Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002

Most of the buzz around Mystic Eye Games which has come my way has focused on their Nightmares & books or the The Hunt: Rise of Evil campaign setting. Not very much attention, it seems, has turned to their modules – such as The Pit of Loch-Durnan, an adventure for characters of 2nd to 4th level.

And maybe there’s a good reason for: The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problems. But we’ll come back to that. First, let’s take a quick peek at the plot.

PLOT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for The Pit of Loch-Durnan. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

At first glance, The Pit of Loch-Durnan appears to be a pretty straight forward, clichéd fantasy adventure: The PCs are approached by two villagers, who tell them that the village mine has been infested by goblins. “Won’t you please come save us?” they beg. The PCs come to the village, clean out the mine, and there is much rejoicing.

But things are a little more complicated than that: In point of fact, the village mine is not just infested with goblins. It is also infested with a very powerful, imprisoned demon who is attempting to escape. The demon has enslaved the entire population of the village and the PCs are actually falling victim to an elaborate trap designed to bring them under the demon’s control.

Abandoned in the titular pit (the village’s mine), the PCs must fight their way past undead minions, defeat goblin slaves, destroy the demon’s crystal, escape into the mansion of the twin brothers responsible for freeing the demon, defeat the brothers, and free the village.

Fun stuff.

BAD STUFF

Those who have followed my reviews over the years know that they tend to follow a common pattern: A synopsis of the content, a review of the good stuff, a review of the bad stuff, and then a conclusion.

In this case, however, I’m going to break from tradition by discussing the bad stuff first. Because there’s a lot of it.

The biggest and most glaring problem is apparent the instant you open this book up: The layout is atrocious. The illustrations are god-awful. The entire product reeks of amateurism from one end to the other. Radically different fonts are rammed up against each other; bold, italic, and underline text is rampantly overused; paragraph spacing is inconsistent at best, illegible at worst; and on and on and on. The only point of solace in the entire sorry mess is the front cover: If the entire product has been as good as the cover illustration there would have been spontaneous dancing in the streets when this module was released. (I may be exaggerating slightly there.)

I playtested this module. Before I playtested it, though, I sat down and revised it. Extensively.

Now, generally, I’m pretty leery of reviews that talk about how the reviewer would have written a product (rather than actually dealing with the actual product). In this case, though, I think it’s the easiest way to demonstrate everything that’s wrong with The Pit of Loch-Durnan:

1. First off, I stripped out all the silly and oddly jarring names which have been given to the NPCs in this module. Gormon? Warphit? Sheepo the Goblin? Tippi the Ghoul? On the plus side, they’re pronounceable (unlike so many bad fantasy names). On the down side, I felt like I had been teleported into some sort of bizarre Sesame Street of Horrors.

2. I provided a logical reason for why the demon in the Pit would want to bring adventurers to the town. (The more powerful the people it enslaves, the more powerful it can become. Therefore, it wants people as powerful as possible – but not so powerful it thinks it can’t defeat them.) I also provided an explanation for enslaving the PCs that involves dumping them in a pit and giving them a mission to kill the goblins… who are also slaves of the demon.

3. I pumped up the elements of betrayal in the townsfolk. This is a nice theme (as I discussed above), but if you run the adventure as written the PCs will literally never, ever know that the whole mission is a sham until after they’ve destroyed the demon. As a result, there is no mystery or build to the adventure: Just a yawn-fest of a dungeon crawl cliché, followed by an incomprehensible attack by the townsfolk. I honestly don’t understand why Doug Herring and Andrew Thompson tossed aside one of the best elements of the adventure.

4. I did this by having the PCs get fed a sleeping poison during the night. There was always the chance that they wouldn’t be affected by the poison (in which case they would be lowered into the pit normally, but would not be raised back up again) – but if they were affected by the poison, the villagers would strip them of all their possessions before dumping them into the pit. This added a survival element to the module, which also helped strengthen the “kill all the goblins plot”.

5. Barlan’s back story was given a degree of credibility and self-consistency. In the module as written there is absolutely no explanation of how Barlan knows any of the information he gives to the PCs.

6. The goblins are given a reason for being in the Pit. For some reason, the authors neglect to explain why the goblins are there; how they got there; etc. There is some sense that they have also been enslaved by the demon, just like the townsfolk, but its not clear how that happened, why, or what purpose they serve in the dungeon.

