The Slayer's Guide to Elementals
By Ian Sturrock
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 0026
96 pages, $19.95
The Slayer's Guide to Elementals is kind of in a class by itself. At 96 pages, it's bigger than the standard 32-page book in the line, but not quite as big as the previous "supersized" Slayer's Guides (
Demons,
Dragons,
Giants, and
Undead), all of which have 128 pages. Furthermore, more than any other book in the series, this one seems much more like a
Monster Manual - at least, it has a much higher percentage of pages devoted to new monsters than any other Slayer's Guide I can recall.
The cover is nicely done by Ralph Horsley: he managed to get all four standard elementals into the picture, although due to their natures the fire and earth elementals stand out much clearer than the water elemental (in vortex form) and the air elemental (in twister form). The earth elemental has rather refined features, making him almost look more like a stone golem.
The inside front cover is a color piece by Chris Quilliams, and is always my most anticipated piece of artwork in any Slayer's Guide. This one is rather blah, but in Chris' defense elementals
are rather blah-looking creatures - there's really only so much you can do with them. (He does a really nice earth elemental in the more "traditional," all craggy style.) Of course, it looks like he needed to get an editor, since his "notebook style" artwork (a well-loved Slayer's Guide" tradition) contains two misspellings: "it's" should be "its" and "a flame" should be "aflame" (both are in the fire elemental notes on the side).
As for the rest of the book, the artwork contained within consists of 37 black-and-white pictures by 9 different artists. Quality varies, with no really exceptional pictures, but none were particularly poor. I did notice several were taken directly from
Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism, though (specifically the illustrations of the creatures that were taken from that work and updated to 3.5 here), and at least one was taken from
The Slayer's Guide to Demons (the vaporous demon serves double-duty here on page 44 as an ash or dust elemental). Finally, now that "nipple art" is forbidden, it looks like the new thing is naked female posteriors aimed at the viewer (see pages 5 and 16) and figures seated with their legs spread wise open (see the female on page 36 and - equal opportunity, apparently - the male on page 84). Finally, it looks like quite a few "elementals" in this book are represented by a not-quite-the-same-thing scantily clad female. Need a picture of a metal elemental (from Chinese folklore)? - Use a "Witchblade" looking chick with shiny skin. (She's one of the ones in the "hey, check out my hot butt" poses.) Need a mineral quasi-elemental, described as a "great, stomping, crystalline human, with two enormous stalactite-like spikes instead of arms?" - Use a female human falling out of her outfit; she's got some leopard-like spots on her skin, maybe those can be minerals. Need a radiant quasi-elemental, described as having a body that "seems to be a featureless sphere of purest glowing white, with not even a hint of sensory organs or other features?" - Use a barely-clad chick with angel wings (actually, she looks like she just walked off one of those Victoria's Secret TV commercials). I think you get the idea.
AS far as the book itself, it's laid out as follows:
- Introduction: a one-page explanation of the "Slayer's Guide" line of books
- Elemental Lore: elemental views from the ancient Greeks, the Hindu and Buddhist religions, Aztec mythology, Chinese mythology, Judaism and the Qabala, and medieval European views on the elements
- The Physiology of Elements: a very short (2-page) section on elementals' diet, lifecycle, aging and death, breeding (including half-elementals), and birth and childhood
- Elementals: 33 pages of Monster Manual style creature stats on various elemental creatures
- Quasi-Elementals: 29 pages of Monster Manual style creature stats on various quasi-elemental creatures
- The Elemental Planes: traits and creatures found on the elemental and quasi-elemental planes
- Elemental Society: 3 pages dealing with typical elemental personalities (by elemental type), elemental leaders, religion (or lack thereof), arcane magic, and cross-elemental relations (why fire elementals hate water elementals and vice versa)
- Methods of Warfare: specific methods of warfare by elemental race, 8 new elemental feats, and preferred spells
- Scenario Hooks: 4 ideas for scenarios involving elementals
Proofreading (provided by Mark Quennell) is about at "Mongoose standard," or perhaps a little higher: while there were the usual number of misused commas, sentence fragments, double periods at the ends of sentences and sentences missing a period, the number of mistakes wasn't as high as I've seen in past books. The editing job (provided by Richard Neale) could have used a little more work, though, especially in the monster stats. While nowhere near as bad (or as pervasive) as in
Ultimate Monsters Volume 1, there were quite a few minor problems with the stats as given. While none of them were so outlandish as to make the creatures unusable, I tend to think that in a monster book (as
The Slayer's Guide to Elementals is, much more so than previous "Slayer's Guides") you should have everything correct. I can forgive a typo or an instance of incorrect punctuation in text verbiage much easier than I can an incorrect Basic Attack Bonus or miscalculated Armor Class.
