D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!

[Stormonu]

I read the arms and equipment guide off of the 2e rules CD's rtf of the book, so no pictures. I don't remember anything particularly standing out. It probably lost a bit without the art.

Nowadays, with the access to Wikipedia and the like, the book is not as invaluable as it used to be. The artwork wasn't extraordinary in any way, but it clear up a lot of areas where people might have had a question about exactly what armor or weapon was being referred to (as sometimes what D&D refers to as an "X" weapon is somewhat muddled in other resource literature. Modern D&D has cleaned up/clarified/redefined a lot of weapon and armor classifications since those days.

 

[Orius]

Arms and Equipment wasn't bad, it's just that looking back on 2e, Combat & Tactics had a much better and comprehensive section on weapons. Armor, too. The equipment chapter in Arms and Equipment isn't too bad though, and the chapter on horse barding is good for what it is. Some of the weapon illustrations weren't that good at depicting the weapons either.

Still, it was a good resource when first published. It took several years for Combat and Tactics to come along, so this book was good for a while.

Also, each section of the book was handed by a different writer, so they do feel a bit different. I think the idea behind the book was to provide comprehensive descriptions of the weapons, but it wasn't enough to fill 128 pages, so the other chapters were meant to pad things out. There's a few places, especially in the armor chapter, where things fell like filler.

 

[Alzrius]

So now we come to DMGR4 Monster Mythology, and before I say anything else I have to get this out of the way:

ZOMGILOVETHISBOOKSOMUCHSQUEEEE!!!

Remember how much I gushed out The Complete Psionics Handbook? Well that's nothing compared to the enjoyment I get from this! I bought my copy of DMGR4 years and years ago, and I'm quite honestly shocked it hasn't fallen completely to pieces from how much I've read it. I still pull it off the shelf just to peruse when the mood strikes me, despite having half of the book memorized. As someone who owns around two thousand print RPG products (if we include individual issues of magazines like Dragon and Dungeon), I like to think it means something when I say that this is in my personal top ten. Yeah, it's pure nostalgia winning out over practical functionality, but who cares? I love this book!

I mentioned back when I was going over The Complete Priest's Handbook that this was the closest I came to looking for a generic book on deities that weren't tied to a particular campaign world. Sure Legends & Lore fit that bill also, but its cultural trappings were too strong for me (which also the case for 1E's Deities & Demigods). Here we got the completely original pantheons that I wanted to find, without having to splurge on a boxed set, and while fifty some-odd deities here were updated from earlier sources, more than half of them were completely new (and at the time, they were almost all new to me). And while I'd thankfully be over my search for a generic pantheon by the time that Faiths & Avatars, Powers & Pantheons, and Demihuman Deities came out (that last one retreading some of the ground in DMGR4) - setting a new standard for how gods were presented in AD&D 2E - Monster Mythology was the MVP of "god books" prior to that.

(As an aside, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention AuldDragon's Monster Mythology Update Project. I know everyone knows about it already, but it deserves to be mentioned again for how superb it is.)

But about Monster Mythology, I could go on for paragraph after paragraph, there's just so much to love here. For instance, there's a minor shift in presentation here from Legends & Lore that I quickly picked up on: unlike in that book, the deities in DMGR4 are presented as existing within the holistic scope of the Great Wheel cosmology. That is, this book tacitly acknowledged that all of its gods were a part of the same setting, unlike how L&L presented its gods in the context of historical Earth. Of course, On Hallowed Ground would put them into the Great Wheel as well (though, to be fair, D&D had assumed that all the various human pantheons were on the Outer Planes as early as the 1E Manual of the Planes, but it was nice to get a contextualized presentation of how the various deities fit into a planar point of view). Since I didn't know much about D&D's planar setting at the time, I found those tantalizing.

I also remember being quite pleased with how Monster Mythology took into account the new clerical spheres from the 2E Tome of Magic, something that Legends & Lore didn't have since it predated that book (there'd be a series in the "Sage Advice" column of Dragon magazine, starting around issue #198 or so, with unofficial updates for the new spheres to the pantheons in L&L, but again, I wouldn't find out about that until later). To my mind, this was another mark of greater usefulness.

I think what stuck with me most, however, was just how much this put a whole lot of "big bads" into play. For all that I know a lot of people looked down on the idea of "gods as just big monsters," I absolutely loved the idea of being able to mix it up with (the avatars of) actual gods. Of course, I came by this honestly, since D&D had been indulging in that at least as far back as Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, but I still relished the thought of crossing blades with the likes of Maglubiyet or standing up to the savage fury of Yeenoghu.

That reminds me of another point: quite a few demon lords made the jump to being deities as of this particular tome. Demogorgon, Yeenoghu, Baphomet, Juiblex and more. To this day, I'm still not sure why the decision was made to elevate them (since they weren't gods in 1E, even if the Manual of the Planes edged them closer to that status, nor were they divinities in 3E), or why they were the only planar rulers to get that treatment, compared to, say, Asmodeus and the various Lords of the Nine.