7. The reaction tables needed some tidying up to make them practical/useful for the final confrontation with the demon crystal. The module also neglects to take into consideration what the villagers are going to do at the end of the scenario.

Those are the major highlights. Basically, the common theme here is simple: There’s a lot of raw material here, but it’s like unmolded clay… you’re going to have to work it if you expect to have anything resembling a sculpture at the end of the day.

GOOD STUFF

The good stuff here is the raw material itself:

1. The maps. The pit itself is well thought out, with some strong encounters. I would’ve liked to see the goblins be a little more proactive, but I have yet to see a module take the simple step of providing a comprehensive analysis of how an actual colony of intelligent humanoids would react to an assault by an adventuring party.

2. The basic concept. Villagers hiring PCs to save the village, only to have it revealed that the whole scenario (the most basic cliché of adventure gaming) is an elaborate trap designed to enslave the PCs to the will of a demon. It’s necessary to seriously beat the adventure into shape in order to bring this out, but it’s there.

3. The characters. There are some really strong NPCs here – both antagonists and victims. There is a scene towards the end of the module that’s a classic: The PCs have rescued a family of villagers who were taken prisoner after they proved resistant to the demon crystal. Their five year old son was tortured to death before their eyes. As the PCs work their way through the mansion, their son suddenly appears! …a decayed and rotting zombie. The PCs need to physically restrain the father from going to his son’s corpse (which will tear out his throat if given half a chance).

The Pit of Loch-Durnan needs a lot of spit and polish… and patching… and reconstructive surgery. But it’s worth it if you’re willing to put the work into it.

CONCLUSION

The Pit of Loch-Durnan has a lot of problem. A lot of problems. But it’s salvageable. And there’s enough material to chew on here that, if you’re willing to put a little elbow grease into it, this can be a highly entertaining module for you and your group.

That being said: There are definitely better D20 modules on the market right now. Personally, I’m happy with The Pit of Loch-Durnan in large part because it slotted very nicely into one of the D&D campaigns I’m currently running. Despite the massive amount of revision I needed to do, I felt I got a decent bang for my buck.

Could Mystic Eye Games have done better? Oh, God, yes. By the same token, however, there’s enough of merit here that I really hope that Mystic Eye Games does do better in the future – because it would be a shame to see the value of some of the raw material I see here go to waste.

Style: 2
Substance: 2

Authors: Doug Herring, Andrew Thompson
Company: Mystic Eye Games
Price: $11.95
ISBN: 0-9708265-1-6
Production Code: MYG0002
Pages: 72

Revisiting this review, I’m forced to conclude that my effort to explain the adventure’s many, many failures by explaining everything I changed in trying to fix them doesn’t seem to work. Feels like you need to have already read the adventure for my laundry list to mean anything.

What I remember about The Pit of Loch-Durnan is that it’s quite likely the worst published adventure I’ve ever run. The conflict is that — after writing up 35 pages of revisions to fix the thing — we had a really fantastic time playing the adventure at the table. The deconstruction of the standard dungeon is such a cool concept that, if you pull it off (in exactly the way the published adventure doesn’t), you’ll get a really memorable experience.

Oddly, the bit about the really great looking cover causing “dancing in the streets” was sort of prophetic: The first wave of reviews absolutely raved about this adventure. It was even nominated for the Best Adventure ENnie Award in 2001 (the first  year of the Ennies) — a decision which made it rather difficult for me to take the Ennies seriously for many years. This was really quite inexplicable, and later reviews (my own among them) have generally been more accurate in their assessment.

My review was also a huge “scandal” when it came out. A number of different free RPG review sites had popped up in the wake of RPGNet, and I decided to start cross-posting my reviews at multiple sites. This include ENWorld and a defunct site called d20reviews.com. The “problem” was that these different sites used different rubrics. I forget the details at this point, but whereas RPGNet used Style & Substance, for example, you might have another site using X out of 5 Stars and another that included scores for Playability, Mechanics, and Graphics, or whatever. In cross-posting the review, I would also rate it according to the local rubric. This caused consternation because if I gave it 2/5 + 2/5 at RPGNet, then why had I given it 1 out of 5 stars somewhere else? The argument was that this should be a simple mathematical conversion. My position was (and remains) that if you’re scoring for different things, you should not expect those scores to equal each other across multiple criteria.

