The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Diablo II: To Hell and Back

Diablo II: To Hell and Back is the second of two gaming supplements published by Wizards of the Coast that hopes to bring the world of Diablo II, Blizzard's gloriously detailed computer game of gratuitous demon bashing, to the Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition game. The first book Diablo II: Diablerie, is aimed primarily at players and details character classes, abilities, spells, magic items, and monsters of the Diablo world. This book, more targeted at the DM, contains creatures as well as maps, random encounter tables, and guidelines that recreate the four acts of the Diablo II computer game.

Graphical Presentation and Format

Diablo II: To Hell and Back is a 192 page softcover book, double the length of it's companion volume. Like Diablo II: Diablerie, Diablo II: To Hell and Back has a black cover with artwork by rk post. However, this time the book depicts monsters from the game vice characters from the game. The interior is black and white, with art by rk post, Pete Venters, and David Roach. A lot of the art is appeared previously in Diablo II: Diablerie (not to mention the 2nd edition Diablo supplement, Diablo II: The Awakening.)

The book makes good use of space, though not as good as Diablo II: Diablerie did. It has slender margins and a mid-size readable font. Adventure text to be read to players are in shaded gray boxes. The book has no extraneous bits like gaudy margin artwork, though it does offset some material in shaded boxes resembling frayed paper. Unlike Diablerie, there is more gratuitous whitespace in the creature appendix, and some artwork that is a little larger than it needs to be.

The maps in the book are clear and readable, with a sizable key in the appendix.

The book is priced at 29.95 US. The book is rather large for a D&D supplement, but some people will still be put off by paying that much for a supplement.

Contents

The book has an introductory section on running adventures and explaining the backstory of the game, 4 chapters detailing the actual adventure material associated with the 4 regions of the game, and appendices detailing the monsters of the game, encounter tables associated with the different areas, notes on using and modifying encounters.

Introduction

The introduction is a bit longer in this book than in the companion book. It has a somewhat less brief summary of the backstory of the Diablo world than Diablo II: Diablerie does. In short, some princes of hell have decided that mortals are a powerful resource, and by incorporating the mortal realm into hell, they can gain the upper hand against the forces of light.

The introduction also explains a couple of basic concepts about running adventures in the Diablo setting. The first thing you'll notice is that the book doesn't give you everything. You are expected to draw your own wilderness maps. The book tells you the basics of how to draw your own wilderness areas and populate them with monsters in the Diablo spirit.

The section discusses a number of variations in the rules that you can use to make the game feel more like the computer game. This includes things like spawning new monsters in unattended areas, monsters forming trains, limited visibility, and so on.

The Four Acts

(Warning: minor spoilers ahead. Enter at your own risk...)

Over one half of the book is dedicated to the adventure material detailing the four acts of the Diablo II computer game in D&D terms. For those not familiar with the Diable II computer game, the basic plotline of the acts is as follows:

Act I: Act one finds the characters at an encampment populated by the rogues, an order of female warrior/rogue types proficient in ranged weapons. In addition to dealing with minor threats in the area, the players will eventually be asked to defeat the demoness that has taken over the monastery that formerly belonged to the rogues, and now blocks the pathway to the east, where the demon Diablo was said to have fleed after the events of the first Diablo computer game transpired. The characters also have to rescue Deckard Cain, a kindly sage/advisor who accompanies the players to every base camp they visit through the rest of the game.

Act II: Act II finds the the characters in Lut Gholein, a city with a somewhat Arabic feel amidst a land of dry valleys. Most adventures have the PCs exploring ancient tombs filled with mummies and snake-like creatures. The primary objective during this segment of the campaign is to assemble the peices of an ancient staff which will open the way to the tomb of Tal Rasha, where one of Diablo's companions, Baal, was entombed. The must defeat another nasty demon, Duriel, to find their way into the tomb and free the angel Tyriel.

Act III: Continuing their pursuit of Diablo, the characters travel to Kurast, a town near an evil infested jungle. After a few side quests, the party must find the ruins of old Kurast, and defeat yet another demon, and pursue Diablo into hell itself.

Act IV: This act begins in a Pandeomonium Fortress, a base camp a short walk from hell itself. After a few side quests, the PCs must go into the heart of hell and confront Diablo himself.

The adventures boast a few "surprises" that weren't in the Diablo II computer game to throw veterans of the game off. Unfortunately, very little of these variations are in a form that strive to go beyond the basic monster bashing recipe of the computer game. The book also provides for little in the way of deeper NPC interactions as written than the computer game does.

