and his fighting undercover aides staked the fate of Civilization on one last-minute duel with these new and horrible invaders!

Invaders from the Central Empire held all New England and most of the Eastern Seaboard. The Purple Emperor, bloodthirsty and heartless, was subjecting millions of Americans to an endless reign of terror. Threat of the horrible Green Gas had driven our defenders to the Mississippi. The President had fled to a ramshackle courthouse in Florida. Despair filled every heart. Operator 5, leading a desperate guerilla band within the enemy lines, is America's only hope. This long novel, dramatized from Jimmy Christopher's own personal history of the invasion, presents a startling, thrilling picture of the Second War of Independence

The defense forces of the United States have been crushed by the powerful war machine of Emperor Rudolph, Warlord of the World... From the Atlantic to the Mississippi the brutal conqueror is subjecting millions to his merciless, bloody reign of terror-and his ruthless gray-clad hordes are steadily sweeping westward, leaving a vast path of death and destruction in their wake... Faced with the surrender of America's army, only Jimmy Christopher-known to the Intelligence Service as Operator 5-and a pitiful handful of desperate men stand between the Mad Emperor and his bloody conquest of the nation...

Against the Mongol hordes on land, and the Purple Fleet, loosing its annihilating bombardment from the sea-New York had fought through the bitter, exhausting siege. Victory, at last, was within the grasp of Operator 5 and his fighting American patriots. Then, from out of the Emperor's devil cauldron, rose the scourge of the Black Plague!

Thundering across a ravished America comes a loot laden train bearing twenty million dollars in gold, hurtling toward the despoiled metropolis of New York, where the dread foreign conqueror, Emperor Rudolph I, has established headquarters. Suddenly the train trembles to a stop. A desperate little band of American patriots, who refuse to bow to the conqueror's yoke, make a bold attack. Their leader, Jimmy Christopher, known as Operator 5, realizes that with that trainload of gold he can flood the skies with a thousand fighting planes, the only chance for America to repel the brutal invaders! Already they have ravished the Eastern seaboard. Even now they are hammering at the surviving citadel of American freedom-the Rocky Mountain stronghold of the brave men who will not yield.

One by one the helpless little American towns vanished-wiped from the face of the earth by a fiendish weapon in the hands of a blood-maddened European dictator! Against this attack, unparalleled in the entire annals of warfare, Operator 5 and his gallant undercover aides had to wage desperate battle in order to save civilization from defeat and disaster!

It was a horrible, false New Dawn breaking over the world-heralding the most powerful and ruthless autocracy known to man. America, like England and France, was under the heel of a dictator who had set out to make himself emperor of the earth! To fight this evil force, Operator 5 and his volunteer aides crossed the sea to Europe-waging a fierce, relentless undercover war!

The desperate defenders of America went over the top against the vandal hordes of the Purple Emperor at the Continental Divide-only to find that the murder-maniac tyrant had protected his trenches with a living wall of America's youth hung upon crosses! It was then that Operator 5 had to find the way to strike at the enemy-and also rescue, from a blood-mad jaguar's cage, the girl who guarded a nation's secret!

The grim banner of the Purple Empire was flaunted over America from coast to coast. Americans labored in chains for the blood-maddened Emperor Rudolph. Defiant patriots found their heads under the guillotine. All hope seemed lost. But one man-Operator 5-clung to the vision and the courage to fight for an America once more free. Facing dismaying perils, he snatched the Purple Emperor's own weapons to fire the spark of battle in a mighty nation!

Can a beaten, subjugated nation fight back-and win? America was doing it! Starting out with a handful of ragged, desperate men, Operator 5 went doggedly about the hopeless task of transporting his precious store of guns and ammunition-across two thousand miles of enemy territory-to our last crumbling defenses in the Far West. Read here of that amazing running battle with death. March with this swelling, triumphant legion of hungry patriots-in the greatest, most stirring epic of military history!

In the far reaches of High Asia, the Purple Empire had set up its factories and its smelters, to forge the most powerful weapon yet devised in military history. That weapon was a fleet of super-dreadnoughts equipped with a strange secret device to render our Defense Force helpless... In this gripping novel of the historic Purple Invasion, giant guns ashore and turret magic at sea hurl death at America's crumbling bulwarks as intrigue knifes the stout defenders. And Operator 5, Secret Service ace, becomes a man without a country, with death and disgrace as his only reward.

From friendly but helpless Canada had come the false feint at America's mighty, steel-armored line. Investigating that strange attack, Operator 5 learned that to save his country from the most astounding invasion in history, he and his volunteer aides must cross the sea to fight a desperate undercover battle with the three bandit nations of the Old World-and, man for man, match American agents against their foes in the grim hope that he might overwhelm a ruthless enemy!

In the hot streets of Old Mexico, Operator 5 launched his great counter-espionage campaign-against a plotting Asiatic horde which threatened to loose the entire barbarous Mexican guerrilla Southwest upon America, in an attack that also combined modern Japanese mechanized warfare and dread tropical disease! Then, in the final, decisive minutes, America seemed to turn back the very pages of history as she made her last stand for freedom at the Alamo!

Across ravaged America, exhausted from the long Purple Wars, Operator 5 and his gallant caravan trekked on their errand of mercy, step by step rebuilding once more a mighty nation out of a hopeless ruin-battling to the death a lawless horde that had been released by a Dictator of Doom who planned to transform the prostrate country into a vassal-state that never again was to know liberty!

It was inconceivable that America should ever bow beneath the heel of the invading tyrant, the self-styled Emperor Rudolph I-yet two-thirds of the nation had been seized and laid waste. A courageous but deluded people had muttered, It can't happen here!-even when the purple hordes had swept over Europe and Asia. Now these people were retreating before the bloody battalions of the conqueror. And finally, when even the women of the nation had hurled themselves against the enemy in a last desperate effort to stay his irresistible progress, America staggered under the most paralyzing blow of all-the devastating barrage of the cholera bombs... What could one man-even though he be the veteran Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5-do against such odds?

Over the Rockies and down the Pacific slope the Purple Emperor's great war machine rolled on, to crush the last vestige of American resistance. Operator 5, seeing his cause already lost, decided upon the incredibly daring, typically American action-of a counter attack! Read here of his mad, secret sortie through enemy territory-across two thousand miles of hell to the guns and ammunition which alone could stave off defeat.

The goose-stepping armies of the Purple Emperor massed in the passes of the Continental Divide, ready to swoop down upon the last defenders of American soil and drive them relentlessly westward into the sea. Grimly the besieged force, without guns or supplies, waited the attack they could not hope to hold off. Then Operator 5 played his last card-a daring dash into the Occupied Territory, where his life was worth a province to the man who could deliver him into the eager hands of a torture-mad emperor!

With those merciless vandals turned loose by the Purple Emperor, helpless America had been plunged back into the dark days of primitive warfare, and sacked civilization lay smouldering in ruins. For the coming of the Gothic hordes with fire and sword was a living scourge across the face of the eastern states, and Operator 5, racing against time, sped on to New York's wrecked towers to meet there in battle the fury of Urslup the Strong!