What was really driving the “scandal” was that Mystic Eye Games was furious that I had attempted to “tank” their review scores. They started by contacting me privately and demanding that I remove the reviews, otherwise they wouldn’t send me review copies in the future. When I refused, they went public with the “math” to claim that I was biased. They were successful in creating a kerfluffle and making me waste a bunch of time responding to a lot of nonsense. (Wouldn’t be the last time.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

A great third-party Monster Manual for D20. Minions is a little pricy for its content, but the quality is high. Recommended.

Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002

CONTENT

Minions: The Fearsome Foes is a third-party monster manual from Bastion Press. It’s a softcover featuring full-color printing on glossy pages, and weighs in at 96 pages. It’s not entirely clear why the product is named Minions: There doesn’t seem to be any particular theme to the monsters found here. (In fact, the Puppetmaster is described as the “ultimate voice of evil in the multiverse” with the possible exception of “the deities themselves”… which would be the exact opposite of a minion in my book.)

GOOD STUFF

But whether the book is called Minions or Grandpa Fred’s Cookbook, it’s the content that matters, and that’s where Minions delivers: 92 monsters, including templates, are squeezed between the covers – and most of them are good. Very good. A few samples:

Amberjuron. An enigma of the forest. The amberjuron is indistinguishable from a snowy owl, save for the gleam of intelligence in its eye. Amberjurons live for a thousand years, and their insatiable curiousity and fascination leads them to acquire a wide range of rare knowledge and magic. They can serve as sources of information and rare items, but only if the PCs know how to approach them diplomatically.

Am-Ren. An am-ren is a demon which steals the names of its victims. Those who have their names stolen literally lose their identity.

Blessed Ring. A blessed ring is similar to the fairy rings of folklore: Simple rings of common toadstools found in the wilderness. With a twist: Those who lie within a blessed ring for five rounds will find themselves surrounded by an impenetrable dome. Those who are pure of heart may rest within the blessed ring for as long as they want, protected from threat by the powerful acidic attacks of the ring. Those who are evil, however, will be digested by the blessed ring.

Cacogen. Stealthy undead, crafted from the remains of lepers, hunchbacks, or other deformed humans. They are essentially undead assassins.

Ebant. A well-executed dark treant.

Hearth Horror. Why is the evil temple in the middle of the wilderness always being rebuilt? Possibly because the ruins have spawned a hearth horror: A powerful undead which compels its mortal servants into restoring its original form.

Mirror Fiend. A powerful golem which lives within (and can emerge from) a mirror. When it returns to its mirror it can regenerate from its wounds; but it can also be destroyed by destroying its mirror.

Quickener. A powerful CR 20 creature which absorbs every spell cast at it – enabling it to cast the same spells at its targets. Unpredictable, quick, and deadly, high-level characters will need to exercise their minds as well as their brawn if they expect to defeat a quickener.

Slather. A huge magical beast which disguises itself as the entrances to buildings, dungeons, etc. – swallowing any who pass through its “doors”.

Sync. I really like this race of humanoids. Syncs have featureless faces, but when they enter combat they slowly assume the features of their chosen target. As they do so they become more adept at adapting to their target’s tactics – they become faster, stronger, quicker. PCs who don’t destroy a sync quickly will rapidly find themselves completely outclassed. There is a quality of the doppleganger here, but the concept is very original and can serve to totally panic your PCs.

In general, Minions succeeds at giving you a wide range of high quality monsters. This isn’t just another rehash of concepts you’ve seen a thousand times before: There are some truly fresh, original ideas which will send you scrabbling to take notes for your next game session.

One particularly nice touch in Minions is the inclusion of a “Campaign” section with each monster entry. This entry gives you adventure seeds, campaign ideas, and other notes for incorporating the monster into your game in an effective, compelling fashion.

CRITIQUES

I think the first strike Minions has against it is the title: When I saw the book on the shelf of my local game store I assumed it was a generic NPC collection and passed it over with little more than a quick glance. This is compounded by the cover design, which seems to be place where Bastion Press has been consistently weak to date (although the forthcoming Oathbound looks like its going to completely reverse this trend).

