Legions of Hell

[Psion]

Legions of Hell

Legions of Hell is the latest D20 System offering by Chris Pramas under the Green Ronin Productions banner. Pramas also wrote the Origins Award-winning adventure Death in Freeport for Green Ronin and the Guide to Hell supplement for AD&D 2nd edition for WotC.

Legions of Hell (LoH) is essentially a new D20 System monsters sourcebook detailing many new inhabitants of the nether realm that the D&D game calls Hell or Baator. There is some additional material in the form of a brief outline of hell, prestige classes for followers of various servants of devils, and some material on celestials, with a primary focus on those celestials who have fallen away from the service of good and now participate in the hierarchy of hell.

A First Look

LoH is a modest sized booklet at 64 pages, and is staple bound. The cover are by Brom depicts some form of devil with a head resembling an animal skull. The cover is not nearly as attractive as the one that adorned the Guide to Hell (also by Brom.)

The interior is black and white with illustrations for each creature ranging from middling to excellent. I especially liked the illustrations by Sam Wood and Raven Mimura. Mimura’s illustrations had a very crisp look to them and his illustrations of some of the baatezu (devil) nobles are especially nice. Sam Wood’s illustrations of some of the devils look somewhat Gigeresque and appropriately creepy looking.

The text density is average and the margins are narrow. The whitespace is abundant, but those who deplored the cramped layout of the 3e Monster Manual will appreciate the much more spacious layout in LoH.

A Deeper Look

The book starts of with a brief introductory section that very briefly outlines the 9 layers or circles of hell, and the ruler of each layer, the nature of infernal politics, the role of devils in the prime, a recap of the common baatezu abilities, and some thoughts on adapting the devils for your own use.

As mentioned, the bulk of this book is devoted to devils or other servants of Hell. In all there are 41 new creatures, not counting tidbits like the mount of the master of the infernal hunt.

The main section includes both non-unique creatures such as rank and file servants and agents of hell, and a number of unique fallen celestials and baatezu nobles. All told, the creatures in the book run the gamut of challenge ratings from ½ for the lowly knocker, to 24 for the fallen solar, Iblis.

Each monster description has both campaign and rules information, and includes some good resources ideas for adventures and campaign. Many of the unique creatures plots and aspirations are described, and some of the unique creatures have specific followers. One of my favorites is the duchess of domination Hadriel, a creepy looking spine covered female figure. Hadriel has plots and aspirations in the lands of mortals underway to help advance her station in hell, and many of the creatures described elsewhere in the book are her servants, the gladiatrix (flail-wielding female gladiatorial devils), the darkspinx (half-fiend sphinx bodyguards), strigae (ghastly winged spies), painmistresses (strange baatezu with huge claws whose purpose is to inflict pain) and painshriekers (hideously deformed aberrations that emit a powerful shriek).

Other favorites of mine in the book are the faceless (faceless fiendish assassins and masters of the blade), ashmede (hideous winged enforcers of the laws of hell), chamagons (magic-suppressing saboteurs), keres (female baateze elite soldiers that somewhat resemble Andariel from Diablo II) and Furcas (the baatezu Duke of Rhetoric).

Note that none of the rulers of the nine circles of hell is given stats in the book; in interviews elsewhere the author has said that such powerful creatures are best reserved until such a time as WotC comes out with their epic-level campaigns book.

The first appendix details three prestige classes the represents servants of specific devil nobles detailed in the book, and a sample NPC for each one:

- Balan’s jackals follow Balan, who is depicted as a sort of Herne-type master-of-the-hunt figure. They gain abilities representing their bestial aspects, like greater rage and wild shape.
- Montebanks are servants of Jalie, an undead fiend-lich. Montebanks gain a fiendish servant and powers that deal with cleverness and betrayal in addition to continued spell advancement.
- Plaguelords are servants of Nergal, a fiend noble associated with pestilence. Plaguelords become vermin and gain powers associated with disease and rotting.

Appendix 2 introduces the Fallen template, which is applied to celestials to create a “fallen celestial” which has been cast out of the upper planes. They are prevented from entering the upper planes or holy places, but their powers are twisted towards evil and they gain an impressive power to tempt and ensnare the souls of mortals.

Appendix 3 outlines the hierarchy of celestials in the Seven Heavens, called angelic choirs. It also touches on the history of fallen angels and outlines a number of such creatures that now serve in the infernal hierarchy.

The book finishes up with a listing of monsters by CR, a bibliography, the obligatory D20 license, and an ad for more Green Ronin products.

Summary and Conclusions

The material should be useful whether or not you use a specific incarnation of hell (e.g., if you use the 1e Dragon magazine version, Planescape, Guide to Hell version, your own, or even the Diablo II version of hell.) The book seems to provide a lot of material without trying to provide too strict a definition of what is there.

