The Slayer's Guide to Ogres
By Shannon Kalvar
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 0028
32 pages, $9.95
The 28th book in the soon-to-be-finished "Slayer's Guide" line of d20 monster sourcebooks,
The Slayer's Guide to Ogres takes a look not only at the titled vicious brutes but also at their aquatic subspecies the merrow and their more powerful cousins the ogre magi. This is quite a bit of material for a 32-page book, and I think overall the book suffers a bit because of it.
The cover is an interesting piece by John Hodgson (I wish Mongoose would pick one spelling of his first name - the correct one, hopefully - and stick with it; I've seen "Jon Hodgson" about as frequently as I've seen "John Hodgson"). This is another "limited palette" piece, with browns, tans, grays and whites predominating. In the background, we see a small band of four male ogres, clad only in simple furs and barefoot despite a covering of snow on the ground. They wield simple weapons like clubs and spears and look like the typical slobbering brutes we're used to seeing as "Third Edition ogres." (I suppose I should state my preference for the "pre-3E ogre look" when they were more like smaller hill giants; I always thought the 3E ogre's jutting lower teeth just made them look silly.) Still, John (or Jon; maybe I'd better just call him "Hodgson") does a pretty mean male ogre; despite my dislike for the ogre's current look, these four are about the best 3E ogres I've seen. However, there's a bit of an anomaly in the foreground of the painting: a hooded figure, which may be a human adventurer dressed appropriately for winter, or may be a female ogre (one of the suppositions that Shannon drops in the book - and then does nothing with, kind of like a "what if?" question - is that the ogre race could have a high degree of sexual dimorphism, with brutish males and good-looking females), but to me looks like nothing so much as Michael Jackson dressed like an Eskimo. She kind of "ruins the mood" for me. I did like the textured effect on the word "Ogres," though - this time, it looks kind of like gray marble.
I was surprised to flip open the inside cover and discover that the typical "anatomical diagram" picture - a "Slayer's Guide" standard - was not done by Chris Quilliams this time. (I imagine Mongoose had him hard at work on the
Conan book, which I have to admit was a good place for him to focus his time and energy.) Instead, we have Tony Parker filling in. Tony does a pretty good job with the anatomical drawing: while the ogre isn't particularly interesting from an anatomical perspective (pretty much just a muscular human with weird facial features), Tony throws in a diagram of the merrow's gill slits, and the fact that it's in color helps, too.
The interior artwork consists of 11 black-and-white illustrations, also done by Tony Parker. I have to say, putting one artist on a book like this really helps give the monster in question (or three monsters, in this case) a standardized look. However, some of these pictures just seem a little "off" to me: the merrow on page 5 seems awfully skinny and I think Tony went a little wild with the webbing between the creature's fingers and thumb; the merrow on page 11 (and page 5, now that I look at it) seem rather "skull-faced," a design never mentioned either in this book or the
Monster Manual; the ogre's arm on page 24 looks rather oddly-muscled. Still, he does a rather nice ogre mage on page 8. All in all, though, I'd have to put the artwork as a whole at about average.
