34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Outsiders, undead and constructs, oh my, September 4, 2003
This review is from: Fiend Folio (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.0 Fantasy Roleplaying) (Hardcover)
I held off on buying the Fiend Folio for a while. There was no real reason, other than the fact that the first time I had the chance to look at the book, I'd just been to the optometrist and my eyes were all woogly. I didn't take the chance to look at it again until later. I'm glad I took that second chance.
The clear emphasis in this book is on outsiders, undead and constructs. The back of the book says that the major focus is on "fiends," which is a trifle misleading as there aren't that many new true fiends, meaning baatezu or ta'anari. The ones included basically flesh out what was once available in the second edition Planescape compendiums and other sources, so it was very much appreciated.
The remainder of the book has some lovely creatures as well, including a number of neutrally aligned inevitable and rilmani, giving the party more than just demons and angels to cope with.
CRs are quite high in this book, but again the cover warns you of this, and a simple glance through will show this. Few of the monsters are in the truly unkillable category, though, and many of the high CR guys would make suitable behind-the-scenes villains, bad guys for a low-level party to take on after taking out the beasties minions. This book also doesn't suffer from the Monster Manual II's overemphasis on the Improved Grab feat, which makes for some powerful monsters that won't just grab the PCs and never let go.
The grafts section is interesting, providing a way for willful PCs to increase their raw power, for a price. I really liked the fiendish prestige classes, which enable you to create a barbaze or even a lemure with just that extra edge of power and ability to drive the PCs nuts.
Once again, though, WotC has decided to shuffle the templates in with the monsters, which is needless and a little confusing. There are also some minor typos and some slight disagreements between the main body of monsters and the stat block, or between the description and the picture. All these issues are easily resolveable, but for [$$], I expect them to be resolved BEFORE I buy.
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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
By the Numbers, March 14, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Fiend Folio (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.0 Fantasy Roleplaying) (Hardcover)
The *Fiend Folio* has 166 creatures, 224 pages, and 8 templates, as well as 3 prestige classes for fiends and a section on grafts and symbionts (which is very cool, if not necessarily easy to implement).
Its CR values: mean ~8.3; mode 9; median 8; low 1/8; high 25.
CR values of *MM1 3E* for comparison: mean ~5.4; mode 3; median 5; low 1/10; high 26.
It retails at [$$$], which is a cost of $0.13 per page.
Overall, these values are close to *MM2*, and the focus of the text is true to its title, as over 50% of the entries are extraplanar in some fundamental way. If one is looking to enhance some kind of Blood War narrative or planewalking game, then this book would be highly useful, for it does round out the possibilities hinted at in the Manual of the Planes; it is not so obviously useful for a straightforward "let's jump in the pickup and git us some kobolds!" type of game.
Noteworthy templates include the "half-fey," "half-troll," and "half-illithid" (along with a cool sidebar on illithid reproductive activities heh). The "huecuva" and "swordwraith" templates are also decent.
Specific creatures worthy of comment:
1) Constructs such as the "blackstone gigant," the "caryatid column," the "necrophidius," and the "zodar" (this last is especially well rendered), along with two new "inevitables" of high CR.
2) Undead: the "crawling head" and the "crypt thing" are decent, and the "hullathoin" is good. My favorite is the "quth-maren," a mid-range beastie that is pretty much the skinless guy from *Hellraiser*. Very nice. (but where's Pinhead, beeyotch?)
3) Dragon: only 2, but they're alright-the "sunwyrm," which is decent, and the "sea drake," which is very well executed (it likes to charge tolls to ships that pass through its territory, and if they don't pay, it constricts the vessels and sinks them; it especially hates pirates).
4) Planar-stuff, which is the meat by which this text must be judged:
--the "rilmani" entries are a nice touch (creatures as adamant about true neutrality as the tanar'ri are about CE);
--the "nerra" (from the "Plane of Mirrors," an area mentioned in *MotP*, but not at all developed until this entry, which is pregnant with idea);
--the "kaorti" (from the "Far Realm," another area mentioned in *MotP*, which i interpret to be some space outside of the normal planes that is not subject to the axes of Good-Evil and Order-Chaos, and with plenty of other weirdness about it, etc);
--more "planetouched" types e.g., dwarf-demon combos, &c;
--the old 2E gehreleths return, but with their 1E name of "demodands," to round out Carceri's politics;
--a miscellany of cool bits: the "khaasta," some "slaad," more "formians," more low ranking "yugoloths" (much needed, since *MotP* & *MM2* give mostly tougher ones), and the "ethergaunts" (a malevolent culture on the Ethereal Plane--very well conceived, since before the Ethereal was an apolitical space with ghosts and other nasties that merely want to eat people);
--and of course tons of Celestials (2 "deva" types), Tanar'ri (7 or so types, some aquatic), and Ba'atezu (2 with high CR) plus allied creatures, like the "canomorphs," the "varrangoins," and some innovative golems.