The creatures – especially the unique ones – come with some ideas that could easily be expanded upon for campaign ideas. It gives the book a definite feel that this is by no means the last word on Devils and there is plenty of room for DMs to build on what is there. I like that in supplement. To me, a supplement that provides a starting point and a variety of useful material is far better than one that circumscribes and leaves nothing to the imagination.

The material describing the celestials and their relationship to hell shows a definite Judeo-Christian and Milton “Paradise Lost” influence. Depending on the tastes and campaign style, that may be good or bad. It does have a familiar feel to it, but it may be difficult to reconcile that feel with that of other campaign assumptions if you use the more traditional Greek and Nordic style pantheon of deities.

To me, the book feels as if it has just the right size and price point. At $15, the book falls pleasantly short of what many D20 System vendors are expecting for supplements these days. At 64 pages and over 40 creatures, you get a great variety of foes for your players with a much smaller chance that large swaths of it would go unused than might be the case in a larger book.

I also appreciated that there are creatures in the book for a wide variety of challenge ratings. That in and of itself should vastly increase the opportunities for fiendish DMs to inflict a few devils on the hapless players.

The rules use and consistency is fairly solid throughout the book, but a few things raised my eyebrows. For example, the chamagon continually radiates an anti-magic shell, yet the description states that their lord teleports them into battle. Just how they are supposed to be able to do this is beyond me. Another example is that a few creatures like the ashmede and the faceless that seemed like powerful enough outsiders that they would have some for of damage reduction, but they had none.

Overall, though, the book should be a useful resource for DMs that appreciate devils as villains, either in standard games or in exotic settings such as Planescape. I don’t know about the esteemed reader, but devils were a classic villain in the early days of my campaign. LoH has definitely whetted my appetite for the devils to have a comeback tour!

Given the production qualities, ideas, and ready to use game content, I give the Legions of Hell 4 out of 5 pitchforks.

Edit: In hindsight, I have really come to adore the style and substance of Legions of Hell. Though I don't think it is quite the value of the Book of Eldritch Might or Relics & Rituals (my benchmark "5" products), it is certainly in the top 20% of products AFAIAC.

 

[Tuerny]

Legions of Hell, designed by Chris Pramas, is the fourth in Green Ronin Publishing’s line of d20 products. Designed to be used with most any setting, it is a monster book containing a wide variety of denizens of the Plane of Hell.


The Book
Legions of Hell, a standard, laminated, perfect bound, book, is sixty-four pages long.
The interior covers are blank. The margins depict scenes of being stuck in cages and being impaled on sticks.
The cover, by Brom, features some sort of devil posing on the top of a rock. It is as good as any Brom illustration is. If you like Brom, you will probably love it. If you hate Brom, than this one won't change your mind. The interior artwork, by Toren Atkinson, Brom, Chris Keefe, Raven Mimura, Sam Wood is very good, never failing to convey a menacing tone for the fiendish denizens of the Hells.




The Meat/The Good/The Bad
Legions of Hell introduces fifteen unique nobles, twenty-six more common inhabitants of the Hells, a template, and three prestige classes, each dedicated to one of the nobles introduced in Legions of Hell. Each is provided with the standard stat blocks and ability descriptions, as well as a color illustration and an informative and interesting description of the creatures role in Hell and often their origins as well.
The nobles are a mix between native inhabitants of the Hells and powerful Fallen Celestials. They are a disparate group ranging from Antaia, the Witch Queen, who serves as a patron of witches on the Prime Plane who is largely indifferent of infernal politics, to Iblis, Duke of Pride, the celestial who precipitated the Fall in ancient times, and brought 1/3 of the entire Heavenly Host down with him, to the camel-headed Vuall, Duke of Pleasure, who has power over fertility and sex, and is worshipped by those seeking his power. For some reason, Vuall reminds me of Joe Camel. Without fail all of them are interesting, AND useful, and each lends itself easily to campaign use.
The other twenty-six monsters are equally varied. They range between diabolical minions of the nobles in the book, like the Gladiatrix, physical domination-dedicated female servants of Hadriel (the duchess of domination), to more independent creatures, like the Faceless, diabolical assassins for-hire used to help devils move the hierarchy of Hell. The devil's presented are as diverse as the nobles, though an inordinate proportion seem to be dedicated to service of Hadriel. Several of the monsters, such as the Enforcers of Dis do not lend themselves well for use on a Prime Material campaign, however, so their lose might be more limited in scope than that of more traditional monsters. My only complaint about this section is they left out the divas, the primary servants of Iblis.
The prestige classes, Balan's Jackal, Mounteback, and Plaguelord, are interesting and mostly vile. Each one involves greater dedication to a particular diabolical noble in exchange for increased power. Each one suffers permanent loss of ability points as they slowly become more and more like their master. Balan's Jackals descend into savagery and bloodlust, Mountebanks become increasingly cunning but absent-minded, and the Plaguelords become insectoid horrors, gaining agility but losing endurance.
The Fallen Celestial Template, in the vein of the fiendish template, creates a celestial that has fallen to the forces of temptation and joined the legions of Hell. Its powers appear to be in line with the gains made by other +2 templates, and provides an interesting mechanism for creating evil celestials.
The remaining portions of the book cover the Choirs of the Seven Heavens, a list of celestials that fell among the Primogenital Stewards and the Samsayan Host, and a list of the monsters presented in the book, organized by Challenge Rating. There is a broad cross-range of monsters in the book ranging from 1/2, with the Knockers, all the way to over twenty, with Bune. For some reason they left Iblis off of the list. The information on the Choirs and the list of fallen celestials is useful for creating future fallen celestials to follow off of the module found in this book.