With that in mind, I felt I should point out the following:
- p. 11, Ushkya: Base Attack should be +3, not +2. Grapple should be +10, not +9. Hooves should be at +5 melee, not +4. Space/Reach should be 10 ft./5 ft. - in 3.5, everybody's space is a perfect square, so you can't have things like 5 ft. by 10 ft. anymore.
- p. 12, Thoqqua: Slam damage (in the Attack line) should be 1d6+3 plus 2d6 fire. (They left out the "+3.")
- p. 12, Wind Serpent: Has one feat too many. While this is acceptable in monster design, any above the norm for its Hit Dice should be listed as bonus feats, with a "B" in superscript immediately after the feat name. Also, is CR 19 a typo, perchance? It seems like CR 9 would be more appropriate, especially since the text suggests allowing a wind serpent to be summoned in place of a greater air elemental (which is CR 9).
- p. 15, Huge, Greater, and Elder Wood Elementals: Space should be 15 ft.
- p. 15, Greater Wood Elemental: Grapple should be +32, not +33. Slams should be at +22 melee, not +23.
- p. 15, Elder Wood Elemental: Why does he have a crit range of 19-20 without the Improved Critical (slam) feat?
- p. 18, Huge, Greater, and Elder Metal Elementals: Space should be 15 ft. Weapon Focus (slam) should add +1 to each creature's slam attack (the figures listed are all short by one point).
- p. 22, Sylph: One of her spell-like abilities (wind armor) is based on a spell from Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism, which is not reprinted here (and the book doesn't even mention where it can be located). While not technically an "error" per se, it's pretty bad form.
- p. 22, Undine: Ditto with the whirlpool special ability.
- p. 23, Chthonic Bull: Grapple should be +23, not +31, unless there's a reason for that unexplained asterisk (perhaps a +8 "quadruped bonus?"). The gore damage doesn't take its Improved Critical (gore) feat into account. Finally, the "stoning" ability is pretty cool (stones fall from the sky in a mile radius from the chthonic bull), but it doesn't seem like it would work at all on the Elemental Plane of Earth, where the creature originates (kind of hard for rocks to fall from the sky when there's no "sky").
- p. 24, Flame Lion: Has one too many feats for its Hit Dice.
- p. 26, Stormborn: Has one too many feats for its Hit Dice. "Cut of the mind" is a bit odd: why can a stormborn only add its +7 Intelligence bonus to its melee attack rolls against enemies of Intelligence 3 or higher? It seems like those creatures of low intelligence (animals, vermin), would be the easiest to anticipate and predict their behavior, leading to more accurate melee strikes.
- p. 27, Wave Eagle: Bite should be at +14 melee, not +15. Stings should be at +12 melee, not +13. (Looks like they forgot the -1 size adjustment for being a Large creature.)
- p. 30, Fine, Diminutive, and Tiny Air Elementals: Each has two feats too many.
- p. 33, Fine, Diminutive, and Tiny Fire Elementals: Each has two feats too many.
- p. 37, Half Earth Elemental Satyr: Base Attack should be +3, not +6. Grapple should be +7, not +6. Head butts should be at +7 melee, not +6. Shortbow should be at +4 ranged, not +3. Dagger should be at +2 melee, not +1. One too many feats for its Hit Dice. Finally, the artist (not sure which one, the work's unsigned) apparently doesn't know the difference between a satyr and a centaur (or perhaps the Mongoose guy in charge of selecting pre-existing artwork either didn't know the difference or figured a long-horned centaur was "close enough").
- p. 38, Ice Shard: One feat too many for its Hit Dice. Full attack refers to "cold" as "chill" (which is one of its special attacks).
- p. 40, Smoke-Ghost: Armor Class should be 17 (+1 size, +2 Charisma, +4 Dexterity), touch 17, flat-footed 13.
- p. 41, Diminutive Ash Quasi-Elemental: Slam should be at +5 melee, not +6.
- p. 41, Tiny Ash Quasi-Elemental: Hit Dice should be 1d8+6 (10 hp) - they forgot to add either the 3 points for the Toughness feat or the three points of Constitution bonus (since it has a full hit die). Also, just out of curiosity, why do Tiny ash quasi-elementals have higher Constitution scores than Small ones?
- p. 42, Large Ash Quasi-Elemental: Flat-footed Armor Class should be 16, not 15.
