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This is a nice soft cover, perfect bound collection of mostly OGL and a couple 4E baddies. Each entry comes with a hearty helping of "fluff," in the form of background, lore, physiology, society, and then something specific to the monster. For the centaur this was equipment and medicine. For cloakers, it was psychology. For the maened, this was religion and the derro gave us a very cool set of incantations to play with later. The text is decently edited, and reads well enough that you forget this is a book with ten different contributors, rather than the work of one author. Don't be fooled, though, as this has material from many well established designers like Wolfgang Baur, Dragon Magazine veteran Paul Leach, Nicolas Logue, and Richard Pett-- as well as RPG Superstar contestants Matthew Banach, Ross Byers and Clinton Boomer.

Then there's all that delicious crunch to go along with it. We get feats, crafts, poisons, and of course, with every entry, a fleshed out stat block of an example monster that puts the material through its paces. Nick Logue's barghest would make a good reoccuring lieutenant or low/mid-level primary villain full of vicious potential. Ross Byer's golem would be a very novel mentor or good-aligned NPC. Richard Pett provides all of the tools necessary to create a great story arc focused on the liches and does so with his trademark vivid prose. Scott Gable's offering is robust enough that an entire campaign could be based around the phantom fungus, creating a very solid cthulhu-esque theme that is expectation-exceedingly creepy. In my opinion, it's the sleeper gem of the whole book and turns an easily discarded monster into adventure-designing gold. (because, really, can you ever have enough Lovecraft?)

It's great to have all the material from nearly three years worth of magazines compiled into single book that's far more durable, transportable and easier to find than the early print issues of Kobold Quarterly. The two new entries-- the half-giant and the retreiver are excellent additions, providing an OGL take on a closed content race and putting an interesting spin on a monster that never quite got the proper transition from its Planescape roots while giving us a look at Clinton' Boomer's writing chops in a non-Paizo venue.

My only complaint about this book has to do with some of the artwork. Many of the primary pieces for the entries were either in color in the original publications, or slightly smaller. Now the pieces are either too dark because the original color image was simply printed in black and white, or slightly pixellated. Both issues are frustrating, because I know the art looks good on the original PDFs, and probably in the PDF of this book, but it's not done justice in the printed book. I know there are difficult choices to be made for small press print runs, but I think that the images should have been converted to more legible black and white before the print run. There is a link to the color print copy in here, and it's more expensive than the PDF and the B&W copy combined!

Overall, I'd recommend Ecologies, but mostly for the OGL GM looking to supplement the depth to his monsters and those 4E Dungeon Masters who don't mind doing their own conversion work. It's a tough sell for the time-pressed 4E crowd with only two entries-- they might be better served purchasing pdfs of KQ7&9. For the OGL crowd, this is definitely a nice purchase, giving you some great twists on known creatures, plenty of time-saving stat blocks, and a wheelbarrow full of good story hooks and mechanical crunch.