Rating: 5/5
Legions of Hell is arguably the best monster book, except for the necessary Monster Manual, produced by any d20 company to date. The artwork is excellent, the monsters are interesting and very useable, and the book as a whole is an example of the heights that d20 products can reach. If you have any interest in planar monsters as foes, or just have an interest in monsters in general, get this book.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

I like Chris Pramas’ work. I also like to use fiends in my campaigns. Therefore I thought that this book is going to be one of the more useful d20 products for me and possibly my favorite among the monster encyclopedias.

Sadly, despite some good thing that can be said about it I found it very rigid and practically useless in most campaigns.

I find it strange that many people who attacked SSS “Creatures Collection” for being too campaign specific praise this as a more general ‘creatures book’. My feeling at reading this book was that it’s utility falls exponentially as one departs from a very specific cosmology of Mr. Pramas. This cosmology, or at least its infernal part, is laid out in his “Guide to Hell” and again in this book and represents a (slightly) modified Judeo-Christian – Miltonian cosmology, together with arch-nemesis Asmodeus (Lucifer) fallen angels and angelic choirs.

While have nothing against this cosmology as such, it is by no means a default DnD cosmology and is probably not likely to reassemble cosmology of the most homebrewed campaigns. All of this would not be a problem if most of the content of the book would not assume rather explicitly that one is going to be using this, or very similar, layout of the universe.

The book claims to be providing over 40 (42 to be exact) new devils. However, out of 42 new monster entries a bit under half (17) are in fact individual entities whose descriptions focus on their place and status within this particular hell campaign. In effect those are not new monsters but rather NPC’s and, as it is always the case with published NPC’s their utility outside their particular campaign world is very limited. Out of the remaining 25 monsters, good many are practically defined by their relationship with the 17 unique powerful beings making the work of incorporating them in the non-Pramas campaign additionally difficult. Further on, heavy reliance on the Judeo-Christian cosmology defines the very nature of the Devils of this book. Their aspect as those who tempt mortals to sin is very emphasized, much more then in a regular DnD campaign once again making their adaptation to a different cosmology exceedingly difficult.

All in all, after Manual of the Planes gave us the guidelines for building cosmologies of unprecedented variety, any book that rigidly holds to a single (and rather non-standard) layout of the universe can at best be labeled as the setting sourcebook and not the proper “monster encyclopedia”. “Creatures Collection” goes to the great length to minimize the dependence of its monsters on the Scared Lands setting and the number of the unique entities in it is bellow 1%. This book does either and is therefore practically useless for those with different ideas about hell from that of the author. As a campaign sourcebook for a specific campaign it would be getting a 4 from me but as a generic monster book it pretends to be I can not give it more then 2.

 

[Simon Collins]

Beware! This review contains major spoilers.

Legions of Hell is a manual of devils for the D&D game. It costs $14.95.

Presentation: Legions of Hell is a 64-page softcover book. The front cover is an atmospheric portrait of Baal, Lord of the First Circle of Hell. The back of the book contains a short introduction and overview of the sourcebook with some cool skulls at the top of the page. The irst page is credits and contents, the last page is an advert, and the penutimate page has the OGL. The internal black and white artwork is on the whole excellent. Each devil is given a page (or in some cases two pages) to themselves and they are not (in almost all cases) split across pages. There is some white space around the drawings, but the margin is relatively narrow, and the text is compact.