The Slayer's Guide to Ogres is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: explaining the "Slayer's Guide" line and this book in particular, followed by a page of fiction
- Physiology and Psychology: 5 different possible origins for ogres, ogre stench, merrow gills, ogre magi skin tones and horns, 6 possible physical variations, and psychological aspects to the ogre mindset and personality
- Habitat: the lairs of ogres, merrow, and ogre magi (complete with rules for the effects of an ogre refuse pile)
- Society: principles of ogre culture, arts and crafts (or lack thereof), birth and death, diet, names, relationships with other races, religion and rituals, family, and tributes and slaves
- Methods of Warfare: tactics for the lone ogre, ogre groups, ogres in service to a stronger creature, merrow adaptations, ogre magi as warriors and as leaders
- Scenario Hooks: 10 scenario hooks in a new format: each has a basic concept, a starting situation, a progression, and several potential complications
- Ogre Characters: ogre professions, 4 new ogre feats, 6 new items (3 mundane and 3 magic), and the 10-level Veteran Warrior prestige class for ogres
- Ogre Reference List: stats for 10 different ogres
Shannon made some interesting choices on how to write this book; I don't think all of them were necessarily the best choice possible. Rather than giving us a coherent history on the ogre races, he takes more of a "toolbox" approach. Here are 5 different possible as to how ogres might have developed in your campaign: pick one. Here's a possibility: maybe female ogres are really good-looking, wouldn't that be interesting? (My response: yes, it would be, tell me more. Please? No? Drat.) I think the toolbox approach works much better in an "Encyclopaedia Arcane" or a "Quintessential Whatever" book, where you have an easier time of incorporating bits and pieces into a given campaign; in a 32-page book on a monster race, I'd rather not waste precious space on possibilities and maybes. (A good example here is
The Slayer's Guide to Yuan-ti: there, the authors organize the yuan-ti race in the Asian mythology mode, with a strict hierarchy where everybody knows his place in the big scheme of things. It might not be the way everybody would set up their yuan-ti in a given campaign, but at least the whole 32 pages of the book are playing by the same set of rules.)
Another choice that was disappointing to me was the inclusion of ogre magi in with the ogres and merrow. Ogres are stupid, vicious brutes. Merrow are stupid, vicious brutes who live underwater. Ogre magi, however, I see as much removed from the ogres and merrow, and I think Shannon does a disservice by treating them as slightly less stupid, vicious brutes with some cool magic powers. On pages 7-8 he describes how ogre magi are "easily confused and distracted" and have short attention spans. This doesn't sound to me like a creature with both Intelligence and Wisdom scores of 14! (Shannon acknowledges their heightened mental abilities somewhat but puts it down more to them being able to become incredibly focused for periods of time. I just don't buy it.) Personally, I think ogre magi are different enough from the standard ogre that they could easily fill up a 32-page "Slayer's Guide" of their own, which would give more room in this book to focus on the ogres and merrow, who
do have an awful lot in common.
And "more room" is something
The Slayer's Guide to Ogres could use. For those of you familiar with other entries in the "Slayer's Guide" line, one of the first things you'll notice when flipping through this book is that there is no sample lair! I think that's a first, and it's a disappointing one at that. One of the many benefits to purchasing a "Slayer's Guide" - for the DM, at least - has always been having a sample lair of the creature in question, which is usually enough for a short "Side Trek" style mini-adventure if not a full night's worth of game play. I was saddened to see that this was not the case this time around, and I hope it's just a fluke.
Still, lest it seem like I'm picking apart the book, there were many things I enjoyed about
The Slayer's Guide to Ogres. Shannon does a nice job picking up the "ogres smell bad" idea and running with it: he posits a sweat gland secretion that smells like rotting meat and drives off most non-scavengers, then, in one of the "uncommon traits" mutations that crop up in the ogre races now and again, develops a stony hide infection (fungal based) that I thought meshed rather nice with this foul-smelling ooze being secreted from their pores. One of the 4 new ogre feats takes this stench concept a step further and makes it powerful enough to grant the ogre a bonus to grapple checks! I also like the fact that rather than just coming up with 6 possible mutations - each of which is guaranteed to make the ogre more powerful - he also devised a game-balancing mechanism: an ogre with one of the mutations loses one of his starting feats. I appreciate that level of effort to keep game balance on an even keel. Furthermore, the new items are pretty cool, although I personally think that the
charmed collar - a leather collar that prolongs indefinitely any charm spell cast on the item's wearer, and decreases his Will save by -4 in the process - is ridiculously underpriced at only 1,500 gp.
I was very impressed with the new format Shannon came up with for the scenario hooks chapter; each one not only gives a bare-bones idea that a DM can flesh out into a full-fledged adventure, but also sets up possible future adventures along the way. I wouldn't mind seeing this as the new standard for "Slayer's Guide" scenario hooks. I was also impressed that there were ten of them provided, as many previous books have gotten away with much less.