The book provides a lot of maps, but not nearly all you will need if you are running the totality of the four acts. It does provide maps for some key encounter areas, and instructions for what the rest of the maps should be like. In addition, except for a number of fixed encounters, the dungeons are not populated and provided with completed stat blocks. However, the way the book operates, you tweak the random encounters (or underlings for fixed encounters) according to the party's levels.

Appendix A: Monster Compendium

This is where the a lot of the books more valuable material lies. The appendix describes every non-unique creature type in the Diablo II game (I checked.) For those not familiar with the game, this includes many types of undead, creatures corrupted by the agencies of hell (such as spear and bow wielding corrupt rogues, the lightining breathing reptilian tainted, and the catlike panther women), and demons from hell (such as the goblin-like fallen ones, the brutal goatmen, and the balrog type megademons.) This is not quite so much value if you consider that many of these creatures also appeared in Diablo II: Diablerie.

Unlike that book, however, this book doesn't make the mistake of dismissing advancement options. For most creatures not given the "By character class" option for advancement, the creature may advance up to double the base creature's hit dice and remain the same size category as the base creature, or be up to triple the base creature's hit dice and be one size larger. Material regarding modifying monster stats for such creatures are collected and condensed from the D&D 3e Monster Manual. Also, a table for giving unique creatures special powers (as they have in the computer game) is provided.

Despite the overall improvement of the treatment of creatures over the Diablerie book, there are some annoying glitches in the creature statistics. Normally I have to watch the independent D20 vendors for this sort of thing, but this book shows that Wizards of the Coast are not immune. Take the panther woman, for example. Despite not having weapon finesse, it appears that all panther women have melee attack bonuses based on their dexterity. Further, the hell cat subtype of panther woman has 3 attacks, despite the fact it only has sufficient base attack bonus for two attacks. This may be a minor annoyance, but I consider a supplement's resource value impugned if it doesn't conform to the game's own rules.

The final annoyance in the creatures section becomes noticable if you also own Diablerie. Except for the undead horror, none of the creatures that weren't also in Diablerie have illustrations. And the undead horror's illustration was in Diablo II: The Awakening, the AD&D 2nd edition book for Diablo II.

Summary and Conclusions

There is a lot of usable material here: a lot of maps and adventures and a lot of creatures, the latter marred slightly by the fact that the creature selection overlaps with that in Diablo II: Diablerie. The price tag is still pretty hefty, and beyond raw source material there is little in the way of fresh and exciting adventure and setting ideas being explored here. There isn't quite the magnitude of value for DMs who intend to lift material out of the book and put it in their own campaigns as the Diablerie book provides.

Of course this book will be a shoo-in for foaming at the mouth Diablo II fans who also play D&D -- or who want to. However, a good niche for this product is as an introductory training campaign for new DMs. It provides a basic outline for the campaign and adventure ideas, but provides the up and coming DM with basic mapping and encounter writing tasks that can form the basis of adventure writing skills.

The only drawback to this use is that the book is perhaps too focused on the monster bashing aspect of the game, when there is so much more to D&D. Sure, there's not a whole lot more to Diablo II, but it seems to me that if the only thing you are getting out of the game is stuff you could get out of Diablo II, then well you should just play Diablo II.

If you do play Diablo II, take a look at the instruction manual page 40, where the background of the necromancers are described. Reading through that (and other similar passages), it seems like there is some wonderful potential in the Diablo II setting for rich, well developed background, and along with touching on deeper roleplaying and problem solving aspects than the computer game can realize.

Ratings

(See below for a guideline)

Idea value: 2. Could have explored deeper aspects of the Diablo II setting but didn't.
Resource value: 4. Lots of maps and creatures. Might bump it down a notch if you already have Diablerie. Which is you are in the market for this book, you probably do.
Value for money: 2. 30 dollars. Ouch.
RPGnet substance rating: 3. Barely.
RPGnet style rating: 3. Nice rk post artwork, but nothing as mood setting as (say) the art in the psionics handbook. Pretty straightforward supplement fare.

How I rate D20 System adventures (standard blurb)

As far as I am concerned, canned adventures provide two primary points of value: ideas (adventure premises, interesting challenges, etc.) and ready to run game material (maps, useful and properly done encounter statistics, new creatures and items). The obvious third criteria is overall value for money, which includes page count for a given cost and use of space.

I use these three factors to holistically determine what "substance" rating I’ll give the item on RPGnet. This is separate from the style consideration, which I use as stated on RPGnet.

Alan D. Kohler