Jade Dragons and Hungry Ghosts
If you keep your ear to the winds of gaming news on the internet, then by now you have probably heard something about this book already. Oriental Adventures author James Wyatt reviewed it on his site, and DMG author Monte Cook pretty much blasted it in a review on his website. You've heard tales of giant babies and wasted space.
Well, any diagnosis deserves a second opinion, doesn't it? After all, how could Chris Pramas and Green Ronin, who brought us the widely praised Legions of Hell, go wrong? Let's give this one a second muster, shall we?
Jade Dragons and Hungry Ghosts is the second monster book by Green Ronin, following their popular Legions of Hell book. Jade Dragons & Hungry Ghosts' theme is creatures appropriate to an East Asian style setting. Its release was timed to follow closely that of Wizards of the Coast's Oriental Adventures book. Though d20 publishers are not allowed to use material in WotC supplements that have not been added to the SRD, the hope that it will sell to those using the OA book is obviously there.
Contributing authors include such industry names as Chris Pramas, Eric Mona, Wolfgang Baur, and Dave "Zeb" Cook.
A First Look
Jade Dragons and Hungry Ghosts is a soft-cover, perfect-bound book. The color cover, by rk post, depicts a creature (a Shiko Me, an outsider described in this book) wearing a ceramic mask against the backdrop of Asian appearing structures and a gray sky. The interior is black and white and fully illustrated. The book boasts the talents of a number of well known artists in the game trade: rk post, Quinton Hoover, Michael Phillipi, Tony DiTerlizzi, and Toren "MacBin" Atkinson. As one would suspect, the interior art is top-caliber.
The book is arranged such that each creature begins on a new page. In some cases, this generates a little white space on pages where the entry ends early; however, Green Ronin fills much of the space with art and flavor text. This is nowhere near as egregious as Monte Cook made it out to be in his notorious review, and it does make for an easily readable layout. Further, the book uses a font size and line spacing that keeps the overall text density fairly high.
The price is $14.95 for a 64-page book.
A Deeper Look
The first pleasant surprise to me as I was reading the book was the table of contents. The table of content has a column describing which countries' myths the creature in question spring from. Creatures herein are taken from myths of Japan, China, Burma, Vietnam, and Malaysia. I consider this a massive improvement from the attitude taken by James Wyatt in the writing of Oriental Adventures that the source of a legend is unimportant. Much like Oriental Adventures, however, the bulk of the material is drawn from Japanese myth & legend. Some of the creatures are new and not drawn from any specific nation's folklore.
There are 64 monsters and one template in the book, ranging in CR from 1 to "no hope" (I'll get to that in a minute). Most of them are in the CR 1 to 5 range, and many of them are suitable for or assumed to have character classes.
The monsters vary in quality. Most are beautifully illustrated and most have concepts that sound like they would make a good encounter in an Oriental Adventures campaign. Yet the creature concepts do not sound like they would lend themselves to quite the level of extrapolation into full-blown adventures and campaigns that you might get from those in Green Ronin's Legions of Hell.
As this is a d20 product, the book was written without the luxury of being able to refer directly to Oriental Adventures. In some places it does things such as refer to a samurai class without ever telling where to look for such a class. In other places, you will obviously have to use your own judgment on how to apply Oriental Adventures, but in some cases it is fairly apparent. For example, many creatures would properly use the spirit subtype, and in many cases creatures are described as "spirits" in the descriptive text, which should make that task fairly easy. There are other apparent openings as well, such as replacing the honor / dishonor oriented spells for alignment spells such as protection from evil. For another example, see the description of the Shiko Me below.
Rule compliance seems to be an ever-present stumbling block for d20 publishers when it comes to designing d20 creatures, and this book is no exception. Some authors did an outstanding job. Pramas (who already has a list of d20 accolades under his belt) and Mona (who is still on staff with WotC) seem to have the most rigorously compliant creatures. Yet these two probably should have played a stronger role as rules compliance editors of the creatures by the other authors, as many creatures have rules issues (see below for some examples). The most common error seems to be arbitrary or unjustified allotment of skill points.
As the saying goes, "don't tell, show." With that and mind, lets take a look at some creatures in the book as examples of the good and bad:
Bamboo Elves (and Giant Pandas): This is one of those creatures "not drawn from Asian myths," elves that dwell in the bamboo thickets and ride giant pandas. On a superficial level the concept seems okay, an attempt to fit the D&D notion of the nature-loving elf to an Asian style setting. When I visualize the end result, however, it seems a little too silly to me.
Carp Eater: This is an example of one of the creatures that have a baffling skill assortment. A carp eater is a monstrous humanoid that radiates an aura of despair. I am not sure why the author decided to make this a monstrous humanoid - it does not have any bestial features. As a 2 HD creature, it would normally be limited to 5 ranks in skills. Yet all of its skills are above this limit. Normally, if a creature has a quality that gives it a bonus with a skill, it is assigned a racial bonus. The unusual thing here is that it has a racial skill bonus that makes one of the skill levels possible, but it totally neglects mentioning any modifier to make the other skills possible.
