AD&D 2e Monsters By Dungeon Level

I didn't have a big post prepared for today, and might not for a while (I'm going to Mexico next week!), but felt the need to share something on a Friday. 

For my AD&D 2e game, I wanted to create a list of monsters in the Monstrous Manual sorted by "level" (or more accurately, dungeon level). 

When I'm designing a dungeon, I usually have an idea as to what level the PCs "should" be when they attempt the dungeon. I make a note as to whether the dungeon is 1st-level, 2nd-level, 3rd-level etc. 

When placing monsters in the dungeon, I refer to AD&D 1e's DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER LEVLE DETERMINATION MATRIX, below (page 174):

Click to embiggen. 

So, a 1st-level dungeon can have monsters which are appropriate for levels 1, 2, or 3, and so on. Why don't I use the version of this table from 2e? Well, because there isn't one, for some reason.

At this point, I could simply use 1e's DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER TABLES to populate my 1st-level dungeons with 1d4 giant ants, 1d4 badgers, 1d4 fire beetles, and the like. The problem is that these tables are far from comprehensive (and I demand comprehensiveness), and they're also not totally compatible with AD&D 2e. There are plenty of monsters in AD&D 2e which aren't in 1e, and a few from 1e which are more or less powerful in 2e (I'll get to that in a minute).

2e, as far as I can tell, doesn't have DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER TABLES of its own (again, for some reason). Instead, on page 135 of the DMG, it has Table 55: Dungeon Level, which lists the XP ranges of creatures and their corresponding "level". A 1st-level creature is worth 1-20 XP, a 2nd-level creature is worth 21-50 XP, and so on, all the way up to 10th-level creatures, which are worth 10,001+ XP. 

So, using this table, I went through the whole 2e Monstrous Manual and sorted all the monsters into the level 1-10 categories as laid out by Table 55. The result is here. 

The work was arduous. Many times I pushed back from my desk and held my head in my hands and asked myself what I was doing, namely when I got to the dragons, or the fish, or the humans, or the insects, or the giants, or the mammals, or the whales...

But I powered through it, for some reason. Now, when I use 1e's DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER LEVEL DETERMINATION MATRIX  to determine what level the monster should be, I can use my own reference document to find an appropriate monster according to 2e.

If someone has done this already, please don't tell me. I looked for a really long time, asked around, got many completely unhelpful answers and spreadsheets with way too much information, and finally just decided to do it myself. Don't tell me if all that work was in vain.

It was validating, sort of. I suspected that the DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER TABLES from 1e weren't 1:1 compatible with 2e, and I was right, in my opinion. 

Halflings, hobgoblins, and piercers (1st-level in 1e, with 9-16, 2-8, and 1-3 appearing, respectively) are 2nd-level in 2e (35 XP). Assuming a party of 6-10 1st-level PCs with henchmen and hirelings, I'd probably only include 3-5 of any of these creatures in a 1st-level 2e dungeon (so the hobgoblin and piercer numbers are pretty close, admittedly).

The weakest dwarf in 2e, the hill dwarf, (1st-level in 1e, with 4-14 appearing) is a 3rd-level creature in 2e (175 XP). I'd probably only include 2-3 hill dwarfs in a 1st-level 2e dungeon. Gnomes, skeletons, and zombies are similarly 3rd-level in 2e (65-120 XP), but the skeletons and zombies in 1e at least appear in groups of 1-4 or 1-3, respectively, which is very close.

Elves are also 1st-level creatures in 1e, with 3-11 appearing. In 2e, the weakest elf (regular or aquatic) is a 5th-level creature (420 XP)! I probably wouldn't include an elf at all if I was designing a dungeon for 1st-level 2e characters.

There are some drawbacks to the tables I'm using. The only really interesting 1st-level creatures are goblins, gremlins, humans, kobolds, orcs, and giant rats. The early dungeons are kind of same-y as a result, but they can be spiced up with the occasional 2nd- or 3rd-level monster. My players are already past 1st-level, and almost at 3rd-level, so the options have already opened up, allowing me to use up to 5th-level monsters, which is really where the juice is (carrion crawlers, dopplegangers, gargoyles, hellhounds, werewolves, ogres, owlbears, shadows, etc.).

The fact that monsters above 10,000 XP are all categorized simply as 10th-level is a bit of a letdown. I can't imagine an 8th-level party (which is when 10th-level monsters can theoretically start showing up) will be equally capable of handling an Age 6 white dragon as well as an Age 12 red dragon, or a 72 HD leviathan whale, but I know that the power scaling of characters in 2e (and especially spellcasters) is much steeper than in modern D&D, so we'll see what happens.

Overall, that's why I'm playing 2e, and trying to play in as systematized a way as possible (which is why I'm looping in resources from 1e as much as possible - 2e seems to be the dawn of the "just figure it out" school of DM advice, whereas 1e is more concrete and instructional). I want to see what happens when I run the game the way I think I'm supposed to run it.