Review of Fiend Folio

Review Summary
Comped Capsule Review
James Landry
September 8, 2003

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

A good monster book for those who want to use fiends as primary adversaries in a campaign, as well as those who focus on other planes or the fey.

James Landry has written 31 reviews (including 6 D&D 3e reviews), with average style of 3.16 and average substance of 3.58. The reviewer's previous review was of Dry Land: Empires of the Dragon Sands.

This review has been read 9905 times.

  
Product Summary
Name: Fiend Folio
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Line: D&D 3e
Author: Eric Cagle, Jesse Decker, James Jacobs, Erik Mona, Matt Sernett, Chris Thomasson, James Wyatt
Category: RPG

Cost: $29.95
Pages: 224
Year: 2003

SKU: WOTC886610000
ISBN: 0-7869-2780-1

REVIEW OF Fiend Folio


Goto [ Index ]
Fiend Folio is a collection of monsters for the D&D Third Edition role-playing game from Wizards of the Coast. It contains many elements of 3.5 edition in its monsters, and really should be seen as 3.2 or so in terms of its edition.

Philosophy

What is the overall philosophy of this book? After all, we already have the Monster Manual, Monsters of Faerun, and Monster Manual II. This isn't even counting the Creature Collection, the Creature Collection II, the Tome of Horrors, the Monsternomicon, the Liber Bestarius, and others from d20 publishers.

My sense is that WOTC wanted another book, liked the name Fiend Folio, and thus decided to focus the book on extraplanar entities and fey creatures, which aren't as heavily represented in the other books. This focus isn't overwhelming, but it does shape the book and make it a better book than Monster Manual II, which had a kitchen sink feel to it from all the monsters appearing that had previously seen print in other 3e sources.

Keep in mind throughout this review that I own the monster books for 3e: Monster Manual, Monster Manual II, and Monsters of Faerun. I also have the Manual of the Planes. The rest of the d20 monster books I do not own. Also, I don't own Planescape, so I don't know which monsters in this book came from there, although some undoubtedly did. Finally, I got into this biz through D&D, so I don't own the original Fiend Folio, though they seem to be sufficiently different that this isn't a handicap.

Art

The cover art is hideous. It makes me a little queasy to look at it. It also goes away from the book theme to focus on a skin-like cover held together by fastenings, but for some reason the middle of the cover shows a fairly cartoonish fiendish landscape. I don't like that they have gone away from the book paradigm, which even if you didn't like it, gave the books a consistent look and feel.

Interior art is usually good, and each monster gets an illustration as far as I can tell. Related creatures tend to have the same artist, so that D. Cramer did the Fossergrim, Kelpie, and Oread. Though I didn't like these illustrations as much as his black and white work, I appreciated the attention to detail this must have taken.

One thing I didn't like was the filler artwork that was repeated several times throughout the book, presumably to take up space. There were numerous little pictures, which I have seen before, of fiendish little familiars that reappear in random places throughout the book. Examples are on page 5, 7, 29, 126, etc. I don't really like these pictures, and I really don't like seeing them more than once. In my mind, these are unnecessary filler.

One picture struck me fairly forcefully. The Blood Golem of Hextor illustration shows the golem jumping out of an exploding castle. I didn't realize that a golem could be the leading man in Die Hard 4. I find this picture fairly ridiculous but also whimsical at the same time. If you have the book check it out.

Overview

At this point, I want to segue into a discussion of the main contents of the book. The book is organized into six sections. The first is the Table of Contents, which contains that and listing of monsters by type and subtype. After that comes the Introduction, which described how to read the entries and gives a short primer on the planes of existence. The next part is the monster listings, which take up almost all of the rest of the book. After that are three appendices: the first gives prestige classes for fiends, the second describes grafts and symbionts, and the third gives a list of monsters by challenge rating. Note that the templates are presented in with the main text, and that there is no index. I'll now discuss these sections in detail.

Table of Contents

The table of contents matches exactly the main headings in the section, and thus leaves out a lot of monsters. For example, all the specific demons and devils in the text are not listed in the table of contents. You are supposed to know to look them up under demon or devil.

