Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign
Nope.
Now we're talkin'.
FrankT:
We're going to be doing things a little differently this time around, because I used the Fiend Folio as a coloring book when I got my first set of fine tipped colored pens. So I think this time around, Ancient History gets to be on team rage, while I get to be on team nostalgia. This is literally the book in which young Frank learned to color inside the lines, and despite every piece of terribleness about this book, a part of me will always love it.
The title page has a demon looking dude enticing us to go further into this folio (or perhaps tome). It's not labeled, but a lot of people think it's a Forlarren, which is a special kind of half-fiend where the mother was a nymph and it has a stupid bi-polar disorder where it acts Good and Evil alternately to try to balance the two sides of its heritage. And that's stupid. He looks like this:
But my copy has that dude's head all colored in sort of light indigo and has a word balloon that says “I AM PURPLE BLUE HEAD” which apparently I thought was fucking hilarious at some point. I don't remember why I thought that was funny, but this is one of the few ways I have to connect – even for a moment – with the small child that used to be me.
AncientH:
This is the book that every except Frank mainly remembers as stealing a bunch of monsters that were first published in White Dwarf, without giving the writers any credit. Most famously, Charles Stross gave us the Githyanki and Githzerai.
If you stumble upon this through random googling, then: Love your books, Chuck!
Likewise, I'm like 95% sure that much of the art is provided by the guys that illustrated the first fifty or so Fighting Fantasy books. A lot of this is down to the editor, Don Turnbull, who lived and worked in the UK and was preparing this book as TSR in the States was doing the Dungeon Master's guide...in 1979. The actual copyright date on the book is 1981, which says to me that layout took a little while.
Still, I like the Fiend Folio. Sure, it's the first completely unnecessary add-on to the Monstrous Manual line and full of stuff stolen from a bunch of fucking pimply-faced teenagers in the UK, but it was fun and many of the monsters are now considered venerable and iconic...while others have been relegated to the dust bin of history.
FrankT:
Most 1st edition AD&D products are claimed to be the pure creations of Gary Gygax, even when that was really obviously not true. Part of it was a sincere attempt to stop people from being able to take the company away from him, and part of it was just that Gary Gygax was a giant, giant asshole who simultaneously got taken to court by Tolkien's people for selling books about Hobbits and wrote editorials about how anyone playing an RPG he didn't write was stealing from him. But the Fiend Folio is different – it's actually composed from a bunch of British fan-created monsters edited together by a guy in Cambridge. There's still a lot of stolen stuff – the badass dude on the cover is a Githyanki, and that name was actually designed by George R. R. Martin (who found out about the blatant theft like 20 years later and formally gave up ownership of the name because in a separate issue: George R. R. Martin is a crazy person who thinks that copyright works that way). A lot of these monsters were taken from fanzines, and I'm pretty sure that not all of the original authors got paid. Good times.
But the point is, that while the basic piratical “adverse possession” model of early TSR was totally in full effect for this book, Gygax wasn't really involved. This was a bunch of British people dicking each other over, rather than the product of brutal fanboy infighting in America's Midwest. Some of the fans went on to fame and glory: the Githyanki mentioned earlier was written up by none other than a young Charles Stross. But if his contribution is mentioned anywhere in this book, I can't find it. Monsters that were less well received may well have had their original authors lost to history entirely.
AncientH:
There actually is a list of monsters-by-contributor in the very back; it's disguised as a sort of index and is in smaller font than the RPGA advert that follows it.
The introduction is a rambling page-and-a-quarter affair in the style I like to call Old Gamemaster Moderne; it involves bolding and capitalizing every game product name for emphasis, entire paragraphs captured between parentheses, and commas apparently applied by shotgun. Anyway, Don intimates that this thing was a sort of early crowdsourced project, where eager young fans would submit their monsters for inclusion in an OFFICIAL AD&D PRODUCT!...which would then be sold to them, for money. Really, it's a forwards-looking business model. TSR needed only to combine it with Kickstarter to achieve the nadir or low-effort RPG publishing, where people pay you for the privilege of writing material to include in a book they pay to publish.
