Slayer's Guide to Gnolls
The Slayer's Guide to Gnolls is the second product from d20 publisher Mongoose Publishing and the second in Mongoose's Slayer's Guides series. Each Slayer's Guide covers a monstrous race featured in the standard D&D set of creatures.
This book of the series covers gnolls. Gnolls are a race of hyena-headed humanoids in the D&D game, and are notworhty for their physical prowess, keen senses, and savagery.
A First Look
The Slayer's Guide to Gnolls (SGG) is a 32-page, full-size booklet. The cover is color and depicts an advancing gnoll against the backdrop of a village being sacked by gnolls.
The interior is black and white. The interior artwork is appropriate, but not necessarily keyed to depict the topic at hand. As with The Slayer's Guide to Hobgoblins (SGH), the most noteworthy interior artwork is that of Chris Quilliams; however, I found some of the art in the book quite unappealing, unlike in SGH.
As with the previous book, I do have some concerns about the use of space. The margins and the font size seem about average for the industry, and the inside covers are utilized. Yet header text was done in a very large font, and the paragraph spacing is rather wide on some pages.
Most surprising, however, is that the book dedicates a whole page to a copy of the d20 license. This is strange, as there is no requirement for d20 publishers to redistribute the d20 license with their products, only the Open Game License. I am uncertain whether they did this out of confusion over the requirements or to pad the book.
A Deeper Look
SGG leads off with an introduction, stating what the book, and the Slayer's Guides in general, are all about. The book aptly describes gnolls as "vicious scavengers."
The next section discusses the physiology of gnolls, which includes the physique of gnolls, their senses, and how they use them. The section also describes the diet, life cycle, and mindset of gnolls. The author describes gnolls as having a very impulsive yet cunning nature, thoroughly selfish yet having some capability to enter into short-lived alliances.
A section is devoted to the habitats of gnolls, including details on regions in which they commonly live and regions they avoid. This section also discusses the preferred lair of gnolls: underground burrows or stolen accommodations.
The gnoll society section is possibly the most interesting part of the book. It convincingly and creatively describes how malicious, chaotic creatures such as gnolls relate to one another and to other creatures. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to enslave other intelligent creatures to get some work out of them before consuming them. Slavery is a major bartering chip in the economy of gnolls.
The religion of gnolls is discussed in this section as well. Some attention is paid to how gnoll clerics fit in with gnoll society and discusses the scourge of gnoll druids.
The section entitled Methods of Warfare is a little weaker than the society section. Though their tactics are covered well enough, the exposition seems a little less creative and more hollow.
The next section covers roleplaying gnolls. It provides tips for how the GM can make the most out of an encounter with a race that is normally reserved for sword fodder. It does fairly well. While it does not explain how players can come to know these savages, it does give good advice on how to highlight their bestial nature and savage disposition during play. Unfortunately, I feel as if any attempt to truly create interesting gnoll NPCs will be hampered by the book's attitude on which classes gnolls should be allowed to take.
The next section, on scenario hooks and ideas, are much better than the dismal showing in SGH. Unlike that book, which leads off with simple ideas such as caravan raiders, SGG leads off with adventures such as one in which the players are expected to make a decision on how they should deal with a baby gnoll.
A section is devoted to playing gnolls as PCs. As with the SGH, this section assumes that a vast majority of gnoll PCs will be one of three classes: fighter, ranger, or cleric. Also like SGH, SGG deviates from the descriptions and abilities of gnolls in the core rules, and seems sort of fuzzy on how monster characters with multiple HD are handled. It mentions "starting characters at second level," yet the description never mentions such issues as treating the two levels as "monster levels" or which skills gnolls choose for those levels.
A few pages are dedicated to Edendale, a sacked village that now houses a gnoll lair. There are decent perspective maps and descriptions, which should be of some value for GMs in need of a quick encounter area involving gnolls.
The last section is a "gnoll reference list" containing stat blocks for a variety of common gnoll characters. Unfortunately, both these stat blocks and the one for the leader in the Edendale section are botched. The section on gnoll PCs had me wondering if the author understood the "monsters as characters rules"; this section convinced me that he did not. At a glance you can tell that the HD are not done correctly.
For example, the "gnoll pack leader" is a 6th-level gnoll ranger. The first problem I notice is that the gnoll has a hit dice rating of 7d8 14. I'm unsure how the author came up with that, but according to the MM and DMG, a gnoll with the pack leader's class, levels, and constitution score should have hit dice of 2d8 4 6d10 12. Even if I read in the section on PC gnolls that the author wanted to treat gnolls as 1 HD creatures, the gnoll should still have HD of 6d10 12. I see no reason whatsoever that the hit dice should be reduced to d8. A glance shows that the challenge rating is wrong, too. I have not done the math, but I would also wonder if the skills--done by someone with a slippery grasp of the "monsters as characters" rules--could be correct.
Conclusions
As a work of exposition on the culture of gnolls, I found that SGG does a much better job than SGH with hobgoblins. Unfortunately, while SGHtakes some liberties and breaks with conventions (ultimately forgivable), the SGGsimply botches the rules related material.
Another problem SGG shares with SGHis its reluctance to accept or examine the possibility of more than a few classes in the gnoll society. It does marginally better in that it takes a look at the gnoll druid, but it never bothers to touch on those gnoll barbarians, fighters, sorcerers, or wizards that the DMG tells us are out there somewhere.
Fortunately, the book is not all that expensive and is rather well laid out and attractive save for some substandard art. It is probably a marginally better buy than SGH. Its rules material is less functional, but the SGG's focus is an exposition on the race of concern, in which it outshines SGH.
-Alan D. Kohler
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