In short, you’re likely to overlook or underestimate Minions at first glance. Don’t. This is a great product, which suffers from only a couple of flaws:

First, some of the creatures in Minions have been given rather cheesy names. For example, the cavernivore. What? Does it eat caverns? The cavernivore is actually a solid creature (just in need of a name change), but there are a couple of others that just left me scratching my head: The chortler, for example, is a hyena-like creature that attacks with a deadly cloud of dandruff.

That’s right. Dandruff.

Minions also features a few too many humanoids for my tastes. This is just my personal taste, though: There’s only so many “they’re just like goblins, but they have the head of a dog!” that I can squeeze into a campaign world before I begin feeling a little ridiculous. And even with my strong tastes in this matter, this is still little more than a quibble for me.

I would have also liked to see stronger art in Minions. I like being able to hold up a book like this, point to a picture, and say: “This is what you see.” There are less than a half dozen pictures in Minions that I would actually do that with. I do appreciate that every monster (with the exception of one) has a picture associated with it. And the illustrations do not actively detract from the book – they simply don’t add much to it.

CONCLUSION

The only reservation I have in recommending Minions is the price: $24.95 is a hard pill for me to swallow for a 96 page soft cover, even in full color. If this book was priced at $20, I wouldn’t hesitate to push you out the door on the way to the game store. At it is, you should give it a good solid ponder to make sure you have a good use for it before you pick it up. Things would probably be slightly different if the artwork were of a higher quality (which would help justify the full-color).

Nonetheless:

Minions gets the job done. There are a lot of really clever, compelling ideas here: Monsters that make you sit up and want to use them in a game. Monsters that will add freshness and variety to your campaign. Monsters that will send shivers of terror down the spines of your players (and their characters).

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Greg Dent (Lead Designer)
Publisher: Bastion Press, Inc.
Line: D20
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0-9714392-1-4
Product Code: BAS1000
Pages: 96

I got quite a bit of use out of Minions for a couple of years after writing this review, but then I took a short break from D&D and it fell out of the rotation.

A good monster manual, in my opinion, is one that you end up using at least a couple dozen monsters from. A great monster manual, on the other hand, is one that inspires you to create whole adventures. By that metric, Minions veers closer to greatness than not. Unfortunately for most people reading this, it’s never received an update for D&D 5E. (Fortunately for me, I still run D&D 3E campaigns.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

A manga that really didn’t manage to distinguish itself in my eyes.

Review Originally Published February 5th, 2002

WHAT IT IS

Bastard!! is a series of manga created by Kazushi Hagiwara and first published in Japan in 1988 in the pages of Shonen Jump. New episodes are still being published today, and over the years (as the success would imply) it has garnered a fervent fan base and continues to enjoy a high level of popularity.

In 2000, in Japan, Hagiwara began releasing the Bastard!! Complete Edition: This was a re-release of the original 1988 manga. Like the Special Edition of the Star Wars movies, this Complete Edition was retouched, redrawn, and variously improved. Viz Comics is now releasing this Complete Edition in an English translation (oddly credited as being translated by Kaori Kawakubo with an “English adaptation” by Fred Burke – I don’t know what that means).

The comic is subtitled (at least in English) as “Heavy Metal Dark Fantasy”. Based on this first issue, it’s a little difficult to see where either of those terms would apply: The general tone is more comical than dark; and Hagiwara’s Heavy Metal influence doesn’t seem to really enter the series until later based on what I’ve seen.

Basically, here’s the concept of the series: The legendary evil sorcerer Dark Schneider was imprisoned several years ago by the high priest of the kingdom of Metallicana. Dark Schneider’s personality was sealed away and his body transformed into that of a young boy named Lucien. The good priest then “adopted” Lucien, raising him as the younger brother of his own daughter, Tia Noto Yoko. Dark Schneider can only be released by a spell which requires, as catalyst, the kiss of virgin innocent. The high priest taught this spell to his daughter. It is known to no one else.

In the first issue, Metallicana is beset by an army led by an evil sorcerer. To save them from their peril, they are forced to call upon Dark Schneider. Dark Schneider, of course, is not only evil, he is also breathtakingly gorgeous – and Tia Noto Yoko is instantly attracted to him, despite the fact that’s he Pure Evil(TM). Of course, to add a little spice to the mix, every time she kisses him he transforms.

