Initiative: After the much acclaimed and nearly indispensable
Tome of Horrors, the second volume of the series was much awaited.
Hit Dice: However, it is a little disappointing -- 80 less pages for a price $15 more expensive... Also, contrarily to the first, it's not an update of old favorites (and less favorites
), but a compendium of original monsters -- and important difference.
Since the nostalgia appeal isn't there, and neither the potential for using more easily 2e sourcebooks and adventures that references neglected monsters; those new monsters have to be interesting in their own right. And right they are.
Organisation: The book is organised roughly like the 3e MM: no chapters, just one long stream of monsters (nearly 170, more if you count as separate the multiple monsters put under the same entry, like the two new quasi-elementals), plus appendices. Bonus points for including a list of creatures by types and subtypes next to the table of content.
Special Attacks: The first appendix is for animals, 19 of them (including three with a variant). Strangely, vermins are put in the main part of the book, but not animals.
The second appendix holds nine templates: Amphisbaena (not just for snakes anymore), Cheitan (a half-efreet template), Corpsespun Creature (tied to a spider-monster in the book, named, you guessed it, Corpsespinner), Debased Fey (for wicked unseelie court type), Landwalker (now you can send krakens and piranha swarm against those landlubbing PCs! Oh, and stygian leviathans too), Phase Creatures (once you get tired of spiders...), Ravenous (kinda like a wendingo), Spellgorged Zombie (interesting things you can do with dead spellcasters), and Undead Lord (turn any undead into an evil boss).
A tenth template is placed in the third appendix. This section of the book details the N'gathau, weird sadomasochistic freaks from a lovely plane called Agony, who create more of their own through torture and mutilation. Outside of the template, there are no rules here -- only description of the Twelve bosses of the N'gathau, and of their god, the Quorum (made from four people grafted together, one man and a half, and one woman and a half). If you are a Hellraiser fan, you'll love them.
The fourth appendix details a bit a few new planes. Infernus, Lucifer's pocket realm, is here, as well as Agony. Other new planes include the Plane of Molten Skies (nice name), which is tied to Necromancer's interpretation of the City of Brass; the Plane of Time, and three quasi-elemental planes, of Acid, Lightning, and Obsidian.
Appendix five contains 16 feat on 3 and a half pages. One feat (Battle Shout) is referenced in the book, but got cut. Not for space reason, though, since there was more than enough place with that blank half page.
The sixth appendix holds a memory helper of the traits (but not features) associated with each creature type and special subtype. It also contains useful tables of monsters sorted by Challenge Rating -- including those from the first ToH, and an index listing the source and page number for each monster in both Tomes.
It ends on a legal appendix. Strangely, the first Tome of Horrors is not mentionned in Section 15. I guess it would have required them too much space to follow their own guidelines, and as they are the copyright holders, they can allow themselves this. Then there's a few pages of advertisement for Necromancer, White Wolf, and Reaper Miniatures products.
Full Attack: The icing having been done with, let's look at the cake: the 160+ monsters. The stat-blocks respect the 3.5 rules and norms (with "base attack/grapple", "attack" and "full attack" entries, and a "level adjustment" entry for each creature). Armor Class is broken as expected with full AC, list of bonus, touch AC and flat-footed AC. The Environment entry of extraplanar creatures list their home plane. And so on -- in other words, the stat-blocks are perfect.
However, the descriptive paragraph that was introduced in the revision of the Monster Manual has been imperfectly applied here. While one was written for most of the first creatures (by alphabetical order), as you progress in the book, it becomes evident this effort wasn't always done. The first paragraph of the creature's description was italicised, regardless of whether it was really a good idea. Let's take for example the Volcano Giant:
Volcano giants make their homes in the many twisting caves and subterranean rooms of volcanic cones, enlarging and reinforcing them for comfort and convenience.
For a text that is supposed to be able to be paraphrased or read aloud by a DM when he introduces a monster, it's a miss -- it does not describe in any way how the giant looks. Golems are another example: the description of the furnace golem explains how its fires need to fuel and cannot be extinguished, though they burn out if the golem is destroyed; and the description of the magnesium golem explains how they obey their masters and what they are created for. I could list a lot of others, but it would be boring, so let's pass to another gripe.
Ogre is not a subtype. The first Tome of Horrors re-introduced the half-ogre, the orog, and the ogrillon, but as humanoids with ogre, orog, and ogrillon as subtypes. It annoyed me -- conceptually, I think they should have been Giants with human and orc subtypes instead. Ogre is not a subtype, but orc is. Well, they did this again with the Ogren, a ogre/hobgoblin crossbreed, which is dubbed Humanoid (Ogre). I promptly changed it to Giant (Goblinoid). Ha!
One last technical point, art. It's overall good, better than the first Tome. There's a few pics that don't really match the description -- the abyssal wolf looks more like an abyssal lion, the scythe horn is described as bison-like but looks more like a horned horse, or a goat, etc. The only real blooper is the Clamor, described as being an incorporeal being made only of ripples of air and sound, but illustrated as sort of mouth golem or humanoid-shaped gibbering mouther. Gni?
Armor Class: The monsters themselves are usually imaginative and interesting. The swarms are especially nice: there's a swarm of grigs (good idea), a swarm of piranha (so obvious it was painful it wasn't in the MM, good idea), a swarm of animated caltrops (good idea). Only regret about swarms: a bit before in the book they made 7 entries, from Tiny to Colossal, for the Sea Wasp, a sort of jellyfish. They could have put a swarm of Tiny Sea Wasp in the same entry.
A few favorites: There are lots of Tiny fey, and that's great. Asrai (mini-naiad), Mimi (frost-themed sprite), Redcap (one-foot-tall serial killer). Outside of their own potential as monsters, the Mimi and the Redcap could make great Improved Familiars. Several nasty plants, like the bloodsuckle, vicious mind-controlling vampiric plant. Nice flavour creatures, like the Church Grim. Several new demons and devils, including in the fiendish aristocracy (the Lucifer backstory is expanded on here). The Inphidians from the first Tome gets updated and get two new variants. And the Sepia Snake, famous for the sigil spell that summons it, gets described at last! Oh, and I also like the Dragonship -- a drakar longship whose contruction requires burning several navigation maps. The knowledge once held by these destroyed maps is then kept in the Dragonship.
Among the running themes, you have undead (a lot of new undead, most of them created by a special way to be killed, be it by being hanged, crucified, magically incinerated, etc.), desert- and fire-creatures (a heavy influence of that ongoing City of Brass project at Necromancer Games), weird cats (the tangtal looks like a response to the Displacer Beast going PI, the Tazelwurm looks like a reverse Kamadan), dangerous trees (like the Gallows Tree and its zombies, the sneaky Sleeping Willow, or the Witch Tree)...
Also of note are the Weirds (if you preferred the old evil snake-shaped monsters to the new human-shaped seers, you'll like these Weirds) and the Encephalon Gorger (no, they aren't really like mindflayers, although they can fill a similar niche, somewhat).
Challenge Rating: So, what to think of this book? Well, it's a good book, and one I won't regret having purchased. Is it a must have? No, I don't think so. Contrarily to its predecessor, which is an absolute must-buy (do not care about it not being up-to-date with 3.5). I would put it somewhere between between the WotC Fiend Folio and Monster Manual 2 on the scale of Great Monster Books To Have (I'd say the hierarchy goes like this: MM1, ToH, FF, ToH2, MM2). If you liked the first Tome and the Fiend Folio, and are looking for more strange critters, the second Tome is for you, with its weird creatures and smart ideas.
