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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2008410" data-attributes="member: 18387">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.</blockquote>

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