To get any more evil, they'd have to make the book from the vellum of orphans.
FrankT:
One thing that is interesting is that Don Turnbull feels the need to spend an entire paragraph apologizing for using the masculine pronoun by itself. The preface was written some 35 years ago, when the awkwardness of that proposition was well known, but the use of the singular “they” had not been well accepted by the publishing world. He knows that the gender-neutral “he” is bullshit, but doesn't have an acceptable replacement.
Ultimately, the gender neutral “they” is winning, and that's good.
This book doesn't do a great job explaining how to read a monster entry. They assume you have a god damned Monster Manual and they are using the same format. Each term gets a minimal explanation, and it's all over in a bit less than two pages. Honestly, this was sufficient and could even stand to be condensed in a few pages. The 3rd edition monster books had a lot more padding, and I don't think there was any real benefit.
AncientH:
This was a long, long time before Critter Ratings were a thing, so gamemasters are sort of on their own as to what a "level appropriate" encounter is, not that I imagine they'd even consider such a thing. You kill the monster, divvy up the XP, and that's that, be it a dragon or a sheep.
Page 5 is the table of contents, sort of. This is before you could automatically generate a table in Word, and so this had to be compiled by hand on a typewriter. It's...different. It's an alphabetical list of the monsters, grouped by first letter, which is supposed to be an illuminated initial. It's...just very weird to see. Little things we take for granted, y'know?
is for Aarokockra.Monsters A-Z: Aarakocra to Crypt Thing
FrankT:
This monster comes first alphabetically, which is its most important power.
We've mentioned the Aarakocra before in the Monsters of Faerun OSSR. It comes first alphabetically because it has two fucking As in the title and always comes first alphabetically. Since double-A has no special pronunciation in English, I can only assume they were named like this to ensure coming first in the alphabet. Some of the bullshit described in the Monsters of Faerun description actually started here: groups of Aarakocra can summon an air elemental by dancing around and chanting for a while, but it doesn't say how big of an elemental they can get, how long it stays around, or how often they can do this. However, I'm willing to give this version a lot more slack. First of all, this was just how things were done back then, so it doesn't stick out. Secondly, any first attempt obviously gets more slack than a third revision. But mostly, this particular ability is written out as some sort of favor exchange with the elementals rather than as a spell effect – so it's actually sort of reasonable that there isn't any caster levels listed.
This entry definitely reads like an early draft, but you can tell that someone put a lot of thought into it. Not all of it is good thought, and I genuinely can't figure out how the feet they are attempting to describe work. But this is an actual description of a species, with a little blurb on how they have a large breast bone to accommodate their monstrously large wing flapping muscles and a description of how long it takes for their eggs to hatch. It takes up about a page and needs some heavy editing, but it gives the stats, their allies, their combat methods, and some high points of their biology. If more race entries were formatted basically like this, we'd all be better off. This should have been the starting point for 2nd edition to work from.
AncientH:
There's a lot here. First, you have to understand that the achaierai is an unpronounceable demonic chicken that looks like a giant head on four legs with small wings attached. Second, the AC (written "Armour Class," because Brits) on the "body" is 8, while the AC on the legs is -1. So nobody is going to cut the legs off because that's almost fucking impossible. So they've given elaborate thought to the last-minute flight-reflex tactic of a critically wounded infernal chicken. In another age, this might have made it into somebody's punk D&D game as a handy source of hallucinogens. Lastly, you can sort of see how they really wanted generic spell-like effects a long time before they actually got them.If a bird loses three legs, or is otherwise seriously wounded, it will release a cloud of black toxic smoke which in size and shape approximates to a sphere of 10' radius. All within the cloud (except achaierai) take 2-12 hit points of damage automatically and must save against poison or suffer insanity for 3 hours (treat as the Druidic feeblemind spell of limited duration). In the confusion the wounded bird will seek to escape, crawling have been lost at a 2" movement rate.
