The Slayer’s Guide to Undead

Game: The Slayer’s Guide to Undead
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 16th, February 2003
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10   [ Good ]
Total Score: 15
Average Score: 7.50

It certainly isn’t every D&D accessory that makes me nervous. The Slayer’s Guide to Undead manages this, it makes me nervous whenever I turn the page.

If you were to admit to me that the full-colour artwork on the inside covers made you nervous or uneasy then you’d have my sympathy, I can see why that would be the case. It’s not the illustrations that worry me. The book itself makes me nervous.

More preciously, it’s the paper; it’s the very thin paper. I pushed The Slayer’s Guide to Undead up against the other 128-paged book in the series, the Slayer’s Guide to Dragons, and the difference is striking. The Slayer’s Guide to Undead is only about two-thirds the width of the latter. I feared to sneeze while reading the book or turning the page too briskly in case I tore the page.

Comparisons to the Slayer’s Guide to Dragons are inevitable. They’re both larger than usual Slayer’s Guides, they’re both hot topics and both written by this Gary Gygax guy. Actually, SG Undead finds space for co-author Jon Creffied on the front cover and so it seems likely that his contribution was significant.

The two books are very different though; the SG Dragons is one great big Slayer’s Guide but the SG Undead is more like a collection of mini-Guides. The Slayer’s Guide to Undead works well. There are a plethora of undead nasties in any D&D game and so the approach of looking at each type, in turn, helps to ensure that the reader’s favourite will be given sufficient attention.

The strategy helps keep any overlap between the SG Undead and the Encyclopaedia Arcane: Necromancy, an alternative Mongoose product, down to a minimum.

The book isn’t entirely this collection of mini-Guides. After the mandatory introduction, a chapter called “A Demonic Overlord” scores a mixed success. We’re told that the demon prince Orcus is the master of Undead, their original creator. Well, maybe, there are pros and cons to the mythology but what I wanted to see in the Slayer’s Guide was continued support and references to it.

I’ll admit it; I was slightly surprised to actually get this. As the book talks about the various types of undead it does continue to talk about Orcus and his role. While reading about Devourers, for example, we discover how they’re created and that sometimes Orcus (or other dark powers) “rewards” followers with the status. I’m not so impressed by the book’s efforts to define what can become Undead and what cannot. Plants can’t become (or are unlikely to) undead because they don’t have a soul – fair enough.

Oozes are unlikely to become undead because they’re gelatinous. Hmm. Why would negative energy be thwarted by a bit of gel? Now, if the pitch was that the Ooze doesn’t have a soul and therefore unlikely to be undead then I’d have bought that. Giants make for uncommon undead because they’re so big. Oh right. This all-corrupting negative energy or Orcus’ curse of undeath seems a bit wimpy to me. Monstrous Humanoids make good undead but are rather rare because they’re strange.

The chapters on the other side of the mini-SG collection are equally mixed. Hybrid Undead is a tiny chapter but a great example of the jumble of good and bad. Hybrid Undead wouldn’t even be possible without the successes of the mini-SGs in the middle of the book. A Hybrid Undead is a creature unlucky enough to be suffering from two types of undeath at once!

The book asks one simple question and in a single stroke makes the concept entirely believable. “What happens to a ghoul when its physical body eventually wears away? Perhaps it becomes a spectral ghoul, doomed always to hunt for flesh it cannot eat!” Wonderful. The same chapter then looks at the art of terror – how to scare your players. It’s a good start; it straight up admits that the nature of D&D as heroic fantasy makes this hard. Other intelligent offerings are the reminders to pay attention to the atmosphere of the gaming environment and that the horrific isn’t always horror.

A bloody death isn’t scary horror, it is just gore. All too quickly though the section devolves into a discussion on how to keep the unliving scary in a dungeon crawl.

Then there’s the adventure. I don’t mind the short little adventures in the standard Slayer’s Guides; normally they’re a sample map of the lair of the creature being covered in the Guide and a page or two on how to run an encounter there.

Fifteen pages of adventure are too much of a bite out of my Slayer’s Guide though. Outline maps of castles are as common as adventures featuring a vampire in a castle and a village below cooperating with sinister plans.

The Bestiary of the Damned rights wrongs. The Bestiary of the Damned makes explicit the huge success of the Slayer’s Guide to Undead, a success that the mini-SG interior leaves implicit. Why are undead almost always human? In many high fantasy games, mankind is but one of many races, in fact, in some high fantasy games mankind is a minority and yet skeletons, zombies, bodaks, shadows, you name it, are almost always “human”. This isn’t so in the Bestiary of the Damned.

The chapter is just a short creature collection, one without illustration too, but by giving us stats for Giant Bodak-Eages, Mohrg Satyrs, Mummified Dark Nagas, Shadow Harpies and others it can do very little wrong in my eyes.

Ah yes, and what of these mini-Slayer Guides in the middle of the book? There’s divided up into four main sections; the unwilled living dead, the free-willed living dead, spirits of evil and the lords of the living dead. Each mini-SG in the sections enjoys similar layouts; a look at the physiology, habitat, society, methods of warfare, roleplaying tips, scenario hooks and best of all; a template.

These headings will be familiar to anyone with a Slayer’s Guide in their gaming collection. These headings are not sacrosanct, sometimes they’re missing, sometimes for a reason and sometimes not. It’s the templates that matter to me; with the skeleton template, I can make my skeletal dwarf different from my skeletal orc or with my wraith template I can ensure that my elf wraith is different from my halfling wraith. The picture of the mummified mind flayer will haunt players.

There are new types of undead in the book too. Making new sub-types of ghouls seems to be especially popular with the book’s two authors; the Tr’oul is a Troll Ghoul. Gholles and Ghulaz are something entirely different from a ghoul. Honest.

There are occasionally particularly powerful individuals of any given unliving caste that the book describes and stats. The Ghoul King is a Challenge Rating 29 monster but the Demon Gholl only manages CR 21. I really can’t shake the feeling that ghouls are a personal favourite for the authors.

The new types of undead don’t impress me nearly as much as the collection of templates. With all the templates the Slayer’s Guide to Undead provides I’m free to go off and create all sorts of living dead with interesting twists all by myself.

The book fights for and wins its position as a special 128-paged Slayer’s Guide and I’m pleased with most of the use of this extra space. Without any doubt, the book does guide you through a vast collection of undead and does so successfully.