- p. 43, Greater Ash Quasi-Elemental: Slams should be at +20 melee, not +16.
- p. 46, Small Dust Quasi-Elemental: Flat-footed Armor Class should be 18, not 19.
- pp. 49-51, Lightning Quasi-Elementals (all sizes): One too many feats for their listed Hit Dice.
- p. 53, Fine Mineral Quasi-Elemental: With only one hit point, why would it ever use its "shatter" special attack (which deals an extra 1d3 points of damage to the victim, but causes half damage to the quasi-elemental as well). One use, and that's it for that Fine quasi-elemental - thanks for playing!
- p. 55, Elder Mineral Quasi-Elemental: Spike damage shows Improved Critical (spike) results, but the creature gained Improved Bull Rush instead.
- pp. 57-59, Radiance Quasi-Elementals (all sizes): Two extra feats for their Hit Dice (except for the Small one, which oddly only has one extra feat).
- p. 65, Small Steam Quasi-Elemental: Grapple is usually indicated as +0, not -0. (EN World messageboard user "Negative Zero" ought to get a kick out of this, though!).
- pp. 67-69, Vacuum Quasi-Elementals (all sizes): One too many feats for their Hit Dice.
- p. 68, Medium Vacuum Quasi-Elemental: Technically, the damage listing for its Full Attack should be "(1d6 + 1d6 implosion)," not "(1d6/1d6 implosion)." The latter way makes it look like the implosion occurs twice, kind of like a poison's secondary effects.
There were also some piddly little things like feats not being alphabetized, but as that's merely a convenience issue I won't bother pointing out specifically where all of those popped up.
I was a bit disappointed in the general lack of "generic information" on elementals, as that's one of the staples of a "Slayer's Guide." Granted, with elementals, Ian really didn't have a whole lot to work with - they've each pretty much got the same personality (among similar elements), they don't need to eat while on the Prime Material Plane, their hierarchy is almost always based on their relative sizes: really, what more is there to say? I found the sections in the front on various cultures' takes on elemental forces to be an interesting read, and since it led to new elemental types (wood and metal elementals are taken from Chinese mythology, for example), it was all that much the better.
One thing I did notice in
The Slayer's Guide to Elementals that I haven't seen in any other Mongoose book - and which was really annoying - is that somebody had the smart idea to not only left justify all of the text (as normal), but right justify it as well! This was done not line-by-line (which wouldn't have been so annoying), but paragraph by paragraph. That means that if a one-sentence paragraph would normally stop in the middle of a column, the whole thing was stretched out so it filled two full lines - even if it meant looking like there were four or five spaces after every word. (The best example of this is on page 83: you'll see it at once if you look). Likewise, if a one-sentence paragraph would normally be one full line and then one short word on a second line, the double-justification squished it all together. Here's an example of what this looks like, taken from page 76:
Theelementaldemiplaneofmagmahasthefollowingtraits.
(By the way, that's hard to type that way: your fingers naturally want to stick the spaces in where they belong!) In any case, if any Mongoose staff members ever see this review, please, please, please
never do that again!
A final quibble I had was the inclusion of the "Thoqqua" entry from the
Monster Manual. Sure, I suppose it made sense for "elemental inclusiveness," but I highly doubt anyone's going to pick up
The Slayer's Guide to Elementals without already owning a
Monster Manual. I was slightly disappointed to see the gnomide, royal salamander, sylph, undine, lesser phoenix, and ushkya take up space here as well, as they're taken directly from
Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism, but I suppose since they were updated to 3.5 it makes some sense. It's a pity that Alejandro Melchor, author of the aforementioned
Encyclopaedia Arcane book, didn't get a mention in the table of contents page ("Additional Material" might have been appropriate, since he originally created the 3.0 stats for those creatures), but naturally that's not my call. (I can point it out in my own review, though, you notice!)
To end on a positive note: I've got
Monster Manual-type books from each version of D&D and AD&D, and Ian's version of the mudman is the
absolute coolest I've ever seen! Also, it was a nice touch to add "Tactics Round-by-Round" to many of the individual elemental creatures. It was also interesting to see a Demiplane of Mud, as opposed to the standard Demiplane of Ooze. (Okay, it was interesting to me at least.)
To sum up:
The Slayer's Guide to Elementals makes for a rather odd duck in the "Slayer's Guide" line, since it lacks so much of what most books in the line contain. It's actually more like a
Monster Manual, only with mistakes in many of the creatures' statistics. There are some cool new monsters in here, and some interesting elemental mythology from other cultures, but all in all I can't see giving this much more than a "3 (Average)" rating.
