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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2009945" data-attributes="member: 9860">This is not a playtest review.The Encyclopaedia Of Demons & Devils II is the sequel to Fast Forward Entertainment's original d20 presentation of evil spirits from real-world folklore, myth, and legend.The Encyclopaedia Of Demons & Devils II is a 224-page mono hardcover product costing $29.99. Font and margins are fairly standard, but a horned skull used to enclose the page number invades page space on each page and causes regular areas of white space that could have been used more effectively. Each monster is illustrated in the frame of a tarot-card-like border; there has been an attempt to portray a mediaeval feel to the illustrations using woodcut-style, simple line drawings, and what look like pictures scanned in from old books - this does not work for me and I found the general quality of the artwork poor apart from the two Jennifer Meyer full-page gems hidden within the book. I found the writing style somewhat varied, reflecting the several different authors who worked on the project, ranging from poor to good. Editing quality also varies.The Encyclopaedia Of Demons & Devils II contains 135 evil spirits taken from real-world mythology and folklore and translated into d20 terms. The monsters range in their depth of coverage from one page to four and CR's range from 1 to 30 with a good spread of CR's within this range. The monster statistics vary considerably in terms of sticking to standard monster creation guidelines - most notably, some CRs are way off. A simple example is the demon Nybras, who is given a CR 1 but has  spell-casting abilities of a 6th-level sorcerer, damage reduction, spell resistance, and a few other demonic abilities that certainly make it more powerful than a Dretch (CR 2). As I looked at some of the monsters with higher hit dice, some of the CR's seemed to be more significantly out (for example a 12 HD/CR 15 monster with similar stats and abilities to a 15 HD/CR 12 monster). Stat blocks contain further minor errors.Some monsters that have a few more pages dedicated to them are presented as potential deities, and some have prestige classes  and spells attached to their section as well, designed to boost the powers of their followers. These prestige classes start in a bad way, with a 20-level class with prestige class requirements (albeit 1st level ones such as Diplomacy 2 ranks). Others have non-standard BAB and save progressions. The spells are somewhat better but also suffer from some nebulous rules on occasion.Apart from the information within the individual monster descriptions, there is no extra material to aid a GM in finding a suitable monster for an adventure - no listing by CR, type, or anything like that, merely a table of contents with an alphabetical list at the beginning.ConclusionThe Encyclopaedia Of Demons & Devils II is an interesting reference book on mythological evil spirits but fails too frequently to provide reliable d20 statistics and rules for the devils and demons it describes, nor are the spells and prestige classes provided for the monster-as-deity's followers created with much appreciation for the d20 rules. If you are prepared to go through the stat blocks, ignore or amend the prestige classes, and are interested in reference information on mythological evil spirits, then this might be worth the money.</blockquote>

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