The index by type does list all the monsters, but under their types, and with no page numbers, so there is no way to know the page number of a monster that is under a subheading under a main heading like Demon or Devil. This is true also of the CR listing in the back. This is a stupid decision, and means that it is very difficult to look up some monsters. This annoyed me so much, I made my own index while I was writing this review and I've attached it to this review below.

WOTC did exactly the same thing in the Monster Manual II, and it was the wrong decision then and it still is now.

I appreciate that they make these other indices by type and CR rating available. They are handy, but it would be nice to include page numbers so that we could actually find the things we want to look up.

Introduction

The introduction goes over each entry in the stat block and discusses how it was calculated. A number of slight changes were made from the standard 3e ways of doing things that later made it into 3.5e. They changed to the square facing in this product. They also give monsters the new skills and feat system used in 3.5e to bring it closer to that product. In addition, the use the new names of skills and feats like Improved Sunder. Also, constructs get extra hit points to represent their solidity. They did not introduce the new DR system in this product or as far as I can tell the new spells.

One nice addition was the Extraplanar subtype, which applies when the creature is not on its own plane. This means the creature is subject to summoning and dismissal spells. The PCs get this when they leave their native plane. Another addition was the Swarm subtype, which covers a collection of Tiny or smaller creatures that act as a unit.

Monster Listings

There are a lot of monsters here, so I'm going to discuss them in a variety of ways so that I don't drown in the shear number of them.

Monster Entries

The stat blocks are essentially the same, but the type is larger than that of the 3e Monster Manual (MM), so stat blocks are easier to read. Each creature gets an illustration and these vary widely in size. There are no breaks and there can be more than one creature per page. One nice touch is that occasionally, if a creature is associated with a particular plane or campaign setting, there will be a little sidebar discussing how to fit it into that setting. Examples are the Abyssal Ghoul, Bhut, and Ophidian. I like this very much, and I appreciate that they are taking the time to do this and show where this monsters originate from. I would have preferred it that they give references to where these monsters appeared first, so that we could figure out how they changed the monsters when they converted them.

In some cases, the monster descriptions lack some specifics. For example, the Terlen is essentially a shark with wings. It has a 60 ft. land speed, but there is no discussion on how it gets around. It is also from another plane, but the description doesn't tell you which one.

Another case is the flame snake, where the heat damage of the snakes is not specified. They take the time in the description to tell you it varies for snake size, but it is never actually given in the individual descriptions.

Monster Quality

Some of the monsters chosen I liked very much. I liked that they gave the equivalent of dryads for different locations in the Fossergrim (waterfall), Oread (mountain), and Kelpie (rivers, lakes, and pools). The new kelpie is a little different from the older versions, but is closer to actual mythology in this case.

Other ideas are a little out there, but fairly interesting. The Kaorti are the remains of humans corrupted by the Far Realm who now live in cysts to protect themselves from the harmful effects of the Material Plane. They have some servant creatures also detailed in the book: the rukanyr (a twisted giant tree/scorpion) and the skybleeder (flying crab mounts surrounded by acidic mist). It's an interesting idea and should fit well into campaigns that want to play up Cthulu-like horror and need an army of evil beings to direct plots.

Other monsters are more problematic. The Hullathoin is a huge undead creature with a surrounding swarm of locusts that can create vampire spawn. It is always surrounded by a troop of lower-level undead. Interesting concept, but it seems somewhat similar to the Ulgurstasta, which also is a huge shambling undead creature that can spawn undead creatures to serve it. I would have preferred a little more originality in the monsters in these cases.

A number of planar races were introduced in this volume. I particularly liked the maug - living constructs who hire themselves out as mercenaries to get money to build more maug. They are excellent low-level encounters and could really be developed in a campaign.

Monster Conversions

A significant number of creatures in this book are conversions. Since I don't own Planescape, I may even have missed some of them. I'm going to consider the following conversions: Bhut, Crypt Thing, Necrophidus, and Shedu.

The Bhut originates in Indian mythology. They are restless ghosts who died violent deaths or had improper burials. They originally appeared in D&D in modules X4 and X5, where they were creatures who appear human during the day and turn into ghoul-like creatures at night who desire humanoid flesh. They had the immunities of undead creatures, but were not undead and could not be turned. They could be killed instantly by the strike of a blessed weapon. The new version is somewhat different. It is an undead creature which possesses corpses and animate them to do its dirty work. It also is vulnerable to stone and earth. I don't know where the new version came from since I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about North Indian myth, but it is very different.

