IronWolf
blank
Enemies and Allies
Back in the days of the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, TSR published a product called the Rogues Gallery. The Rogues Gallery was an assortment of NPC statistics for each character class available at the time. Except for a number of famous characters of big names like Gygax that were included as a novelty, the characters had little in the way of personality or background information.
The second edition of the game also had a product called the Rogues Gallery. This time around, the product was a little different. Each NPC took a page including background, possessions, history, and statistics. This made the product a bit more useful as a source of ideas and ready NPCs that could be dropped into a campaign with little work.
Now that D&D 3e is here, it appears that Enemies & Allies is destined to fill the role that the old Rogues Gallery products once filled. Enemies & Allies is a book containing a variety of NPC statistics for the D&D 3e game. But how useful a resource will this be? Let's take a look.
A First Look
Enemies & Allies is a 64 page softbound book with a color cover and a black and white interior. The cover has the brown metal bound leather book motif shared by the Heroes Builder's Guidebook and the various classbooks. The book is priced at $14.95 US, which means that the book comes in at a relatively high price per page.
The bulk of the book's original interior artwork appears to be done by Dennis Cramer, who you may also recognize as the illustrator of the widely decried gory halfling picture in the pages of Dragon magazine. There are some other illustrator's talents in the book, most noticeably Todd Lockwood's, but many of those illustrations are reprints of the iconic character pictures from the PHB.
As with most WotC books, the overall text density is fairly high, with a small font and line spacing. This helps defray the relatively high cost per page cover price.
A Deeper Look
The book is sorted into five chapters and three appendices. Each of the chapters contains NPC statistic blocks, and are arranged similarly. Each NPC or related group of NPCs has a background section, a statistics section, and a section describing tactics. All of the NPC statistics only use the core rules.
Most of the chapters have NPCs falling into two categories: named NPCs, and unnamed NPCs. The unnamed NPCs are catch-all stats for low-level lackeys with fairly uniform statistics. Examples would be typical thugs, guards, or evil minions. The named NPCs are individuals.
The five chapters divide the NPCs into categories that a DM may find useful in defining their role in the campaign. The chapters are: crime, religion, mages, the law, and adventurers. The one category that is common in fantasy settings that seems conspicuously absent is that of soldiers or warriors.
The crime chapter describes a number of criminal figures that the PCs may run afoul. The chapter includes unnamed figures like a typical thug, a pickpocket gang, a typical burglar, and a halfling "cleaning crew"- hardened killers who eliminate those who have earned the guild's annoyance. Perhaps this is who Denis Cramer was thinking of when he painted his infamous gory halfling picture in Dragon magazine...
Moving into named characters in the crime chapter, we find such fingers as a precinct boss, a black marketeer, and exotic and dangerous figures such as a mind flayer assassin, a djinn slaver, and an urban druid.
The next chapter is the religion chapter. Amongst the nameless hordes in this chapter are a temple guard, a temple warder (a fighter/monk assigned to more important guard duty) and a senior temple guard. The named characters are a menagarie of preists, each following one of the many standard Greyhawk deities.
The third chapter covers mages, which can also include other scholarly types. The only unnamed character type is the evil minion, an evil low level wizard/rogue trained by a higher level wizard to do their bidding. The named characters include a loremaster, a wicked leader of a cult of evil mages, a chaotic sorceress, a halfling apprentice, a minotaur wizard, and a dwarven necromancer.
The fourth chapter describes a set of characters that some PCs tend to run afoul more than criminals: those that enforce the law. Amongst the nameless hordes in this chapter are a typical city guard and an elite guard. Moving on to more distinguished company we have a guard captain, a dwarven rogue in employ of the nightwatch, a bureaucrat, a band of gnome vigilantes, and an elven warden of the forest.
The fifth chapter details a few adventuring parties that are probably quite unlike any PC adventuring party the DM has had the displeasure to run. The Circle of Green are champions of nature. The Band of the Hand are greedy mercenaries and looters. The Claw is an adventuring party composed entirely of hideous creatures like trolls and ettercaps. Finally, the Pale Grin is an adventuring party composed (or is it de-composed?) almost entirely of undead. Finally, the chapter includes a lone-gunman type half-dragon cleric to harass your PCs with.
The book includes three appendices.
The first appendix is called "the one-minute NPC." This appendix is really nothing to get worked up about, as it is merely a random encounter table that will give you the occupation of a character coupled with a list of possible representatives of each table from the ranks of NPCs in the book.
The second appendix lists all of the iconic characters pictured in the D&D 3e PHB. Unlike the earlier characters, there are no background, personality, or tactics notes. Each iconic character has statistics at 5th, 10th, and 15th level.
The final appendix is merely a listing of the NPCs and groups in the book by encounter level.
Summary
Cordell & Co. have put some effort into ensuring that some of the NPCs in this book are unique and interesting. Despite this, there are few concepts that made me want to use the book just to have a certain NPC in my game.
That is not to say the book is useless. Far from it. If you have ever made detailed NPCs and have realized how cumbersome properly statting and equipping them can be, or are someone who can use some help with personality and description on the fly, there is a good chance that there is an NPC in this book that you can simply drop into your game and play with. This holds true especially if you are the sort of DM that frequently goes off the beaten path into uncharted territory.
This utility is somewhat hampered by the fact that the book is fairly costly per page, even by WotC standards.
