Psion
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The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium
The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium is a rules supplement for detailing Undead characters (PCs and NPCs) in a d20 System fantasy game. The book is published by Fast Forward Entertainment and written by Herbert A. Beas, Bret Boyd, Jarad Fennell, B.D. Flory, Tim Kidwell, Todd Laing, M.K. McArtor, Gary McBride, Jason Peck, and Jakko Westerbeke.
A First Look
The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium is a 128-page perfect bound softcover book priced at $24.99.
The cover of the book is a dark textured tone with a skull-emblem on it. The cover design is by William W. Conners.
The interior is black and white, with art by Phil Renne and Steve Bryant, with some freeware clip-art. The art is passable; it appears in some places that poor lithography or graphical resolution has compromised Renne's talents.
A Deeper Look
The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium is divided into six major sections plus an introduction.
The first major section is entitled Undead Game. The section is primarily GM advice, though there are a few rules suggestions in it. The chapter provides ideas for constructing and running an undead game. This advice includes themes you might want to weave into the campaign, a mood you may want to induce, sample character personality types, and so forth.
Notice that I called the rules material in the chapter "rules suggestions." The rules in the chapter read a bit like a forum post suggesting rules for things like handling advancement (basically describing something not unlike the monster progressions seen in WotC's Savage Species) and some pretty neat sounding rules for PCs resisting urges related to their undead nature. The rules are in pretty rough shape, and could really use some polishing to help make them of easy use to a busy DM who doesn't have time to flesh these all out.
The Races section is the single largest in the book, taking up almost half of the total page count. It is divided into three subsections, undead races, undead templates, and mortal templates.
The races presents five creatures in race format, three already in the core rules (devourer, shadow, and wraith) and two new (poltergeist and reaper). These races incorporate some of the suggestions mentioned in chapter one for advancing as a monster race. However they do it inconsistently (the devourer's abilities are lumped mostly lumped in at it's first HD, where the poltergeist sees its spell like abilities scattered across levels more comfortably) and do not have progression tables to organize their advancement.
The second section, undead templates, provides a variety of templates. There are many templates for new creatures, template versions of existing non-template creatures (much like appeared in Mongoose's Slayer's Guide to Undead), revised versions of existing undead templates, and a few templates to modify undead creatures.
Some of the template-ified creatures include the Allip and the Vampire Spawn. The allip is neat, and shows an example of a grig allip. The vampire spawn left me wondering though, what the point of making it into a template is; it already has a template version. The vampire spawn template is basically a slightly more savage and stupid version of the vampire template.
I'm not to clear on why templates like the vampire and lich were redone and the text sheds no light on this. However, there are some nifty little changes to their abilities that a GM may consider using to give these creatures a bit of flavor. For example, liches herein have the ability to telekinetically disarm foes, and vampire's abilities are taken a step towards their classic image by the introduction of a magical "seduce" ability.
New templates include the horror (animate blobs of rotting flesh) and the gloom eater. The gloom eater is a template for nightshades who have consume divine spellcasters. It struck me as odd that the template had a mechanic for spell immunity for spells below a certain level, since this mechanic, formerly used by nightshades and rakshasas in 3.0, has been largely abandoned in 3.5. This had me wondering whether this book was written to 3.5 standards, but a quick check elsewhere shows that other creatures are built with 3.5 rules in mind.
There are three templates for mortal living creatures: the chosen (appointed divine champions), the death master (champions of the powers of death), and demon hunters. Though I see nothing wrong with the templates per se, the concept seems like it would have been a neater fit with prestige classes.
The third section is prestige classes, and includes prestige classes both for mortals and undead creatures. I am glad to report that the prestige classes, while a bit unusual, don't fall into the same old ruts that many prestige classes do, but do seem to draw from recognized sources. There are some irregularies such as nonstandard (for the fantasy SRD) save progressions, but the progression does seem to follow the middle d20 modern pattern.
