A very crunchy, very useful supplement for D20. Like, Minions, Arms & Armor suffers from a price tag just a little too high for its content.

Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002

CONTENT

Arms & Armor is Bastion Press’ second D20 supplement. Like Minions, Bastion’s first offering, Arms & Armor is a 96-page soft-cover book featuring full-color printing on glossy pages. As the title would suggest, it focuses on weapons and armor: Simple, martial, exotic, magical, and more. There is also a short section on martial constructs: Golems and other constructs which are, essentially, forms of weapon and armor which “wield themselves” in one way or another.

GOOD STUFF

Arms & Armor is very, very crunchy, delivering exactly what it promises.

Weapons: Somewhere in the ballpark of 125 new weapons are introduced here – ranging from the mundane (claymore) to the unusual (combat hook) to the foreign (cicada wing sword) to the practical (brass knuckles) to the exotic (double-bladed sword). Combine that with roughly 70 new properties for magical weapons (my favorites are alterable weapons and pivoting arrows), roughly 50 new magical weapons (including class weapons and artifacts – my favorites are the silent dagger, which projects a 5-ft. field of silence around itself, and the arrow of seeing, which allows the user to see everything around the location where the arrow lands), and new rules and options for intelligent weapons.

Armor: Roughly 60 new types of armor are described here, approximately 70 new magical armor qualities, along with new extras and accessories for armor. Several dozen suits of magical armor are discussed, including class-based armor. Optional rules for armor (including the first published 3E system for armor as damage reduction) are also given. My favorites in this section include bone mail (chain mail made from bone), daggered plate (with daggers concealed as armor decoration), quick don armor (which cuts down the amount of time necessary to don the armor), phoenix armor (which will resurrect a character who dies in the armor once, destroying the armor in the process), and healing armor (which can be used to heal the character wearing it).

Other Stuff: Arms & Armor also includes rules for cleric domain rods, arcane school staves, racial masks, and martial constructs. The domain rods, school staves, and racial masks are all very useful. Martial constructs include amulet servitors (golems which collapse into small amulets of tightly wound metal when not in use), golem armor (your armor is alive), and the silver steeds (magical mounts). Several types of new material for weapon and armor construction are also covered.

Arms & Armor also manages to largely avoid a common pitfall of products like this: Weapons and armor so incredibly goofy that they make you want to burst out laughing. There are still some things which will likely make you wince (particularly if you value a high degree of realism in the non-magical weapons of your world), but nothing incredibly bizarre. And even if you really dislike the bizarre and exotic weapons of 3rd Edition, there’s more than enough here that you’ll happily be able to incorporate into your campaign.

BAD STUFF

I don’t like Todd Morasch’s artwork. I commented on this in my review of Minions, as well (Morasch serves as Lead Artist and Art Director on both books): It’s not that he does bad work. But he doesn’t do exceptional work, either. The term “mediocre” fits his work perfectly, I’m afraid.

Of course, that’s just my opinion: Feel free to glance through the book and form your own opinion. However, his work in Arms & Armor is objectively flawed insofar as his artwork just plain fails to match the text. For example, on the very first page of weapon descriptions he manages to draw the chained axe (described as “a double-bladed axe-head attached to a haft by a length of chain”) without a haft. His illustration of the basket-hilted broadsword, described on the same page, not only fails to possess a basket hilt, but appears to possess a double-blade for some unfathomable reason. And so forth.

It’s also regrettable that, despite space on the page, the decision was made to not illustrate all of the weapons described in the book. Almost all of the armor is also devoid of illustration.

In terms of design, I haven’t spotted anything horribly unbalancing after reading the book through and playtesting as many of the items as possible. There are, however, a couple of designs which will leave you scratching your head. For example, the axe-hammer is described like this:

An exotic weapon, the axe-hammer is a long hafted weapon with an axe blade on one side of the head and a blunt hammer on the other. Due to the strange balance of the weapon, axe or hammer wielders cannot use it proficiently; special training is required.

Which is all well and good. But the axe-hammer is statted up as a double weapon. Which doesn’t make sense. If there was an axe head on one end of the haft and a hammer head on the other, sure – that’s a double weapon. But as it stands, an axe-hammer should no more be a double weapon than a greataxe.

CONCLUSION

The only reservation I have in recommending Arms & Armor is the same reservation I had for Minions: The price. At $20 this would be a book which I would happily hype as perfect for every DM’s game shelf. At $24.95, however, I get a little bit choosier about 96 page sourcebooks.

My own mileage:

At the moment I am working on redesigning and repopulating the lower levels of Khundrukar (a dwarven city which serves as the setting for WotC’s Forge of Fury Adventure Path module). As a result, I’m looking for all sorts of nifty and unusual weapons to strew around the dungeon as treasure and/or set dressing. Thus, Arms & Armor is absolutely perfect.

So if you have a niche like this in your game you’re trying to fill, then Arms & Armor is going to fill it very well.

On the other hand, if you don’t have such a niche for the book (if it’s something you’d only dip into sparingly once or twice over the next few years, rather than seeing constant usage), then Arms & Armor will probably prove a little too pricey for you.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Greg Dent (Lead Designer)
Publisher: Bastion Press, Inc.
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0-9714392-2-2
Product Code: BAS1001
Pages: 96

Bastion Press’ D20 System supplements were mechanically sloppy and often ugly, but as a GM I got an incredible amount of value out of them. They were often the first thing I would reach for when looking to add either depth or a touch of the exotic to an adventure. I believe this is the last of their books that I wrote a review for, but their entire product line still sits on my gaming shelf.

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

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.

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.

