I've talked more than once about my love of bestiaries. They're my favorite part of any fantasy role-playing game. A well-done bestiary can do more to set the tone, and explain the setting, of a game than anything else. I've also followed along with the releases that DriveThruRPG has been doing of print on demand reprints of vintage TSR games and supplements. Today, these two streams cross in what I am going to call a tale of two bestiaries.
One thing that the Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the Creature Catalog for the Rules Cyclopedia edition of Dungeons & Dragons have in common is that both of them have their roots in the British gaming scene of the 70s and 80s. The Creature Catalog is John Nephew's revision of the previous British-led edition of the bestiary for the B/X stream of D&D. The Fiend Folio is a reworking of monsters that were originally created and published for the seminal Fiend Factory series of articles that White Dwarf published (before the magazine became a house organ for Games Workshop). The Fiend Folio even contains early material by Charles Stross, and a couple of monsters by EN World columnist Lewis Pulsipher.
Let's talk first about the Creature Catalog. The first edition of this came out in 1986 for the revised B/X line of D&D rulesets, but this edition came out in 1993 to support the Rules Cyclopedia. For the most part, the book compiled monsters from various of the Basic modules of the early 1980s into a single bestiary. It is a shame that they never put out a second volume to compile some of the monsters from things like the Gazetteers series or the Hollow World into a central volume. Most of the art from the first edition of the book carried over into the second, and a number of monsters from the first were replaced by other monsters in the second. You do come out ahead by a few monsters in the second edition, plus you aren't going to have to deal with some silly monsters like the Reflector.
There is also a master index of monsters that give you page numbers for this book, the original edition, the Rules Cyclopedia, the Hollow World, Dawn of the Emperors and the Wrath of The Immortals boxed sets, as well as a number of the Gazetteers. There are also a number of random encounter tables.
There are 150 monsters in the book, covering every possible monster need from aquatic to avian to undead to enormous, scary spiders. If you get the Creature Catalog to use with a retroclone, you're going to be in luck because the monsters contained within aren't in other core books, and they aren't the kinds of monsters that ended up as Open Content through the 3.x SRD or the various Tome of Horror books produced by Necromancer Games during the 3.x era, which means that these monsters are going to be uncharted territory for your players. There are a lot of weird monsters (which is a bonus for me) that will bedevil characters for a long, long time. And, honestly, that's what is important in a bestiary. If it isn't going to be useful in play, it isn't going to useful.
The quality of the POD for the Creature Catalog is variable. The text is clear and clean, and most of the line art came through nicely. Some of the illustrations that were new to this edition, with heavier black tones and more grayscales were muddy in places. Obviously a scanned image from a printed book is not always going to look as good as the reproduction of the original art, but it is important to remember that the originals aren't available to projects like this. The illustrations for the monsters in the book did mostly reproduce well.
D&D 5E fans might be happy to know that the Creature Catalog (both editions) was the birthplace of the Tortle. Unlike the Fiend Folio, unfortunately, the Creature Catalog doesn't let us know who actually created which monster. I never realized that creature's origins went back so far.
The Fiend Folio was the book that started my love affair with bestiaries in role-playing games. At the time that I originally picked this up to use in my AD&D games when I was a kid I didn't know the story behind the book, all that I knew was the it was weird and cool. These days it is pretty common knowledge that the monsters of the book were originally developed in the pages of Games Workshop's gaming magazine White Dwarf. Don Turnbull, the editor of the Fiend Folio, was an original contributor to White Dwarf, before rising to a position of being one of the magazine's editors.
One of Turnbull's jobs at White Dwarf was an ongoing column of monsters submitted by various of the writing staff of the magazine (and those who wanted to become members of that staff) called The Fiend Factory. If you haven't experienced The Fiend Factory I would suggest Googling it, because it was pretty interesting to watch. The Fiend Factory launched in the April/May 1978 issue of White Dwarf with 7 new monsters, six of which ended up in the final Fiend Folio. At this point, the write ups were actually for Original Dungeons & Dragons, and it would be a few issues before they started doing up the stats for AD&D.
The Fiend Folio was the first book for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line that was produced outside of the Wisconsin office of TSR, and it was the first book for the game that was produced outside of the scope of Gary Gygax's plans for the game. Gygax did produce a few monsters for the book, along with a couple of other American TSR staffers, but the bulk of the work was produced by Games Workshop/TSR UK. What makes the production of the book interesting was that work started on the Fiend Folio before the entire line of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core books were published. Work on the Fiend Folio started at about the same time as the Dungeon Masters Guide.
Honestly, I'm not sure what else I can say about the Fiend Folio at this point besides: you really need to have a copy of this book if you don't already. The Fiend Folio's most important contribution to the lore of the D&D multiverse would have to be Charles Stross' (yes, the same one) Githyanki and Githzerai. Due to their relationship with the mind flayers, these creatures importance grew and they became one of the handful of creatures (along with another Stross creation the Slaad) to be a part of Wizards of the Coast's closed off product identity. The kuo-toa, a "fishy" monstrous race, also debuted in the Fiend Folio and is among those closed off creations.
