Sammael said:
The weakening of demon lords is criminal.
Reuse of BoVD Orcus art is criminal as well.
Interest--
EDIT: Hey Joe, i know you hate fluff, but what is the fluff:crunch ratio in the book? Do the stats take up so much space as to overshadow the rest of the book (a la D&DG), or are they a relatively minor part of the book (20 pages or less)?
It's not that I hate fluff. I loved Ed Greenwood's Nine Hells for example.
On the other hand...
1. I've played a long time. Hell, just mentioning Ed Greenwood's articles shows a lot of 'historical' distance in terms of RPGing.
2. My opinion on what's well written and what's not vary tremendously from others.
At the moment, I couldn't give you a fluff/crunch ratio because I don't have it with me. I was writing up my review for PHB 2 (kinda love/hate thing going there) and had the Dragon mag with zuggy in it and looked at how she is in the Abyss book. Wasn't too happy. Looked at the starting section for demon lords and got the explanation.
I'll be reading this one over the weekend and posting more thoughts on it as I go along. Lots of options for GMs to make demons more interesting but for me...
1. Dragon has done a fantastic job of this including Seven Deadly Sins, and articles on how to use demons for different areas.
2. Role Aids did a great line of demon monster books and two fairly large source books for it's time.
3. Planescape did some fantastic stuff for Demons.
Off the top of my head, does anyone know what the name of the demon that balor's were supposed to fear? The one that keept people in the Blood War when they deserted? Was it the wolf headed thing with the snake head? If so, he also got nerfed to a CR 19.