Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale was published by Wizards of the Coast in June 2011 and it was the third post-Essentials book for the 4th edition. The book was re-released as a PDF on October 06, 2015. It was written by
Sterling Hershey,
Brian R. James,
Matt James, and
Steve Townshend and illustrated by
Dave Allsop,
Peter Bergting,
Zoltan Boros,
Eric Deschamps,
Matt Dixon,
Wayne England,
Adam Gillespie,
Ralph Horsley,
Twozdai Hulse,
Mari Kolkowsky,
Howard Lyon,
Jim Nelson,
Steve Prescott,
Vincent Proce,
Wayne Reynolds,
Jon Schindehette,
Anne Stokes,
Gábor Szikszai,
Matias Tapia,
Ben Wootten, and
Kieran Yanner. Appelcline highlighted that
Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale was released after a "grim" Q1 2011 where multiple books had been canceled. It followed the release of
Heroes of Shadow (April 2011) and
The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond (May 2011) when there was confusion on what the line looked like post-Essentials. There were several key differences in format and style between this book and the previous Essentials line: • "
Threats to Nentir Vale wasn't packaged in a box, but instead in a cardstock sleeve that was shrinkwrapped to keep everything inside." • "The book wasn't digest-sized (like the Essentials books). In fact, it wasn't hardcover either (like the core books). Instead
Threats to Nentir Vale was a softcover release, representing yet another format for a 4e line that was growing increasingly chaotic. (Its size and format actually matched the
Shadowfell books, but they were in a box.)" • "Though it's formatted just like
Monster Vault,
Threats to Nentir Vale is actually a
very different sort of
Monster Manual. That's because it mostly focuses on monstrous factions not individual monster types." • The die-cut sheets of tokens "revealed another minor change in formatting for the D&D 4e line: where the Essentials tokens were glossy, the
Threats to Nentir Vale tokens were matte-finished instead." ==Reception==