Also, despite my fanboying out over this book, I've never been entirely sold by how small the Unseelie Court is compared to its good counterpart. Seriously, it consists of exactly one deity! I mean, the tale of the mysterious and insidiously powerful Black Diamond that turned the Queen of Air and Darkness into what she is makes for a damn cool story (and we've never gotten the lowdown on just what the Black Diamond really is), but you're really telling me that the numerous gods of the Seelie Court couldn't take down one intermediate deity? Yeah, I know Titania doesn't want to destroy her sister, and everyone is leery of the corruptive power of the Diamond, but come on; the Unseelie Court needs more to bulk it up!

Also, fun fact: this book features the Elder Elemental God and the Dark God, the latter of whom is Tharizdun by another name, matching how he's presented in WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun. While everyone takes it for granted that Tharizdun and the Elder Elemental God (or "Elder Elemental Eye," as it was called in G1-3 Against the Giants) are one and the same, that was a connection only made as of 3E's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. (For more on this, check out this thread over on RPG.net.)

But yeah, so much to love here. Stats and lore galore, my favorite combination. This just might be as good as the leatherette series ever got.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Voadam]

That reminds me of another point: quite a few demon lords made the jump to being deities as of this particular tome. Demogorgon, Yeenoghu, Baphomet, Juiblex and more. To this day, I'm still not sure why the decision was made to elevate them (since they weren't gods in 1E, even if the Manual of the Planes edged them closer to that status, nor were they divinities in 3E), or why they were the only planar rulers to get that treatment, compared to, say, Asmodeus and the various Lords of the Nine.

I think this is mostly 1e history. Yeenoghu was connected to gnolls and Juiblex with oozes and slimes in the 1e MM, Baphomet with minotaurs in MM II, and Lolth with drow in the Fiend Folio. I am not sure if the Ixitxachitl connection to Demogorgon came in a dragon article but the MM does not mention a connection between their clerics and the demon lord.

None of the devils had a connection to specific races in 1e that I was aware of. Orcs and Sahuagin were the big LE monster manual races and had their own full racial gods in 1e.

Demon Lords and Arch Devils were both lesser gods on their own plane in the 1e Manual of Planes.

 

[Alzrius]

Yeenoghu was connected to gnolls and Juiblex with oozes and slimes in the 1e MM, Baphomet with minotaurs in MM II, and Lolth with drow in the Fiend Folio. I am not sure if the Ixitxachitl connection to Demogorgon came in a dragon article but the MM does not mention a connection between their clerics and the demon lord.

Them being the "gods" of those monsters makes sense, though I suspect that the connection could have been made for other demon lords. Graz'zt and Pazuzu (or rather, Pazrael) were both given non-divine stats in Planes of Chaos (affiliate link); I suspect that they could have been made the deities of, say, lamias and harpies just as easily as Demogorgon could have been for ixitxachitl, so it still seems a tad arbitrary to me.

That said, the Lords of the Nine did have their own niches carved out (those being the layers of Hell that they controlled, rather than a race or a particular evil activity), but 2E was very unclear about how it wanted to portray them, leaving it to a single article in Dragon #223 which, if I recall correctly, had them not being gods but still gave stats for avatars of theirs.

 

[Stormonu]

Many of these entries are collections of and expansions of prior lore scattered between Unearthed Arcana, Dragon Magazine and the various monster manuals of 1E. It is nice to see them all in one place and their lore expanded, but I never paid the book much attention as I was familiar with most of the background information from past sources (and was using my own homebrew world, with different gods).

One thing I hadn't realized or had forgotten about was the lack of goblin gods in Monster Mythology. I thought information about nilbogs and the hobgoblin gods enslaving/overcoming the goblin gods in 5E was a retcon, and was therefore surprised when I pulled this tome out to discover a distinct lack of goblin gods in the first place.

 

[Alzrius]

One thing I hadn't realized or had forgotten about was the lack of goblin gods in Monster Mythology. I thought information about nilbogs and the hobgoblin gods enslaving/overcoming the goblin gods in 5E was a retcon, and was therefore surprised when I pulled this tome out to discover a distinct lack of goblin gods in the first place.

I'm pretty sure you have the part about which gods were overcome backwards.

 

[delericho]

Unfortunately, Monster Mythology came at just the wrong time for me. I've oscillated between "homebrew everything" and "use as much published material as possible", and this book came as I was deep in the homebrew position. So I got it, gave it a look, but didn't really have any use for it. So onto the shelf it went...

 

[Voadam]

That said, the Lords of the Nine did have their own niches carved out (those being the layers of Hell that they controlled, rather than a race or a particular evil activity), but 2E was very unclear about how it wanted to portray them, leaving it to a single article in Dragon #223 which, if I recall correctly, had them not being gods but still gave stats for avatars of theirs.

There is also the 2e Guide to Hell where Asmodeus is a greater power independent of worshipers and there is discussion of the other Lords of the Nine too.

Geryon has stuff in A Paladin in Hell.

 

[Orius]

I don't have much to add about Monster Mythology except that I prefer its power level to what we got with the Faiths and Avatars stuff. The specialty priests were far more in line with what Legends and Lore did, while the material from the Faiths and Avatars series was pretty powerful. So in a 2e game, MM is the baseline for the demihuman priests when I'm running things. Demihuman Deities though is still useful for the fluff, and I'd probably allow some of the spells.

Obviously the usefulness of this book really depends on whether or not the DM is using the traditional non human gods.