Mortal prestige classes include the chosen ally (a companion with unusual resilience who passively makes the rest of the party better, a bit like some famous hobbits) and the mouthpiece of the dead (a lackey and spokesperson for the undead; think Bennie from The Mummy).
Undead classes are mostly for leaderly roles, such as the sire and undead overlord. They don't make the old mistake of omitting fortitude save progressions for undead classes, but they do make the mistake of loading up a class with abilities and then giving it full spell progression.
The skills and feats chapter includes new skill uses, some of special interest to undead. For example, undead creatures with handle animals can try to avoid the negative reactions animals usually have with undead.
All of the feats introduced here are undead exclusive, and mostly read like new creature abilities, such as raising a foe slain in melee as a zombie. There are a variety of metamagic feats that draw on negative energy (in the form of undead HP) to power them instead of spell levels, which seems potentially abusive. However, some feats seem like they could add some interesting spins for undead opponents, such as "dismemberment" feat chain with follow on feats like "eye spy" that allow the undead creature to pluck its eye out and use it like a camera of sorts.
The magic and spells section again is primarily for use by undead or to create the same. Many new spells allow the creation of new undead types. Others do things like project negative energy (to heal undead or harm mortals) or destroy rebellious servants. A few make the classic mistake of adding spells to existing spell domains.
The last section, playing the undead seems to almost belong alongside the earlier campaign section, but is perhaps a bit more targeted at potential players of undead PCs. It provides a brief overview of questions and considerations you may want to consider when making an undead PC. The section has almost no rules material.
Conclusions
After the Monstrous Wizards Compendium, I was really dreading reviewing this. To my surprise I found that there was a lot of nice material herein and not so much in the way of blatantly unbalanced materials. That said, many of the rules seemed a little unpolished.
Though the product is targeted at making undead PCs, I still feel GMs are more likely to get something out of this than players. There are some potential new undead villains, but not near as much in the way of compelling ideas to draw a player in as there are in the likes of Bottled Imp's Lord of the Night: Liches.
Overall Grade: C
-Alan D. Kohler
The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium is a rules supplement for detailing Undead characters (PCs and NPCs) in a d20 System fantasy game. The book is published by Fast Forward Entertainment and written by Herbert A. Beas, Bret Boyd, Jarad Fennell, B.D. Flory, Tim Kidwell, Todd Laing, M.K. McArtor, Gary McBride, Jason Peck, and Jakko Westerbeke.
A First Look
The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium is a 128-page perfect bound softcover book priced at $24.99.
The cover of the book is a dark textured tone with a skull-emblem on it. The cover design is by William W. Conners.
The interior is black and white, with art by Phil Renne and Steve Bryant, with some freeware clip-art. The art is passable; it appears in some places that poor lithography or graphical resolution has compromised Renne's talents.
A Deeper Look
The Complete Monstrous Undead Compendium is divided into six major sections plus an introduction.
The first major section is entitled Undead Game. The section is primarily GM advice, though there are a few rules suggestions in it. The chapter provides ideas for constructing and running an undead game. This advice includes themes you might want to weave into the campaign, a mood you may want to induce, sample character personality types, and so forth.
Notice that I called the rules material in the chapter "rules suggestions." The rules in the chapter read a bit like a forum post suggesting rules for things like handling advancement (basically describing something not unlike the monster progressions seen in WotC's Savage Species) and some pretty neat sounding rules for PCs resisting urges related to their undead nature. The rules are in pretty rough shape, and could really use some polishing to help make them of easy use to a busy DM who doesn't have time to flesh these all out.
The Races section is the single largest in the book, taking up almost half of the total page count. It is divided into three subsections, undead races, undead templates, and mortal templates.
The races presents five creatures in race format, three already in the core rules (devourer, shadow, and wraith) and two new (poltergeist and reaper). These races incorporate some of the suggestions mentioned in chapter one for advancing as a monster race. However they do it inconsistently (the devourer's abilities are lumped mostly lumped in at it's first HD, where the poltergeist sees its spell like abilities scattered across levels more comfortably) and do not have progression tables to organize their advancement.