Among the contributions to the book by Gygax would be the AD&D premiers for the drow and Lolth, who would grow in importance to the D&D lore more through fiction set in the worlds of the game. Outside of the core rule books, I can't think of a single AD&D book that has had the lasting impact upon the lore of D&D that the Fiend Folio had. Without even getting into how cool the monsters are in the book, I think that the historical importance of the Fiend Folio is enough of a reason to have it in your library.
The Fiend Folio lives up to its subtitle of being the "Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign." There are a number of demonic and downright evil creatures to be found in the book. In fact, the flumph, one of the most maligned creatures in the history of D&D (not to mention one of the few lawful good monsters of the early days of the game).
Even if you aren't playing an AD&D 1E game, or using a suitable retroclone, there are a lot of reasons to pick up the Fiend Folio. Odds are, if you're playing one of those, you already have a copy. But if you aren't in that group of people I think that it is probably one of the more important texts in the history of D&D. Not only is it a great book of monsters, but it also signaled a major turning point in the lore of the D&D setting. For both of these reasons, you should have a copy of the book. Physically, the quality of the book is excellent. The images were clean and crisp, and the text was ledigble.
One negative that I have about my orders from DriveThruRPG's POD services is that their printer habitually under packages the books that they ship out. My copy of the Creature Catalog had a couple of dings to it, but the Fiend Folio was pretty banged up upon arrival. The book was loose in a box that was too big for it, and it obviously bounced around in the box during the shipping process. I wish that I could say that the shipping damages to these books were an outlier, but as I buy more print on demand books via the service at DriveThruRPG I find that the poor packaging isn't an aberration. I hope that the powers that be at DriveThruRPG iron this out. They offer a good number of great RPG materials in print through this program, but if books are getting damaged during shipping, that doesn't help anyone.
Despite this, I still recommend checking out the print on demand offerings that are sold through DriveThruRPG (and I hope that they expand the lines). With gaming in a new period of growth, and seeing more new gamers than we have in decades, it is good to have older materials available for those who weren't around to see them the first time. As the newest edition of Dungeons & Dragons looks more to its past than other editions have in a long while, it is good for people to be able to see the original sources and see where the games and their settings have come from. As both the core books for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the Rules Cyclopedia edition of the B/X line of Dungeons & Dragons that these two books reference are already available in POD and PDF, it invites newer players to explore the game's history, and for them to create their own history as well.
One thing that the Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the Creature Catalog for the Rules Cyclopedia edition of Dungeons & Dragons have in common is that both of them have their roots in the British gaming scene of the 70s and 80s. The Creature Catalog is John Nephew's revision of the previous British-led edition of the bestiary for the B/X stream of D&D. The Fiend Folio is a reworking of monsters that were originally created and published for the seminal Fiend Factory series of articles that White Dwarf published (before the magazine became a house organ for Games Workshop). The Fiend Folio even contains early material by Charles Stross, and a couple of monsters by EN World columnist Lewis Pulsipher.
Let's talk first about the Creature Catalog. The first edition of this came out in 1986 for the revised B/X line of D&D rulesets, but this edition came out in 1993 to support the Rules Cyclopedia. For the most part, the book compiled monsters from various of the Basic modules of the early 1980s into a single bestiary. It is a shame that they never put out a second volume to compile some of the monsters from things like the Gazetteers series or the Hollow World into a central volume. Most of the art from the first edition of the book carried over into the second, and a number of monsters from the first were replaced by other monsters in the second. You do come out ahead by a few monsters in the second edition, plus you aren't going to have to deal with some silly monsters like the Reflector.
There is also a master index of monsters that give you page numbers for this book, the original edition, the Rules Cyclopedia, the Hollow World, Dawn of the Emperors and the Wrath of The Immortals boxed sets, as well as a number of the Gazetteers. There are also a number of random encounter tables.
There are 150 monsters in the book, covering every possible monster need from aquatic to avian to undead to enormous, scary spiders. If you get the Creature Catalog to use with a retroclone, you're going to be in luck because the monsters contained within aren't in other core books, and they aren't the kinds of monsters that ended up as Open Content through the 3.x SRD or the various Tome of Horror books produced by Necromancer Games during the 3.x era, which means that these monsters are going to be uncharted territory for your players. There are a lot of weird monsters (which is a bonus for me) that will bedevil characters for a long, long time. And, honestly, that's what is important in a bestiary. If it isn't going to be useful in play, it isn't going to useful.
The quality of the POD for the Creature Catalog is variable. The text is clear and clean, and most of the line art came through nicely. Some of the illustrations that were new to this edition, with heavier black tones and more grayscales were muddy in places. Obviously a scanned image from a printed book is not always going to look as good as the reproduction of the original art, but it is important to remember that the originals aren't available to projects like this. The illustrations for the monsters in the book did mostly reproduce well.
