The Book of Fiends

Game: The Book of Fiends
Publisher: Green Ronin
Series: Dungeons and Dragons: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 8th, June 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 18
Average Score: 6.00

The Book of Fiends is typically Green Ronin quality. It’s professional, has a nice layout, small and crisp font and its packed full of fiends. Flicking through the book is enough to let you peek into a deliciously awful Abyss.

I remember poking fun at the Fiend Folio (the first d20 edition) because it was nothing more than a Monster Manual III trying to avoid the III and capture the glory of the original Fiend Folio.

I also remember reader comments that I was making too much of an issue about the book’s name. It wasn’t really about the name though, it was about the lack of Fiendish atmosphere and yet more monsters instead. I always prefer the theatrics and politics of roleplaying over the mechanics, combat and spells but for some reason, I always go for bestiary books. I really do think you can conjure up atmospheric details for a fantasy setting by finding out about the creatures that live in it.

A bestiary full of low powered and largely nocturnal monsters and animals has the makings for a gothic setting. A bestiary full of titans, hydra and satyrs is suitable for a Hellenic game and one full of dragons, kobolds and umber hulks is most likely Dungeons and Dragons. The Book of Fiends really is full of fiends; it is entirely suitable for a “plane war” game, dark fantasy, high fantasy, even horror and perhaps even occult. That makes the difference for me. This isn’t a book of monsters; it’s a book of demons and devils.

There is a catch – there is a flipside. I cannot imagine spending long hours constructing a wonderfully atmospheric game, working up to chilling encounters with demons to then slur the unique climax with something so un-unique as an arch-enemy taken from a mass-produced book. I suppose it’s a bit like a chef toiling over the creation of wonderful pastry only then to stuff the pie with cheap meat from the supermarket. I just wouldn’t do it.

Yup! There’s a flipside to the flipside. Your players can read The Book of Fiends. Your players can discover just how formidable some of these Fiends are how insidious and sinister even the weaker Fiends are. Any encounter with a Book of Fiends fiend could well enjoy a hefty dose of pre-charged “oh shit!” That’s always good fun.

The Book of Fiends is a mix of new and freshly dusted down old products. Green Ronin’s already published Legions of Hell and Armies of the Abyss. Those two classics are for D&D 3.0 and we’re now in the hands of 3.5. Green Ronin planned a third book too; Hordes of Gehanna. The Book of Fiends is the 3.5 edition of Legions of Hell, Armies of the Abyss and is the premier of the Hordes of Gehanna. It’s very handy having everything together in the 224-paged hardback. The tie-in with other Green Ronin books gets better still. The Book of Fiends is written to fit nicely into the mythos presented in the Book of the Righteous, the Avatar’s Handbook and the Unholy Warrior’s Handbook.

Chapter One, Into the Abyss, is important. We quickly run through the cosmology here. When the Lords of Good created the celestials the shadowy qlippoth came into being as a coincidence. The qlippoth created those creatures which would become the demons. The armies of Good all but finished off the qlippoth, leaving their ruined cities in the upper layers of the Abyss but let many of the demonic creations escape into the lower layers. Souls enter the Abyss and have to deal with The Howling Threshold – what a great name – and some are destroyed forever, eaten by hungry demons, but a few become powerful entities too.

In chapter two, Those Who Serve contains the Thaumaturge class. This is a summoning class and comes complete with new Thaumaturgic feats. There are 10 new domains too and included in here are some with lateral connections to the Abyss. There’s the Eloquence domain, the Prophecy domain and even the Pleasure Domain. Evil GMs could have fun with the idea that these sorts of topics are of interest to the Abyss or that they might even by Abyssal. New domains mean new spells. For the Pleasure Domain, there’s the Phantasmal Lover where if the target succumbs to the tempting whispers of the magical apparition the target will be incapacitated for 10 minutes of “erotic activity” but will also be cured of all diseases, blindness, deafness, hit point damage and temporary ability damage. Guess what the Phantasmal Orgy spell does.

The rather terrible demon princes are detailed in Those Who Rule, chapter three. Full credit to Green Ronin here – they don’t give these unbelievably powerful creatures stats. Stats would be pointless. The Book of the Righteous didn’t stat deities either. That said you will find demons with CR of 20 and much higher later on in this book. It’s slightly annoying that not every prince is accompanied by an illustration though the illustrations we do have are fantastic.

By this stage of the book, the decorative margin is labelled “Volume 1: Armies of the Abyss”. Volume 1 also contains chapter four, Creatures of the Abyss, and begins with rules for creating Abyssal Dragons. Okay, I said the CR does peak over 20 but there are also lower-powered fiends in the book – that’s an important goal of the product. The Book of Fiends (and the smaller books which comprise it) sought to bring these evocative foes to campaigns of any level. Daeobelinus are creatures which help lazy mortals avoid some sort of annoying hardship, like the loss of reputation, and are a CR 1 encounter. The Challenge Rating is nice as is the effort to include a role in the war for souls for them. In fact, throughout this collection, there are plenty of touches like this. There are generic demons like the mandragoras and there are individuals in this section too. Malohin is the exiled demon prince of murder – less powerful than he has been but not a pushover either!

Volume 2 is the Hordes of Gehenna. This section of the book kicks off with the chapter titled Descent into the Seven-Circle Realm and looks at the cosmology of Gehenna. The seven circles; wrath, envy, lust, sloth, gluttony, greed and pride are homes to a horde of fiends. These fiends have titles like Whispers of Sloth, Mercenaries of Wrath, Watcher of Envy as well as their proper names. It is easy to tell at a glance what the fiend’s status in the realm is. This foul collection makes up chapter six.

Volume 3 is the reprieve of Legions of Hell. It’s the same format as before; an introduction to the creatures here so powerful that they don’t need stats (not that you couldn’t drum them up elsewhere) and an introductory glance at the geography of the realm. Then we move onto the collection of fiends, devils in this case. Once again there is a good mix between generic creatures and specific devils. Also tucked in volume 3, in chapter nine, we find the Infernal Prestige Classes.

Since the Book of Fiends is designed to be a great companion to The Book of the Righteous it’s nice to see a large appendix devoted to quickly summarising the three choirs of Angelic orders. Know thy enemy and all that. The next appendix takes a look at the Unholy Warrior class and includes the bunch of new domains introduced by the Unholy Warrior book. Another appendix details the town of Byldgewater and the weird city of Cacoethes as locations in the Abyss. If you want an appendix which lists all these horrors by Challenge Rating (that’s ½ to 40!) and this is certainly handy. There’s even a bibliography and, of course, a thorough index.

The Book of Fiends is one of these really good but specialised roleplaying supplements. It’s great quality but I’m not convinced I’ll use it that often. On my first run-through of the supplement I was loath to give it any more than B (6/10) – it’s good but limited in use, therefore limited in value. I always go through books twice and on the second time through I was still struck by just how thorough the book is, at just how much is packed into here, at the writing, at the illustrations and at how it all ties nicely together. Whereas I accept that no one really needs The Book of Fiends I think it would be an injustice to mark it with anything other than an A grade (7/10). On the GameWyrd scale, it easily scores the 5/10 starting point for professionally delivering what was promised to the readers. It scores another for the sheer quality and the more elusive second upgrade because of just how effectively atmospheric it is.