JoeGKushner said:
Very disappointing if correct. Not only is the page/price ration, if similiar to other WoTC books weak in comparrisson to their other model of 224/$34.95, outer planar creatures need a lot of extra care and feeding in terms of environment, plot seeds, and other utilities to make them useful as opposed to just making them statistics. One of the things I've enjoyed about the other parts of the series, Lords of Madness, etc... is that they give fairly good coverage.
Love to be proven wrong, but 160 pages doesn't seem enough to cover "just the demons".
I'm not sure I agree.
Lords of Madness covered FIVE different aberration types rather well (sure there's room for a little more coverage, but whatever). The Tsochar got 9 pages of info, the Grell 8, the Neogi 12, the Illithids 21, the Beholders 19, and the Aboleths 18. This is not including stats for any new creatures in the book.
Faces of Evil, probably THE definitive sourcebook on Fiendish Lore, covered the 'tanar'ri' in 23 pages. No stats, just flavor text mind you. FoE was also only 96 pages long mind you. (This will probably spawn a couple of '2e products r teh r0x0rz comments and 3e is teh sux0rz' comments, but whatever...)
Green Ronin's
Book of Fiends (of which Mr. Mona was a contributor), covers abyssal creatures in 80 pages. This includes, write-ups of some abyssal lords, a few new spells, a new class, some new domains as well. It does this rather well.
Now, if this was a book on ALL of the fiends, 160 pages I feel it would be quite 'limited' for coverage. But since its only about the Abyssal Denizens, I think that with Mona and Jacobs (the Demon Master after the Demonomicon articles) at the helm, 160 pages is quite enough.
qstor said:
Erik, James I hope you come back to this thread after the book appears in the WOTC catalog. I'd be interested in if any of the material in the Dragon articles appears in the books. I'd *LOVE* for an *official* 3.x book write up of some of the demons princes not found in the BOVD.
Mike
IMO, stats for Demon Lords and Princes would be better served by the Dragon installments. However, I think deity write-ups (like Orcus received in Libris Mortis) for a lot of the Demonic Lords would be excellent.
demiurge1138 said:
I also like the 1e flavor of the lower planes. And I even like the take on the Abyss shown in the Gord the Rogue books.
I, actually, prefer the flavor of the 1e planes and I really, really wish that Gygax's planar ideas (somewhat fleshed out in his Gord the Rogue books) had been made canon instead of Planescape. I like PS, but it's not the end-all-be-all definitive version of the fiends. Things change and as we've seen with both 2e and 3e, the designers aren't afraid to tinker with (or change) preexisting information.
And if this book takes a little step back towards 1e, I'm all for it.