-Alan D. Kohler
Back in the days of the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, TSR published a product called the Rogues Gallery. The Rogues Gallery was an assortment of NPC statistics for each character class available at the time. Except for a number of famous characters of big names like Gygax that were included as a novelty, the characters had little in the way of personality or background information.
The second edition of the game also had a product called the Rogues Gallery. This time around, the product was a little different. Each NPC took a page including background, possessions, history, and statistics. This made the product a bit more useful as a source of ideas and ready NPCs that could be dropped into a campaign with little work.
Now that D&D 3e is here, it appears that Enemies & Allies is destined to fill the role that the old Rogues Gallery products once filled. Enemies & Allies is a book containing a variety of NPC statistics for the D&D 3e game. But how useful a resource will this be? Let's take a look.
A First Look
Enemies & Allies is a 64 page softbound book with a color cover and a black and white interior. The cover has the brown metal bound leather book motif shared by the Heroes Builder's Guidebook and the various classbooks. The book is priced at $14.95 US, which means that the book comes in at a relatively high price per page.
The bulk of the book's original interior artwork appears to be done by Dennis Cramer, who you may also recognize as the illustrator of the widely decried gory halfling picture in the pages of Dragon magazine. There are some other illustrator's talents in the book, most noticeably Todd Lockwood's, but many of those illustrations are reprints of the iconic character pictures from the PHB.
As with most WotC books, the overall text density is fairly high, with a small font and line spacing. This helps defray the relatively high cost per page cover price.
A Deeper Look
The book is sorted into five chapters and three appendices. Each of the chapters contains NPC statistic blocks, and are arranged similarly. Each NPC or related group of NPCs has a background section, a statistics section, and a section describing tactics. All of the NPC statistics only use the core rules.
Most of the chapters have NPCs falling into two categories: named NPCs, and unnamed NPCs. The unnamed NPCs are catch-all stats for low-level lackeys with fairly uniform statistics. Examples would be typical thugs, guards, or evil minions. The named NPCs are individuals.
The five chapters divide the NPCs into categories that a DM may find useful in defining their role in the campaign. The chapters are: crime, religion, mages, the law, and adventurers. The one category that is common in fantasy settings that seems conspicuously absent is that of soldiers or warriors.
The crime chapter describes a number of criminal figures that the PCs may run afoul. The chapter includes unnamed figures like a typical thug, a pickpocket gang, a typical burglar, and a halfling "cleaning crew"- hardened killers who eliminate those who have earned the guild's annoyance. Perhaps this is who Denis Cramer was thinking of when he painted his infamous gory halfling picture in Dragon magazine...
Moving into named characters in the crime chapter, we find such fingers as a precinct boss, a black marketeer, and exotic and dangerous figures such as a mind flayer assassin, a djinn slaver, and an urban druid.
The next chapter is the religion chapter. Amongst the nameless hordes in this chapter are a temple guard, a temple warder (a fighter/monk assigned to more important guard duty) and a senior temple guard. The named characters are a menagarie of preists, each following one of the many standard Greyhawk deities.
The third chapter covers mages, which can also include other scholarly types. The only unnamed character type is the evil minion, an evil low level wizard/rogue trained by a higher level wizard to do their bidding. The named characters include a loremaster, a wicked leader of a cult of evil mages, a chaotic sorceress, a halfling apprentice, a minotaur wizard, and a dwarven necromancer.
The fourth chapter describes a set of characters that some PCs tend to run afoul more than criminals: those that enforce the law. Amongst the nameless hordes in this chapter are a typical city guard and an elite guard. Moving on to more distinguished company we have a guard captain, a dwarven rogue in employ of the nightwatch, a bureaucrat, a band of gnome vigilantes, and an elven warden of the forest.
The fifth chapter details a few adventuring parties that are probably quite unlike any PC adventuring party the DM has had the displeasure to run. The Circle of Green are champions of nature. The Band of the Hand are greedy mercenaries and looters. The Claw is an adventuring party composed entirely of hideous creatures like trolls and ettercaps. Finally, the Pale Grin is an adventuring party composed (or is it de-composed?) almost entirely of undead. Finally, the chapter includes a lone-gunman type half-dragon cleric to harass your PCs with.
The book includes three appendices.
The first appendix is called "the one-minute NPC." This appendix is really nothing to get worked up about, as it is merely a random encounter table that will give you the occupation of a character coupled with a list of possible representatives of each table from the ranks of NPCs in the book.
The second appendix lists all of the iconic characters pictured in the D&D 3e PHB. Unlike the earlier characters, there are no background, personality, or tactics notes. Each iconic character has statistics at 5th, 10th, and 15th level.
The final appendix is merely a listing of the NPCs and groups in the book by encounter level.
Summary
Cordell & Co. have put some effort into ensuring that some of the NPCs in this book are unique and interesting. Despite this, there are few concepts that made me want to use the book just to have a certain NPC in my game.
That is not to say the book is useless. Far from it. If you have ever made detailed NPCs and have realized how cumbersome properly statting and equipping them can be, or are someone who can use some help with personality and description on the fly, there is a good chance that there is an NPC in this book that you can simply drop into your game and play with. This holds true especially if you are the sort of DM that frequently goes off the beaten path into uncharted territory.
This utility is somewhat hampered by the fact that the book is fairly costly per page, even by WotC standards.
-Alan D. Kohler