The Adherer is one of those fuck-you monsters that looks like a more dangerous monster. In this case, it looks like a mummy. But really, it's just very sticky and immune to 1st-level spells except magic missile. It's not even undead. So the critical audience for this monster are those that feel confident enough to attack a mummy in melee combat, but are weak enough to be taken down by a third-tier Spider-Man villain.
Paste Pot Pete, still trying to sound cool by changing his name to The Trapster
FrankT:
The Aleax is one of the moge egregious “fuck you” monsters in AD&D. And that's saying something.
It is often said that finding a Deck of Many Things is the DM telling you that the campaign is over. But AD&D had a lot of similar fuckery. The Aleax is a raw manifestation of the stupidity and subjectivity of alignment. If you fail to live up to the DM's idea of your alignment, you get jumped by your god's personal Aleax. Then it shows up with exactly your stats and equipment and is totally immune to all actions by everyone but you and you have to fight a mirror match, final destination style. It's just you but with a small chance to take extra damage and it regenerates kind of fast. All told, you have almost a fifty-fifty chance of victory. But it doesn't matter. If you “lose,” the DM your god confiscates all your stuff and you lose half your XP; and if you “win” you get taken out of play for a year and a day while you serve your god in Hell or Valhalla or whatever the fuck. So you play out a slightly complicated coin flip, and either way you get proper fucked and the DM makes fun of you. This is one of the most fucked up pieces of DM-fuckery you will ever see. It would be the most egregious piece of DM-fuckery in most editions of most games, but in 1st edition AD&D it was simply one of many “you're fucked, no save” scenarios to choose from.
According to Frank Mentzer, this is pronounced ay-lee-aks. According to Frank Trollman, it is pronounced “go-fuk-yor-self.”
These are supposed to be colored green. At the time I chose differently. I guess it seemed more like a yellow monster to me when I was a child.
The Algoid is a brute monster who is actually a colony of algae, which is why it totally isn't copyright infringement to have an incredible hulking brute monster that happens to be green. They go a little bit Swamp Thing and give them the ability to control trees in their swamp, but otherwise they are basically Hulk expies. There isn't a whole lot to say about them, the description is pretty short and mostly delves into their nonsensical resistances. They are made of wet algae, and that is why they are immune to edged weapons, fire, and electricity. And they take an ass tonne of damage from part water, if for some reason it occurred to you to cast that, which it would not. They do take full damage from bludgeoning weapons, live outdoors, and don't move very fast, so really you can kite them and kill them to death with slings and stones. But there's absolutely no reason for you to know that, because I can almost guaranty that none of the players are going to leap to the assumption that the rampaging plant man is immune to fire and axes.
Based on the resistances, I'm pretty sure that this creature became the Tendriculos in 3rd edition. Which is no less stupid and insulting and doesn't even have a cool sounding name.
This is a 2nd edition Algoid, a modest improvement.
This is the 3rd edition Algoid, no longer even a little bit interesting.
AncientH:
The al'mir-aj is a creature of Arabic mythology; in D&D it's a horned rabbit known as "The Bunny of the Abyss." I'm not even fucking kidding. It could technically have been based off of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but if somebody told me it was a homebrew monster from their Bunnies & Burrows campaign I'd believe that too.
The apparition is one of those weird D&D undead; it's intangible and can't technically do damage, but it still "attacks" which causes you to roll to see whether or not you "think" you're hurt, and if it does enough "damage" you die of fright or something...and then rise in a bit as a new apparition. It's a glass closet troll, in other words, and in a particularly conga-line-of-death dungeon you could theoretically get like twenty of these in a confined space and then it's just game fucking over for anybody that gets within range.
Then there's the Assassin Bug...which is a giant fly with four legs up to 2 feet long. They attack in groups: the male tries to bite people with and paralyze them with its venomous saliva, and then the female comes along and lays eggs in the paralyzed victim. Like giant, hideous botflies.
These things average about 75 XP, and it takes a fucking Limited Wish to get rid of the larva before they hatch. Or a combination of other spells.