D&D 5E fans might be happy to know that the Creature Catalog (both editions) was the birthplace of the Tortle. Unlike the Fiend Folio, unfortunately, the Creature Catalog doesn't let us know who actually created which monster. I never realized that creature's origins went back so far.
The Fiend Folio was the book that started my love affair with bestiaries in role-playing games. At the time that I originally picked this up to use in my AD&D games when I was a kid I didn't know the story behind the book, all that I knew was the it was weird and cool. These days it is pretty common knowledge that the monsters of the book were originally developed in the pages of Games Workshop's gaming magazine White Dwarf. Don Turnbull, the editor of the Fiend Folio, was an original contributor to White Dwarf, before rising to a position of being one of the magazine's editors.
One of Turnbull's jobs at White Dwarf was an ongoing column of monsters submitted by various of the writing staff of the magazine (and those who wanted to become members of that staff) called The Fiend Factory. If you haven't experienced The Fiend Factory I would suggest Googling it, because it was pretty interesting to watch. The Fiend Factory launched in the April/May 1978 issue of White Dwarf with 7 new monsters, six of which ended up in the final Fiend Folio. At this point, the write ups were actually for Original Dungeons & Dragons, and it would be a few issues before they started doing up the stats for AD&D.
The Fiend Folio was the first book for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line that was produced outside of the Wisconsin office of TSR, and it was the first book for the game that was produced outside of the scope of Gary Gygax's plans for the game. Gygax did produce a few monsters for the book, along with a couple of other American TSR staffers, but the bulk of the work was produced by Games Workshop/TSR UK. What makes the production of the book interesting was that work started on the Fiend Folio before the entire line of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons core books were published. Work on the Fiend Folio started at about the same time as the Dungeon Masters Guide.
Honestly, I'm not sure what else I can say about the Fiend Folio at this point besides: you really need to have a copy of this book if you don't already. The Fiend Folio's most important contribution to the lore of the D&D multiverse would have to be Charles Stross' (yes, the same one) Githyanki and Githzerai. Due to their relationship with the mind flayers, these creatures importance grew and they became one of the handful of creatures (along with another Stross creation the Slaad) to be a part of Wizards of the Coast's closed off product identity. The kuo-toa, a "fishy" monstrous race, also debuted in the Fiend Folio and is among those closed off creations.
Among the contributions to the book by Gygax would be the AD&D premiers for the drow and Lolth, who would grow in importance to the D&D lore more through fiction set in the worlds of the game. Outside of the core rule books, I can't think of a single AD&D book that has had the lasting impact upon the lore of D&D that the Fiend Folio had. Without even getting into how cool the monsters are in the book, I think that the historical importance of the Fiend Folio is enough of a reason to have it in your library.
The Fiend Folio lives up to its subtitle of being the "Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign." There are a number of demonic and downright evil creatures to be found in the book. In fact, the flumph, one of the most maligned creatures in the history of D&D (not to mention one of the few lawful good monsters of the early days of the game).
Even if you aren't playing an AD&D 1E game, or using a suitable retroclone, there are a lot of reasons to pick up the Fiend Folio. Odds are, if you're playing one of those, you already have a copy. But if you aren't in that group of people I think that it is probably one of the more important texts in the history of D&D. Not only is it a great book of monsters, but it also signaled a major turning point in the lore of the D&D setting. For both of these reasons, you should have a copy of the book. Physically, the quality of the book is excellent. The images were clean and crisp, and the text was ledigble.
One negative that I have about my orders from DriveThruRPG's POD services is that their printer habitually under packages the books that they ship out. My copy of the Creature Catalog had a couple of dings to it, but the Fiend Folio was pretty banged up upon arrival. The book was loose in a box that was too big for it, and it obviously bounced around in the box during the shipping process. I wish that I could say that the shipping damages to these books were an outlier, but as I buy more print on demand books via the service at DriveThruRPG I find that the poor packaging isn't an aberration. I hope that the powers that be at DriveThruRPG iron this out. They offer a good number of great RPG materials in print through this program, but if books are getting damaged during shipping, that doesn't help anyone.
Despite this, I still recommend checking out the print on demand offerings that are sold through DriveThruRPG (and I hope that they expand the lines). With gaming in a new period of growth, and seeing more new gamers than we have in decades, it is good to have older materials available for those who weren't around to see them the first time. As the newest edition of Dungeons & Dragons looks more to its past than other editions have in a long while, it is good for people to be able to see the original sources and see where the games and their settings have come from. As both the core books for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the Rules Cyclopedia edition of the B/X line of Dungeons & Dragons that these two books reference are already available in POD and PDF, it invites newer players to explore the game's history, and for them to create their own history as well.