The Crypt Thing originally appeared in the original Fiend Folio and later appeared in the Monstrous Manual. It was an undead guardian of a tomb that had the ability to teleport trespassers away from it in random directions. Other than that, it wasn't very powerful. The new version is similar but weaker, in that characters can no longer fall to their deaths, and it isn't that hard to resist. Also, the spread of distances is now much farther. Overall, very little difference.

The Necrophidius first appeared in the original Fiend Folio. It is a construct made up of a skeletal snake with a fanged humanoid skull. It is usually employed as a guard or assassin with its paralyzing bite. It also had a hypnotizing attack called the Dance of Death. The new version has all the same abilities and is tougher because it gains 20 extra hit points from being a medium construct. Not very different, but improved by the extra construct traits.

The Shedu first appeared in the original Monster Manual, though it obviously originates in Babylonian mythology. It also appeared in the 2e Monstrous Manual. In that later incarnation it had two types, lesser and greater, both of which appeared as winged bulls with bearded human heads. The creatures were powerful servants of good who used many different psionic powers and could communicate telepathically with any creature. The psionics have been removed in the version and replaced by similar magic powers. In addition, the ethereal jaunt abilities have been retained. Overall, it isn't that different, though the conversion maintains them as relatively weak physical combatants, which I always thought was a relatively bad choice.

Appendices

The first appendix is a list of three prestige classes for fiends. The Fiend of Blasphemy has six levels and focuses on creating a demonic cult that the demon can control and even kill at will if they displease her. The Fiend of Corruption focuses on tempting mortals to create evil. The Fiend of Possession is able to invade a mortal body and pervert it from within. They are all useful for developing fiends as a major menace in your campaign, especially if you prefer them to act in more subtle ways. Check out the web enhancement (discussed below) for example fiends with these classes.

The second appendix introduces grafts and symbionts. Grafts are modifications to creatures that boost their abilities in some way, but these grafts are not creatures and are unintelligent. Examples are given for grafts for those favored by aboleths, beholders, fiends, illithids, maugs, undead, and yuan-ti. These are things like arm replacements to grant extra strength and a paralyzing touch, etc. There are a wide variety of them and they seem like a good addition to the game, especially to spice up the servants of evil monsters. Symbionts are intelligent creatures that enter into a protracted physical union with their hosts and grant them abilities and sometimes drawbacks. Cerebral symbionts have psionic powers and allow the host to utilize various psionic powers, like claws of the bear and inertial armor. Fiendish symbionts give magical and resistance powers but usually extract a price and tempt the host toward evil. The symbionts I particularly like as they seem a good way to work in a possession from within campaign, and new versions seem easy to construct. Tie these in with some kind of controlling psionic leach and you have a whole campaign ready to go.

Extras

There are no errata on the WOTC for Fiend Folio, as far as I can tell. There is a web enhancement, available here. This web enhancement contains six fiends, each of which has taken one of the three prestige classes in the first appendix of the Fiend Folio. It's very useful if you want to incorporate fiends using these approaches into your campaign.

Conclusions

Overall, this is a better book than Monster Manual II and more care was taken to make sure that the parts fit together. It had three main foci in order of importance. The first is providing monsters and rules for running a game where extraplanar fiends are a major threat, both directly through combat and indirectly through possession and corruption. I think it did a good job of providing a background to make this possible. The second is a focus on extraplanar races in general, and though all of these aren't great, it provided a lot of new races and interlocking race relationships to base campaigns on. Finally, it also expanded the number of fey creatures in the game and provided some dryad analogues, which I liked. If you are interested in these things or the concept of swarms, grafts, or symbionts, then I recommend getting this book. Otherwise, even though it is a good book, it probably isn't necessary to get.

Index

As I mentioned above, I find it sometimes difficult to find monsters in the WOTC monster books, because not all monsters are listed in the front with a page listing, and the other listings of monsters do not have a page listing. So here I provide, in the hope that it will be useful, an index of the Fiend Folio. This also has the benefit of listing every creature in the book.

Copyright © 1996-2009 Skotos Tech and individual authors, All Rights Reserved