How stellar was the old Fiend Folio!

[Raven Crowking]

I have a lot of love for the 1e FF.


RC

 

[WillieW]

Yeah, I liked the FF. You could come up with some interesting scenarios by listing a few monsters and figuring out how they would (or why they would) interact with one another. Plus, the PCs would generally be more used to MM monsters, but would be on shakier ground trying to figure out the bizarre qualities of encounters with FF critters.

 

[darjr]

i LOVE the FF.

It's more than nostalgia. Many of those monsters are scary weird. And the Gith are fantastic SciFi fantasy.

 

[talien]

What's astonishing is if you look at the monsters when they first appeared in White Dwarf, they were even more ridiculous to begin with. The Tirapheg was known as the Lauren, an anagram of "unreal." Personally, I think somebody had a very bad breakup.

And if you think that's bad, there's all the monsters that DIDN'T make it into the Fiend Folio.

Think about that for a second...what monsters could possibly be weird/useless enough that even the Fiend Folio didn't want them?

That's why I dedicated my Monster Madness column to precisely this topic: RPG Examiner

 

[Blair Goatsblood]

I love the Fiend Folio! I especially like how that a significant percentage of the monsters within plants eggs in the adventurers they're fighting, with the differing gruesome consequences detailed.

 

[Glyfair]

Yeah, I liked the FF.

I hated it. Yes, I owned it. However, for the most part the monsters that weren't transferred from other TSR products were not very good. There were some gems, but not many (I didn't even care for the githyanki and githzerai, although I didn't hate them). The art was pretty bad.

In hindsight, there were more creatures with potential. Still, the book was not close to the quality of either the Monster Manual or the Monster Manual II. In fact, I will argue the monster section of The Caverns of Tsojcanth was superior to the Fiend Folio.

 

[catsclaw227]

This thread made me go and browse my old 1e FF. There really is some nostalgia there.

The memories came flooding back after looking at some of the monsters. We were going through a pretty big Monty Haul stage when this book came out, though.

 

[pawsplay]

Bullywugs. I really like bullywugs.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I still ahve my FF in storage somewhere and h\ave not looked at it since 3x came out

I remember osme cool monsters, but lots and lots of what-is-this-thing-anyway monsters in it

So many monsters were unplayable as they could not live in any setting I had dreamed up, and many were only fit for a summoning ritual gome awry situation.

 

[the Jester]

I'll grant you that most of the art stank, though.

I mean, there were exceptions, but mostly, it was waaay over-inked.