There are also a lot of "throwaway" facts tossed into this book that I would have loved Shannon to expand upon, first and foremost being the sexual dimorphism idea mentioned earlier. Shannon mentions that ogre babies are eating meat before two months, which to me implies that they're probably born with teeth! Ogre females apparently carry 2-4 children at a time, making them much more animalistic (giving birth to a small "litter") than humanistic. Even the fact that many male ogres show homosexual tendencies (used primarily as an establishment of dominance in the male "pecking order"), while I found to be pretty a pretty unpleasant concept, is actually somewhat logical. (I think I read somewhere that some animals do that in real life.) And if any of you want to blame me for the mental image of male ogre homosexual dominance rituals, all I can say is...blame Shannon! (Still, I found it rather funny that Shannon didn't want to pin himself down to a single ogre origin, but was perfectly willing to make ogre homosexuality a given fact across the board.)
Proofreading and editing were a bit disappointing, with numerous punctuation errors, typos, and missing words scattered throughout the book, with apostrophe misuse appearing most frequently. I don't recognize the name Richard Ford (the listed proofreader), but he's not off to a very good start.
My final quibble with
The Slayer's Guide to Ogres is twofold, and involves the ogre reference list chapter at the end. First of all, with 10 different ogre/merrow/ogre magi characters taking up 4 whole pages, I thought it was a bit excessive in a 32-page book, especially when you consider that page 32 is the Open Game License and doesn't really count. Some of these are just an ogre with the half-fiend, fiendish, or celestial template grafted on, and while I understand that the whole point of the chapter is for the DM to be able to just pull a ready-to-use monster without doing all of the math himself, I think most DMs can slap on a template pretty easily; it's when you start throwing on class levels (especially more than one class) that it gets tricky. It probably wasn't intended that way, but it comes across - to me, at least - as unnecessarily "padding" the book, although I suppose an argument could be made that it's a logical progression of the "toolbox approach." The other half of this quibble is that many of the stats are partially incorrect. In the spirit of "monster books should have completely correct stats," here are the changes you should make to the monsters in these section:
- Ancient (Celestial) Ogre: the falchion attack should be at +9 melee, not +8 (it's a masterwork falchion)
- Fiendish Ogre: the greatclub attack should be at +8 melee, not +7 (due to Weapon Focus (greatclub))
- Half-Fiend Ogre: AC (and flat-footed AC) should be 19, not 18
- Merrow, 4th Level Adept: this poor fellow got shorted 3 hit points, either the ones from his Toughness feat or the bonus hit points for having a toad familiar (also, to get really nitpicky, that should be "Craft Wondrous Item," not "Craft Wondrous Objects")
- Ogre Magi, 8th Level Sorcerer: under "Organization" it mentions a "coven" of 3-18 plus an equal number of ogres - this looks like a simple "copy-and-paste" from the fiendish ogre mage stat block, which seems much more likely to be in a "coven" than an ogre magi Sor8
- Ogre Magi, 3rd Level Fighter, 7th Level Veteran Warrior: at 136 hp, his average hit points are a little high - depending on whether you round your two ".5 hp" values from the 3d10 and 7d10 HD for fighter and veteran warrior levels up or down, you should get 131 or 132 hp
All in all, nothing terrible, but it shows the continuation of a poor trend that has dogged several Mongoose books in the past. Still, I read that Mongoose head Matthew Sprange has recently hired on a full-time stats reviewer, and I'm sure as he gets settled into the new job we'll see a great improvement in this area.
Taken as a whole,
The Slayer's Guide to Ogres has some interesting ideas and some nice innovations, but I think it suffers from wanting to do too much (throwing ogre magi into the book even though they don't fit in that well with the ogres and merrow), going off into too many directions (the whole toolbox approach), and straying too far from the "Slayer's Guide" norm (I really missed the sample lair!). Shannon could probably have done a much better job on this had it been a 64-page book instead of the standard 32 pages. The ogre and merrow material is pretty good, but I personally think he's way off base with his depictions of ogre magi; I know I'll be ignoring almost all of the ogre magi stuff in my own campaign. I'd say all in all it's about average, and thus gets 3 stars from me.