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

As part of my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, I’ve developed a number of chaos lorebooks, some of which have featured in various Ptolus Remixes and others have appeared in the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign journal. They’re based around a network of chaos cults — an extensive node-based campaign campaign which incorporated adventures from Monte Cook’s Night of Dissolution along with almost two dozen original scenarios. These lorebooks delve deep into:

• chaos cults
• chaositech
• the demon court
• servitors of the Galchutt
• the elder brood
• the cults’ plans for the Night of Dissolution

The time has come to present the full collection, so that they can be used in your own campaigns and/or used as examples of how you can create your own lorebooks. I’m presenting them here exactly as they were written for my personal Ptolus campaign. This is important because I placed the city of Ptolus into my own campaign world and adapted its mythology. Notably, the Galchutt of Ptolus were integrated into the wider mythos of my Demon Court. If you use these chaos lorebooks in a standard Ptolus campaign, then you will find these lorebooks filled with many strange and apocryphal references… but perhaps that’s appropriate for chaos gods.

DISTRIBUTING CHAOS LOREBOOKS

For a detailed description of how and why I create lorebook handouts, check out Using Lorebooks. Lorebooks are one of my “secret weapons” as a GM, and I use them pretty extensively in my games.  They can be prep intensive — although the technique is designed to minimize that as much as possible — but have a huge payoff at the table. As a result, in most of my games they tend to be relatively rare drops

But not always. In my Eternal Lies Remix I designed three huge lorebook dumps, each presented as a list of titles that the players could read by investing significant in-game time. This evoked the experience of actually researching in a library, with the players exploring the lorebooks via topic and cross-reference based on the needs of their current investigation. For the chaos lorebooks, on the other hand, I decided to scatter them throughout the chaos cults so that the players could discover them slowly over time, piecing together their understanding of the cults and the dark gods they worshiped.

The nice thing about lorebooks like this is that multiple copies exist: If the PCs miss the book in one location, they can still find a different copy in another location. Following something akin to the Three Clue Rule, therefore, I created a spreadsheet with a list of chaos lorebooks cross-referenced to the various scenarios I had planned for this section of the campaign. Then I simply charted where each lorebook could be found. My design philosophy here was:

• The chaos lorebooks should be spread around, without any scenario (except the big finale) including more than four or five at most.
• No two locations should have an identical set of lorebooks. This meant that, while the PCs would almost certainly find duplicate lorebooks over time, in any given scenario they were likely to find new lorebooks they hadn’t encountered yet (no matter what path they charted through the node-linked cults).

The Book of Faceless Hate serves as a kind of introductory text, although it’s not strictly necessary for it to be the first to fall in to the PCs’ hands. The other thing they received in the introductory cult scenario was the Cult Diagram, as seen above: Sketched as a mural on the wall, this diagram showed the icons of various cults while, importantly, not giving their names. This diagram served as a kind of checklist, cross-referenced to holy symbols and lorebooks as the PCs work to identify and locate each of the cults.

The original Night of Dissolution adventure included The Book of Faceless Hater, but presented it as a far more encyclopedic resource — a one-stop shop of all chaos cult lore. Because I had expanded the scope of the chaos cults — from four adventures to a couple dozen — I wanted to pace these revelations instead of presenting them as a single exposition dump: What were the chaos cults really doing? How many cults were working together? What was the true nature and secret history of the “gods” they worshiped?

I’ve organized the various chaos lorebooks into four categories:

• Chaos Cults, which describe various chaos cults (including some cults who were not actually part of the campaign; creating both the sense of a wider world and a sense of doubt about the exact scope of the cults’ activities in Ptolus).
• The Demon Court, detailing the various chaos gods.
• Servitors of the Demon Court, powerful servitors of the Demon Court.
• Book of the Elder Brood, describing the lesser demonic servants of the Demon Cult. Many become tools of the cults

I expanded the ranks of all these — cults, gods, servitors, and brood — so if you’re familiar with Ptolus, don’t be surprised to see a few unfamiliar names below.

CHAOS CULTS

The Book of Faceless Hate
Book of Venom’s Truth
Truth of the Hidden God
The Masks of Death
Touch of the Ebon Hand
Eschatonic Visions (Tolling Bell)
Whispers of the Beast
Song of Chaos
Words of the Plague
The Scarlet Oath
The Worm of the Void
Oath of the Divided Eye

THE DEMON COURT

Lore of the Demon Court
The Source of All Filth (Abhoth)
Eyes of Legion (Bhor Kei)
Mouth of the Void (Dhar Rhyth)
The Shapeless Codex (Jubilex)
The Writhing Obelisk (Kihomenethoth)
The Shepherd of Malignancy (Merihim)
The Beast Without Shadow (Ravvan)
The Shadow That Never Passes (Shallamoth Kindred)
The Hand of Gellasatrac

SERVITORS OF THE DEMON COURT

The Assassins of Chaos (Carach)
The Earthbound Demons (Rhodintor)
The Magi of Chaos (Shaddom)
The Grey Veiled (Vreeth)
The Bloated Lords (Zaug)

BOOK OF THE ELDER BROOD

Book of the Elder Brood – Akop
Book of the Elder Brood – Bulugon
Book of the Elder Brood – Essyat
Book of the Elder Brood – Gadacro
Book of the Elder Brood – Marbassik Spawn
Book of the Elder Brood – Nintha
Book of the Elder Brood – Nyogoth
Book of the Elder Brood – Obaan
Book of the Elder Brood – Solesik
Book of the Elder Brood – Sscreeth
Book of the Elder Brood – Tesk
Book of the Elder Brood – Tilaxic