So, I couldn't help myself....
At $14.98 I had to snag a copy of
The Tome of Horrors, by Necromancer Games, off the shelf today at Half Price Books.
Now I have two copies...but it just had to be done. No way I could let that get by me.
Necromancer Games is one of the five companies that successfully surfed the
D20 phenomenon (Necromancer, Goodman, Paizo, Green Ronin and Troll Lord), and is possibly the coolest of the quintet. Necromancer did not immediately make the leap to 4.0, but they have a strong enough following that they will probably do well when they begin to publish again, either in 4.0 or in Paizo's Pathfinder
D20 clone system.
The Tome of Horrors was a natural choice for a company that advertises "Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel." It is a collection of monsters that did not make it across the
Monster Manual void between 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D and D&D 3.0. The forgotten beasties of the
Monster Manual II and the
Fiend Folio ride again in
The Tome of Horrors.
The Tome of Horrors is a big book: 325 pages including the index and the obligatory
OGL legal notices. I would describe the hardback binding as "middling quality." The book doesn't explode in your face, but it isn't the tightly stitched binding of the core 3.0 rulebooks. Like all other books from Necromancer Games I've ever seen, it was printed with the help of White Wolf's Sword and Sorcery Studios.
There are 400 monsters in the book, including 300 from various 1st Edition books. The other 100 are from Necromancer's own publications. Wizards of the Coast gave Necromancer the go-ahead on these monsters with the basic agreement that most of them would not appear in future
WOTC publications.
Each monster stat block from the old days has a note at the end, telling where it originally appeared in print. Author Scott Greene credits the original authors wherever they are known. Some of the citations are inaccurate, since an old-school
DM knows that the monster in question (for instance) was listed in the Monster Manual II, but that it really first appeared in a specific module.
The Tome of Horrors is a fun read for anyone who misses the basic humor and "gotcha" creativity of the old school monsters. So, anyone who misses the adherer (looks like a mummy but is actually an aberration covered with glue that makes your weapon stick to it) can find that goofball creature here. In 3.0, this thing uses its glue to jack up the grapple rules on anyone it hits.
The star monsters of the
Fiend Folio (all four or five of them - thank God for Charles Stross and whoever created the fog giant) have all been picked up and used again in 3.0, leaving the silly and bizarre creatures of that publication to go into this tome. So, we have the devil dog and the lava children chasing about the pages with the coffer corpse, the clubnek (sp), ogrillon, iron cobra and the gambado. There are frost men in the book (squirting cones of ice out of their eyes, apparently in consternation at having been resurrected again in print) as well as the blindheim and the gloomwing. And who doesn't miss the crabman? (They want our women!) Also, the dark stalker and dark creeper are...um...creeping about this book.
Strangely, the enveloper, the Pilsbury Doughboy monster of the
Fiend Folio didn't make it in.....? Ah well.
The Tome of Horrors isn't just the old Fiend Folio re-printed. There are monsters like the korred, the quickling, the drakes (fire and frost) and the orog. Our janitorial friend the drelb (the "haunting custodian") is lurking here, but there is no mention of this creature's original link to Lolth.
Amongst the old-school goodness there are some monsters I've actually been missing (OK - I
did miss the blindheim). For instance, say hello to my old friend, the giant two-headed troll! You can't have enough of those in a campaign.
The skeleton warrior is here! Remember the boney undead dude with the ring that lets his master control him? (For some reason, the skeleton warrior is always depicted with the ring on its own head...which cannot actually happen since, "If a skeleton warrior ever gains control of the circlet that contains its soul the skeleton warrior places the circlet on its head and dies, vanishing in a flash of light.") In
The Tome of Horrors, the skeleton warrior is a template that can be jammed onto any character, but stats are given for a 12th-level fighter version. Yum!
The Tome of Horrors has some charming examples of the kind of toss-out lines found in so many gaming books. For instance, we are told that the skeleton warrior is, "dressed in the same type of armor and clothes worn during life." Um...isn't that what we all wear all the time?
"Hey man, nice medusa!" Oh no, this isn't just a
nice medusa, this is a
greater medusa. She shares part of her page with the king of non-sequiturs; the giant marmoset. (Work with that one for a minute
)
Hello Mr. Flind! Still whacking people with those nunchuks?