Much comedy ensues.

WHERE IT’S GOOD

Hagiwara is justly commended for the high quality of his artwork. Even in the more primitive forms and compositions present at this early stage of his career, it is easy to make out the seed of an immense talent. In addition to being simply gorgeous at many times, Hagiwara is also capable of simplifying his style and compositions when it serves the story and characters.

The other high point of Bastard!! for me was the humor. The tone is nicely set on page four, when the soldiers of Metallicana, standing before the oncoming horde, say: “Dammit! They’ve attacked when the king, imperial forces, and the priest are gone!”

What are the odds, right? That type of tongue-in-cheek satire is designed to warm the cockles of a fantasy fan’s heart. Hagiwara also gets some decent mileage out of the somewhat strange, mystically tainted love triangle of Tia, Lucien, and Dark Schneider.

WHERE IT’S NOT

Although one can make out the seed of Hagiwara’s talent, these early issues of Bastard!! still need a lot of work. The pacing is dizzying and inconsistent. Many of the compositions are too crowded. Some panels appear to have been simply rushed. In several instances Hagiwara simply drops the ball when it comes to telling the story he’s apparently trying to tell.

Nor is Hagiwara helped much by what I consider to be a sub-par translation. (Or, at least, I’m going to choose to blame it on the translator, rather than on Hagiwara.) All of the characters talk with the exact same voice. Most of the dialogue makes you simply want to wince. Worst of all, many things which you can see are meant to be jokes are translated so badly that the humor is lost. For example:

Tia Noto Yoko: I swear … you little ant! Don’t you have any feelings of frustration – of being pissed off, or of wanting to pulverize someone?! How can you be totally VOID of those kinds of emotions?

Lucien: Y-you’ve got more than enough for BOTH of us!

You can see the potential humor in those lines, but it’s lost because the translation of Tia’s dialogue doesn’t ring true. It’s like watching one of those bad sitcoms where you can tell the joke is being set up because all the characters have suddenly become mouthpieces of the writers.

Similarly, you have instances where the dialogue fails to rise to the dramatic quality of the action. Thus, not only do all the characters sound like each other, they sound the same regardless of whether they are having a quiet chat over breakfast or annihilating giants with mighty magicks.

A FEW CONCLUDING REMARKS

Having read Bastards!! from cover to cover, here’s my assessment: Slayers is better at RPG parody. Record of the Lodoss War is better at the RPG-inspired plot. Rumiko Takahashi is better at the bizarre love triangles complicated by strange magic.

Nor can I even say, based on this first issue, that Bastard!! earns the distinction of combining the three to any great effect. It doesn’t. Instead, Bastard!! simply seems to create an uninspiring mishmash.

I would suspect that I would enjoy this comic more if the translation were better at capturing character and conveying the humor. (There’s nothing more annoying to me than to read something and say to myself: “Wow, that would have been really funny if you’d just delivered the punch line correctly.) I also suspect I would enjoy Bastard!! more a year or two down the line – when Hagahashi’s talent has had a chance to mature.

Those of you who are big fans of Slayers, Record of the Lodoss War, or Rumiko Takahashi’s works might want to give this a shot, though: It would definitely be up you alley, and might appeal to you more than it did to me. I’ll probably be stopping back at this well from time to time myself to see if things have improved.

Style: 4
Substance: 2

Authors: Kazushi Hagiwara (Translated by Kaori Kawakubo; Adapted by Fred Burke)
Company: Viz Comics
Line: Viz Comics
Price: $3.95
Pages: 72

I received Bastard #1 as a review copy. I have absolutely no memory of how or why that happened. While I had some channels for receiving RPG review copies in 2002, I hadn’t done any work with comic books. (It’s possible this was somehow related to a letter I wrote that got published in a Punisher comic book several years earlier. My address had been published with the letter and several smaller companies sent me new comic books hoping that I would write back with letters they could use to fill their letters pages. I seemed to linger on some mailing lists for a while, but although I don’t remember the actual events, I don’t think that’s actually why I received Bastard.)