The second section, undead templates, provides a variety of templates. There are many templates for new creatures, template versions of existing non-template creatures (much like appeared in Mongoose's Slayer's Guide to Undead), revised versions of existing undead templates, and a few templates to modify undead creatures.
Some of the template-ified creatures include the Allip and the Vampire Spawn. The allip is neat, and shows an example of a grig allip. The vampire spawn left me wondering though, what the point of making it into a template is; it already has a template version. The vampire spawn template is basically a slightly more savage and stupid version of the vampire template.
I'm not to clear on why templates like the vampire and lich were redone and the text sheds no light on this. However, there are some nifty little changes to their abilities that a GM may consider using to give these creatures a bit of flavor. For example, liches herein have the ability to telekinetically disarm foes, and vampire's abilities are taken a step towards their classic image by the introduction of a magical "seduce" ability.
New templates include the horror (animate blobs of rotting flesh) and the gloom eater. The gloom eater is a template for nightshades who have consume divine spellcasters. It struck me as odd that the template had a mechanic for spell immunity for spells below a certain level, since this mechanic, formerly used by nightshades and rakshasas in 3.0, has been largely abandoned in 3.5. This had me wondering whether this book was written to 3.5 standards, but a quick check elsewhere shows that other creatures are built with 3.5 rules in mind.
There are three templates for mortal living creatures: the chosen (appointed divine champions), the death master (champions of the powers of death), and demon hunters. Though I see nothing wrong with the templates per se, the concept seems like it would have been a neater fit with prestige classes.
The third section is prestige classes, and includes prestige classes both for mortals and undead creatures. I am glad to report that the prestige classes, while a bit unusual, don't fall into the same old ruts that many prestige classes do, but do seem to draw from recognized sources. There are some irregularies such as nonstandard (for the fantasy SRD) save progressions, but the progression does seem to follow the middle d20 modern pattern.
Mortal prestige classes include the chosen ally (a companion with unusual resilience who passively makes the rest of the party better, a bit like some famous hobbits) and the mouthpiece of the dead (a lackey and spokesperson for the undead; think Bennie from The Mummy).
Undead classes are mostly for leaderly roles, such as the sire and undead overlord. They don't make the old mistake of omitting fortitude save progressions for undead classes, but they do make the mistake of loading up a class with abilities and then giving it full spell progression.
The skills and feats chapter includes new skill uses, some of special interest to undead. For example, undead creatures with handle animals can try to avoid the negative reactions animals usually have with undead.
All of the feats introduced here are undead exclusive, and mostly read like new creature abilities, such as raising a foe slain in melee as a zombie. There are a variety of metamagic feats that draw on negative energy (in the form of undead HP) to power them instead of spell levels, which seems potentially abusive. However, some feats seem like they could add some interesting spins for undead opponents, such as "dismemberment" feat chain with follow on feats like "eye spy" that allow the undead creature to pluck its eye out and use it like a camera of sorts.
The magic and spells section again is primarily for use by undead or to create the same. Many new spells allow the creation of new undead types. Others do things like project negative energy (to heal undead or harm mortals) or destroy rebellious servants. A few make the classic mistake of adding spells to existing spell domains.
The last section, playing the undead seems to almost belong alongside the earlier campaign section, but is perhaps a bit more targeted at potential players of undead PCs. It provides a brief overview of questions and considerations you may want to consider when making an undead PC. The section has almost no rules material.
Conclusions
After the Monstrous Wizards Compendium, I was really dreading reviewing this. To my surprise I found that there was a lot of nice material herein and not so much in the way of blatantly unbalanced materials. That said, many of the rules seemed a little unpolished.
Though the product is targeted at making undead PCs, I still feel GMs are more likely to get something out of this than players. There are some potential new undead villains, but not near as much in the way of compelling ideas to draw a player in as there are in the likes of Bottled Imp's Lord of the Night: Liches.
Overall Grade: C
-Alan D. Kohler