"Bah! I spit on your nunchuks, humahn! This be
flindbar!"
Um, even the new book says, "They are otherwise identical to nunchaku."
"Raaah! Let bonking begiiiiiiiiin!"
(By the way, "It is unknown if flinds are a subspecies of the gnoll or a genetic anomaly produced among large gnoll packs." Contemplate that as you hack them apart.)
Ah! Here's the necrophidius!..looks like a snake skeleton with an evil human skull for a head. It's one of the creepier-looking monsters ever published. "On the first round of combat, a necrophidius attempts to entrance its opponents by swaying back and forth." Yup. Same ol' necrophidius. The necrophidius has two hit dice...so on the
second round of combat it flies apart under repeated blows and scatters itself artistically around the nearby stonework. Nice dance, dude!
The monstrous crab notation makes me laugh...not because monstrous crabs are funny but because I once had one of these creatures chasing a party of adventurers in one of my games, but the characters never actually
noticed the huge crab scuttling after them.
Ah! Here's the nereid, escaped from
The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. "Their natural beauty lures men to their doom." One wonders why these chaotic neutral lovelies don't always leave their shawls hidden under the water nearby...probably because if they didn't have their shawls we might have to leave out their pictures entirely. Nereids used to summon water wierds to do their bidding, now they just get to, "form a volume of water into the shape of an arm that ends in a clenched fist."
Hello Mr. Nilbog! I see that you're still indistinguishable from a goblin. According to the text, "The nilbog favors ambushes, dirty tricks and overwhelming odds to a fair fight." Sounds like he has what it takes to be a player character.
The artwork in
The Tome of Horrors is above average to excellent and there is a lot of it. My personal favorite is the stench kow, which looks like a comical buffalo who smells his own gas. Most of the monsters have pictures to support them. The obsidian minotuar is one of the weakest, while the half-ogre is probably the best. The half-ogre and the demonic knight apparently do their shopping together. They both bought their armor at Games Workshop.
For anyone who misses the old stock of demons and devils, there are one hell of a lot of them here. These dudes are duded up with more hit dice than a pack-o-mastodons and 3.0 powers to make you wish you'd never dared the wrath of Heck. Unlike the 1st Edition demon lords and major devils, these guys could stand a few rounds against characters with weapon specialization.
When I ran a recent game in the infernal realms with my 3.5 gaming group I substituted the stats for a few of these guys and tossed them into the mix. High level 3rd Edition characters can still chop them up, but not as easily as the 105 hit points of old-school Asmodeus.
If you're a demon and devils kind of guy, they've got most of your old friends with new stats here in
The Tome of Horrors.
Yes, some of this was pretty silly stuff, even back in the day. But, if you are one of those who still remember those days, there are also some ghosts here to haunt your current game.
But I digress.....
If you're a gamer, there's enough in
The Tome of Horrors to get you through some nasty encounters and memory-lane strolls. In addition to the hardcopy version of the book you ought to go to RPGNow and get the pdf version that has been updated to 3.5. The electronic files are easily accessible to the
DM and you won't wreck your book. You can also cut and paste so the giant marmoset won't intrude on the same page with the greater medusa.
If you're a collector, you need to think about grabbing
The Tome of Horrors while you can. This book combines the old-school monsters with Necromancer's excellence and it is likely to get real scarce in the near future. Any gamer who actually used the hardcopy likely destroyed his own tome in the process. That makes the high quality copies out there even more valuable.
Copies of
The Tome of Horrors are starting to appear on Ebay in the $30 to $50 range and the price is likely go up.
Anyone who has a Half Price Books nearby ought to think about looking to see if there is a copy on the shelf. Half Price Books tends to get gaming books sent to individual stores from what is obviously a central source. (Remember all the
Midnight campaign booklets recently on their shelves all across the country?) Chances are good that your local store recently got at least one copy of
The Tome of Horrors.
One final note in a very long post: There were other books in this series, but I have never seen a hardcopy for sale. It is possible that they only existed as pdf files. Does anyone here know?
Mark