Clay Soldier: This creature is derived from Chinese folklore, and it represents the many clay soldiers that were buried with some ancient Chinese royalty. While a decent concept, this is an example of one of the poorly executed creature write-ups. The creature description lists what should be a special quality, namely that the creature can be turned as undead. Additionally, there is an "impale" ability listed in the stat block that is not mentioned in the combat description.
Jade Dragon: This is also another new creature, but it comes off a little better. Jade dragons are just creatures that occasionally become overzealous, whose task it is to seek out those who have transgressed against the Kingdom of Heaven.
Poison Dragon: Another dragon variant, this one comes from Japanese myth. A poison dragon is a dragon that has been corrupted while in the egg. They swell in power rapidly and die early (for dragons) but not before causing havoc in their wake.
Feng Huang: The Chinese version of a phoenix, the Feng Huang is a huge bird with a head like a pheasant an a sinuous, scaled body and a tail like a peacock's that deploys in a shimmering display. Feng Huang are servants of the Celestial Bureacracy.
Hidari Construct: This one is an example of a good concept but confusing execution. The basic concept is that if a statue is carved perfectly, the gods will bring it to life. As such, the statues are constructs, but always have some character class levels. The information seems incomplete, however. Some sample skills are provided for a few classes, but no mention is made of what level those skills correspond to. Additionally, if the constructs are supposed to be a duplicate of a living being, you would think that a template would be used on the base creature instead of a creature that could have totally different stats.
Jikininki and Shi-ryo: These are undead creatures from Japanese myth. The Jikininki are undead scavengers. Shi-ryo are undead creatures who do not realize that they have passed on. Decent enough creatures on the surface, they have the common error of being stated with a Constitution ability score. Fortunately, their Constitutions are average, so the error is easily enough fixed, but it shows a bit of amateurism in the design.
King of the Tengu: Tengu are detailed in the Oriental Adventures book. The king of the tengu is a unique creature. He is a wicked creature, but possessed of great knowledge of sword use and manufacture. In some cases, he can be persuaded to take on a student.
Kino-o-bake: The kino-o-bake is a kindly tree spirit, linked to a particular tree. Similar in concept to a dryad, you would think that the author would designate its type as fey. But for some reason, Baur has decided that it is a shapeshifter, despite the fact it has no ability to alter its form.
Konaki Jiji: This is the one you probably have heard about. It is a creature that disguises itself as an abandoned child, but when picked up, transforms into a huge baby and crushes the well meaning would-be rescuer. On this note I agree with Monte Cook: some creatures from myth do not translate well to an adventuring game.
Monkey: Monkey is the legendary creature from Chinese myth who could challenge the gods, and the sole contribution by Dave "Zeb" Cook, author of the 1e Oriental Adventures book. Cook made him nearly invincible, and gave him the unique CR rating of "no hope." To be honest, I really did not appreciate this approach. It does have some precedence in myth, as it was said he could contend with the lords of heaven themselves. The lords of heaven in Chinese myth, though, were not viewed as omnipotent in the same way as in western-type D&D campaigns. A creature targeted at a CR of 25-30 probably would have done nicely, and would have made a more interesting opposition.
Ryujin: Another unique creature example, Ryujin is the Japanese Dragon-God of the sea. Unlike Monkey, this creature's stats are incredible but not ridiculous, making it a little less pointless to include it in the book.
Shiko Me: This is the creature depicted on the cover. They are outsiders that serve certain devils. In Japanese myth, the description notes, they have spellcasters that use blood in their rituals and have certain twisted effects. It mentions how to do this using the SRD - they are sorcerers with access to the clerical evil domain - but it seems to me that the mako tsukai class from Oriental Adventures would be a perfect fit.
Tiger General / Chiao: Derived from myths of Thailand and China, these are tiger-like humanoids. The tiger general is a master of martial arts and an animal lord of tigers. The Chiao is a more mundane tiger-man, jungle savages said to bear their stripes as marks of shame from mating with the beast of the wild.
Summary
As has already been said, there are some creatures in here that are not done by the letter of the d20 law. For those who have read my reviews before, you know that I consider that a bona fide flaw - a product is less worthwhile if you have to spend time shoring up the included statistics. The nature of the flaws, however, are such that the creatures are serviceable, and only some of the creatures are thus affected. Indeed, the ones by Eric Mona and Chris Pramas appear very well done. Fortunately, a list describing which author did which creature is in the front of the book, so you have a good idea of which creatures you should examine carefully before using.
In general, the artwork is excellent and the ideas are very good. Anyone planning an Asian style campaign should definitely consider this book, as it expands nicely upon the creature selection presented in the Oriental Adventures book.
-Alan D. Kohler
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