5) A so-so assortment of oozes (the best is the "bloodbloater," a floating fried egg-looking thing that forms swarms to feed on the unwary), fey (some evil ones, too), plants, monstrous humanoids, beasts, and the like, though nothing about which to cream one's pant-except for:
--the developments herein to the yuan-ti, where we now have the "yuan-ti anathema," a huge nasty-nasty with no human bits at all, and 6 snakeheads instead-high high CR, as well as notes on the "ophidian," a yuan-ti slave race of humans morphed into snakey-things, the "ti-khana" template (yuan-ti breeding experiment), and of course tons of fairly sickening (and completely characteristic) yuan-ti grafts in the appendix;
--perhaps, also, the rules for swarms are useful, though the focus in the samples is clearly on tougher planar swarms, rather than on mundane types that (I believe) show up in *MM1 3.5E*;
--one last thing here of interest is the "sarkrith," a mid-to-high CR lizard-thing that hates magickes; the entirety of sarkrith society (based in the underdark) is intent on destroying magic and enslaving those who use it-a fine addition to any game's eco-political system.
6) There is, I should note, a perverse worm fetish here; I just can't understand why anyone would need tons of high CR worm-things that a) have no intelligence, and b) are useful only insofar as they bust out of the ground, swallow half a party, and then retreat (isn't there already a "purple worm" and a "frost worm" for this purpose in *MM1*, as well as a hellacool "fiend worm" in *MM2*?).
Anyway, *FF* offers the "century worm" (CR 19), the "lucent worm" (CR 17), the "slasrith" (CR 7-coolest one, since it is just a flying worm that yugoloths use as mounts, and has a useable CR), the "thunder worm" (CR 21), the "tunnel terror" (CR 15), and the "ulgurstasta" (CR 11-an undead worm-thing that swallows whole, like the rest of the lot, but instead of eating you, turns you into a zombie, then barfs you up hahahahaha); well, yeah, you get the point-should be the *Worm Folio*, &c.
Otherwise, the text has the same high production values-great art here (best drawing by far is for the "blood golem of hextor," which looks just like a Mad Cat mech (a gift to the battletech cross-pollination geeks, i guess), no obvious editorial errors, and for the most part 3.5 compatible, though the DR system needs to be updated with the WotC web enhancement. The cover art is 100% better than *MM1* or *MM2*, since it's obviously a view from a cavern-type area out onto some abyssal plane, complete with a pit, volcano, and fire-stuff shooting out everywhere, rather than the silly eyeball-thing on *MM1* or the braindead mouth-thing on *MM2*.
Ultimately, worth the money for game's that are not content to hunt orcs through level 30.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better Than Most Monster Manuals, August 13, 2003
This review is from: Fiend Folio (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.0 Fantasy Roleplaying) (Hardcover)
As an avid DM, I own about seven different 3E monster manuals, a few from third-party publishers.
Out of what I have, the Fiend Folio is quite possibly the best.
The book is populated mainly by monsters that make the most despicably evil and ugly things in the original monster manual look like guests at your tea party. Most of the monsters are demons, devils, undead, or creatures with a decidedly malevolent and unpleasant nature about them. While there are a couple of monsters that buck this trend (there's a few celestials), they serve to round the book out nicely in the end.
Fiend Folio is probably the first of WotC's monster manuals to implement more complete monster statistics. Listed for your convenience is the monster's base attack bonus and grapple bonus, things which don't appear in the original Monster Manual--three cheers for the grapple bonus especially, a listing that comes in all too handy; a lot of the monsters in D&D need to use grappling to execute their special abilities, and the formula for calculating a monster's grapple bonus is not an easy one to do one the fly unless you are exceptionally familiar with the rules for doing so. "Exceptional familiarity" is not something that beginner DMs have.
I find the art to be four stars. The majority of the creatures are fun to look at, though there are a few shoddy illustrations. Some people think that 3E art in general is too cartoonish, but I find this to be quite untrue. For one, the art is a massive step up from 2E, which was brimming with overly simplistic monster drawings (probably resulting from the fact that a single artist did most of the 100+ monsters in the manual for 2E) and full-page paintings that depicted scenes that were utterly disinteresting. While some of the 3E art is more suited to comic books (a prime example of this is Wayne Reynolds), it would only be suitable for well-done comic books, and the creatures depicted are far more vibrant than before. Rarely is this more true than in the Fiend Folio. Check out wizards.com/dnd to see the art from the books yourself.
I recommend Fiend Folio if you were either unimpressed with the Book of Vile Darkness's monster fare, or just simply felt that you needed additional creatures of an especially wicked and/or grotesque nature. You will not be disappointed.
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