In any case, receiving a review copy it’s the only reason this review exists: This was still during the time when receiving review copies was such a novel experience for me that I felt honor-bound to review everything I received. For better or for worse, that’s not an ideal I can live up to any more: I’m simply too inundated with requests for reviews. When people ask if they can send me review copies, I tell them that the odds of getting an actual review from me are quite small. Even after getting the copy, the book has to intrigue me enough to read it cover-to-cover. Then, particularly if it’s a new game, it generally needs to be good enough to convince me to actually play it. And even then, it may still not get a review if I don’t have anything interesting to say about it.

The existence of review copies creates a surprising amount of distress for some people, which, to be perfectly frank, is mostly just amusing to professional reviewers, who know it’s  standard industry practice and always has been. “But you won’t review something honestly because then you won’t get more free stuff!” is a pretty common refrain, and there are some reviewers who think that way. But those reviewers don’t have integrity to begin with, so it doesn’t matter. The reality, particularly for professional reviewers, is — as I said — being inundated with more review copies than we know what to do with.

I do think it’s important to disclose when you’ve received a review copy. It’s an important facet in what brought you to the product. Something I try to be aware of is that receiving a book for free can have an impact on perceived value. This is also true of birthday presents, of course, but you subconsciously expect less from something that you got for free than you do for something you paid for.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Dream Pod 9 has established a reputation of visual excellence, and delivers it strongly with their line of poster-size blueprint files.

Review Originally Published February 5th, 2002

Dream Pod 9 has earned a reputation of high excellence across its three lines of games (Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, and Tribe 8 — and if you didn’t already know that, shame on you). One of the more innovative forms of supplementary product they’ve tapped in these product lines are the “blueprint files”.

Each of these files – including the Heavy Gear Blueprint File which is being reviewed here – comes packaged in an 8.5” x 11” white envelope. On the front of the envelope is the title and a sort of “table of contents” – which tells you that there are eight 19” x 15” (poster size) blueprints folded inside the envelope, and that these blueprints are of: A Hunter gear; a Jager gear; a Mammoth strider; a Vortex landship; a Khan landship; a CEF hovertank; and a Fury-class assault shuttle. In addition, each of the blueprints is presented in miniature on the cover – so if you have any question regarding what these blueprints look like, you can just take a quick peek at the cover and you’ll know.

Each blueprint comes with some background text on the design, plus various specifications and explanatory passages. They are elegantly suitable for either framing or for actual reference to the crafts in question.

The biggest drawback of the product can be summed up in a simple question: What the heck do you do with it?

Well, like I said, these blueprints are great display pieces: Frame ‘em, tack ‘em up, whatever. If you’re a gearhead like me, your favorite might find a place in your office. Even if you’re not, then you may find displaying them on the walls of your game room will help add ambience and atmosphere to your Heavy Gear campaign.

Speaking of gaming, these blueprints can also come in handy as props and hand-outs. This is particularly true if your adventures are based off of a landship – in which case the landship blueprints can become primary reference points for the campaign.

Other than that, though, I’m not really sure. I, personally, find them cool. Of course, I own a Heavy Gear keychain… judge me if you must.

In short: Take a look at the cover in the store. If it looks like the type of product you’re going to get some use out of, pick it up. If not, don’t. You’re not going to be missing anything.

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Price: $9.95
Product Code: DP9-058
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

The Heavy Gear keychain was solid metal and really cool. I used it for years and years until it broke. Afterwards, I kept it in one drawer or another for several years, but it appears to have wandered away at some point. I’d forgotten all about it, until rereading this review unlocked a core memory.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

In a word: Excellent. Easily one of the Top 10 D20 supplements released to date.

Review Originally Published October 13th, 2001

Let’s face it: When we look at the shelf in our game shop and see yet another D20 monster manual variant, our eyes begin to glaze over. “For the love of God,” we think, “How many cheesy fantasy monsters can these people crank out? Oh, look! It’s a geezlehopper. It just like an orc, except it’s neon pink! Ooooo! Wow!”

We’ve so thoroughly “been there, done that” that it makes the endless Energizer Bunny commercials look fresh and innovative. (Do you realize that there are children in sixth grade who have never seen the original Energizer Bunny commercials? One is forced to wonder what, exactly, they think of this inexplicable pink bunny – who, as far as they can tell, has always starred in some of the worst commercials imaginable. But I digress.)