Whats Inside: The book begins with an introduction to Hell, including the lowdown on the Lords of the Nine Circles. This two-page section continues with information on the Infernal Hierarchy, Devils and the Prime, Baatezu Qualities, and some advice on customizing devils. There follows 41 devils over 45 pages, some of which are types of devil, many of which are individual devils, some of them nobles: Akop, Antaia the Witch Queen, Asakku, Ashmede, Balan - Master of the Infernal Hunt, Balan's Huntsman, Bonedreg, Bulugon, Bune - Duke of Eloquence, Chamagon, Dagon - Warden of the Stygian Depths, Darksphinx, Distender, Enforcer of Dis, Faceless, Furcas - Duke of Rhetoric, Gladiatrix, Hadriel - Duchess of Domination, Hellwarden, Iblis - Duke of Pride, Ice Stalker, Jalie Squarefoot - the Lich Fiend, Kere, Knocker, Krotep - Pharaoh of Axor, Lel - Marquise of the Night, Magugon, Malgrin - Duke of Unlife, Naamah - Contessa of Duplicity, Nekhet - Prophet of Set, Nergal - the Fetid Prince, Oubliette, Pain Mistress, Painshrieker, Soulsniffer, Spinder, Striga, Vierhander, Vuall - Duke of Pleasure, and Whiptail. Each enry begins with a stat block. There follows text which varies with each entry - sometimes it focuses on history, others on politics, whilst there is usually something about the role of the devil within the hierarchy. A section on combat is included with each entry, with tactics and special abilities covered here. After the devils themselves, there is an appendix with three prestige classes - Balan's Jackal, Mountebank, and Plaguelord - that can be used for the minions of a diabolic lord on the prime. Each of these classes has an example accompanying them. Appendix 2 introduces the Fallen Celestial template, with an example. Appendix 3 looks at Angelic Choirs (a basic hierarchy of the Upper Planes). The remainder of the book has a listing of fallen celestials, devils ranked by challenge rating (from 1/2 to 24), and a bibliography.

The Good: One of the pleasures of this book is the text of each entry - the writing has fluidity and holds your interest by giving a different angle on each devil. Within the text, you quickly get a feel for not only the role of the devil within Hell's hierarchy, but also one or more ways to base an adventure around the devil in question. Some of the wicked ideas incorporated in the text actually had me chuckling evilly out loud. The concept of the Fallen Celestial template is ideally suited to reflect the philosophy of Hell should you wish to introduce these concepts into your campaign. The wide selection of CRs for the devils in this book means that there is something for all levels of play, and devils can be modified to be used at higher levels if necessary.

The Bad: I would probably have liked to see some further adventure ideas for using devils on the prime, and a few more devils of very low level to use as foreshadowing for beginning characters in a Hell-related campaign. You must bear in mind that many of the devils offered in this book are tied in with a specific world-view, heavily influenced by 1st Edition D&D. Thats not to say they can't be adapted, just that it would require some work to use with a different cosmology.

Conclusion: This book ably accomplishes what it sets out to do, and does it with panache. Each entry sparked an idea for an adventure or a campaign, and you can't ask for more than that. The fact that it also had me grinning with anticipation says it all. I can't wait for the companion volume on demons.

 

[Desdichado]

There are some source books that you don't know immediately where or how you can use them, but when you read them, they make you want to find a way to implement what's in them. Legions of Hell by Green Ronin Publishing is one such book.

This is their first foray into the world of creature books, and Legions of Hell benefits from a very tight focus as opposed to some. Legions is a soft-cover book with a brown and white interior, a cover painting by Brom -- artist who did many of the "class splatbooks." There are 64 pages on the inside -- although the title pages, OGC and some other "filler" pages are included there. Interior art is fair to excellent with artists Torin Atkinson, Raven Miamura, Chris Keefe, Brom and Sam Wood (one of two "official" Wizards of the Coast D&D artists) providing.

There's two pages of introduction in which baatezu in general are described, as well as Chris Pramas' view of the heirarchy of Baator (which differs somewhat from that presented in Manual of the Planes. There's also a few pages at the pack that have two prestige classes, a template (the famous Fallen Celestial) and some notes on the history of Hell and the fall of some of the Heavenly Hosts into treachery and evil. Other than that, the entire book is made up of creature entries.

There are a number of creatures at almost all CR levels, from 1/2 to 24. In addition, a number of the creatures here are really individuals, and serve more like characters rather than monsters. In addition to a number of clever ideas and well-thought out abilities and monsters to surprise and delight (or terrify) your players, the individuals have motivations, backgrounds and plots rolled up into them, to make any game that touches on the denizens of Hell sure to abound in dark intrigue and back-stabbing treachery (as well it should.)

Legions of Hell is one of my favorite sourcebooks for the new D&D, including those published by Wizards of the Coast itself. I especially found it a great companion for Manual of the Planes, perhaps my other favorite sourcebook yet published. As I write this, Green Ronin is already late in shipping the follow-up to Legions of Hell, a monster book to cover their dark counterparts in the Abyss. Given the quality of this work, I'm expecting Armies of the Abyss to be one of the best publications of the year and a strong contender in the next ENnies.