That’s why I’m writing this review: To send up a bright signal beacon to the gaming world at large, while jumping up and down and screaming:

HEY! OVER HERE! THERE’S AN INCREDIBLY AMAZING, HIGH QUALITY CREATURE CATALOG OVER HERE!

It’s called Legions of Hell, and it’s published by Green Ronin (famed in the D20 market for their Freeport modules).

THE LEGIONS OF HELL

As the title should suggest, Legions of Hell delves deeply into the nine circles of the Pit, exploring the servants of Asmodeus, the King of Hell. The core of the book consists of roughly forty-five monster entries, detailing a wide-range of hellish creatures.

At one end of the scale, Legions of Hell contains the foot soldiers of hell: The Akop (an entire race tricked into servitude and transformed into shadows); the Bonedreg (constructs created by the Leviathan from the remains of his victims he is unable to digest); the Chamagon (gaunt, quick-footed infiltrators and magical saboteurs); the Darksphinx (corrupted gynosphinxes); the Distender (foul devils with the appearance of a bloated stomach, capable of attacking using the four classic humors); the Faceless (assassins who signal their success by wearing the face of their latest victim as their own); the Hellwardens (living scarecrows who act as guardians); the Spinders (monstrous-sized creatures who travel in swarm – a bane even to the devils of hell); the Soulsniffer (creatures capable of tracking escaped souls across the planes); and many others.

At the other end of the scale, Legions of Hell also presents a variety of unique creatures – primarily various Princes and Dukes of Hell. These include such notables as Balan, Master of the Infernal Hunt; Furcas, Duke of Rhetoric; Hadriel, Duchess of Domination; Iblis, Duke of Pride (a Fallen Solar); the Lich Fiend; Krotep, Pharoh of Axor and Nekhet, Prophet of Set (who believe themselves to be the son and daughter of Set); and others.

In addition to this core of material, Legions of Hell presents a number of prestige classes designed for the servants of Hell; templates for Fallen Celestials; information regarding the Angelic Choirs; and an overview of Hell itself.

STRENGTHS

Legions of Hell distinguishes itself in a number of ways:

1. There is a lot of material crammed into it. Not only does it present a plethora of material which can be put to immediate use, every page seems to have some new idea or adventure seed waiting for exploration.

2. Chris Pramas, the chief author of Legions of Hell, was also the author of Guide to Hell, the definitive AD&D reference for the infernal plane. (He is also known for the Origins Award-winning Death in Freeport.) He puts this experience to good use, exploring the complete spectrum of Hell – rather than just focusing on one or two features. Legions of Hell is made notable because it isn’t the same old stuff we’ve seen before – a lot of creativity and research has gone into making this product distinct and valuable.

3. The artwork is simply stunning. It includes work by Brom, Sam Wood, Raven Mimura, and Toren Atkinson (those of you who keep an eye on artist credits in this industry should recognize all of those names). There is, literally, not a single weak piece of art in the entire book.

WEAKNESSES

So, moving onto an actual weakness of Legions of Hell…

Oh, wait. That’s right. It doesn’t have any weaknesses.

CONCLUSION

Legions of Hell is just plain good. It’s subject matter is rich; the ideas it brings to the table are original and creative; the development of those ideas is solid and imminently useful; the lay-out and production values are exemplary.

There is, literally, nothing negative that I can say about this product. If you have even the slightest interest in having a demonic presence in your D20 campaign, this product is absolutely essential.

In short: You will never regret the money you spend on Legions of Hell. There can be no higher recommendation.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Chris Pramas (with Jim Bishop, Brian Kirby, and Erik Mona)
Publisher: Green Ronin Publishing
Line: D20
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 0-9701048-4-7
Product Code: GRR1005
Pages: 64

The Book of Fiends series was completed, then revised into a single hardback collection for D&D 3.5 and then again for D&D 5E. I’ve never stopped singing its praises. It greatly enhanced the Avernus Remix. I used it extensively for my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, from whence its influence can be easily seen in the Chaos Lorebooks series. I’ve adapted its monsters to Mothership, Numenera, and other systems.

If you asked me what my favorite RPG bestiary of all time was, it would be a toss-up between The Book of Fiends and the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual.

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