...nope, kill it with fire. Also, not eating with the Bugbear Ambassador ever again.Assassin bug eggs are considered great delicacies by trolls, troglodytes, and bugbears.
FrankT:
This is a Babbler.
Babblers are described as “Weird mutations of lizard men.” Apparently, sometimes lizardfolk just grow really big and look like dinosaurs. I actually think that Lizardfolk occasionally getting big and looking like dinosaurs is a fine idea, and so apparently did Games Workshop:
Really. Fine idea.
Babblers are a little bit interesting as far as dinosaur looking brutes, because they have this thing where they crawl around on all fours all fast and sneaky like a scurrying rat, and then when it's combat time they rear up on their hind legs and stagger around like a boxing rat. The rules for this are a bit kludgy, but it's evocative. I can imagine how this works.
Babblers fight like this.
The real weakness of this entry is the term “Babbler.” The justification is just pretty weak. They have a language that humans don't know and Lizardfolk do know. So they are “babbling” in the sense that they are saying things you don't understand. But presumably the other Lizardfolk they are talking to are also speaking in the same language, and they aren't called “Babblers,” so really what the actual fuck? They have normal human intelligence and love to eat Humans, because it's AD&D and of course they do.
This Berbalang is demonstrating that it's the early fucking 80s and AD&D hasn't invented censorship yet. Fuck yeah!
Berbalangs are like demons except that instead of living in some hell dimension and sending projections to the material world to fuck up the place (as demons did back in the AD&D days), they live in the material world and send projections to the Astral Plane to fuck up the place. Then when the full moon comes, their astral projection goes to the material plane and they look for havoc to cause and human corpses to eat. It's all fairly complicated and someone really thought long and hard about the intricacies of AD&D's extremely stupid cosmology.
But practically speaking, the most likely way for you to encounter these assholes is to find their bodies while they are asleep and creating shit stirring projections of themselves on the Astral Plane. Then you slit their fucking throats, take their treasure and move on with your lives.
While there was a lot of thinking about the ramifications of AD&D cosmology that went into making the Berbalang, I can't say this was time well spent. I wish someone had spent that much effort making AD&D cosmology less stupid, instead.
AncientH:
Some of the monsters in this book are just bullshit. The Astral Searcher (going back a bit) are beings created by traumatic human thought which wander the Astral Plane, trying to cross over and posses living humans.
Now, this is just complicated. Body-swapping nonsense always is. But it gets worse, if for no other reason than it involves the AD&D exorcism rules. So this monster is rare, obscure, and overly complicated for what it does.If an astral searcher reduces its victim to zero hit points or below, the mind and personality of the victim are destroyed and the astral
searcher possesses the body. It acquires the victim's physical abilities
and hit points (as all damage from the astral searcher's attack now
disappears) but not the former owner's personality, and alignment
should be re-determined at random. The possessed body becomes a
new non-player character in the body of a player character and what
this non-player-character may do is entirely in the hands of the
referee, who must have regard to the body's alignment in determining
its action
On the other end of the spectrum is the Giant Bat. Which is just a giant bat. No horns of anything. That seems like something that should have been in the Monster Manual. At least the fucking Blood Hawk, which is just a big fucking hawk, has a taste for human flesh and lines its nests with gems from its prey. You can work with that. It gives you a reason to be wary of them and raid their nests.
FrankT:
There are a fuck tonne of humanoid frogs in this book.
These two monsters are on the same double page spread.
So, we can't really talk about the Fiend Folio without talking about Giant Frog. Apparently, Giant Frog is Chaos, and that particular meme starts in the Fiend Folio. The Slaad are in here too, and we'll get to that eventually. With the book open to pages 15-16, you are confronted with two completely unrelated Chaotic Evil humanoid frog people: the Blindheim and the Bullywug. The Blindheim is basically just an animal, so the fact that it's Chaotic Evil and humanoid in shape doesn't make any difference or sense. Their big trick is that for no particular reason their eyes have blinding searchlights in them. No one knows why.
The Bullywug has gone on to be the standard frog person in D&D (not that there aren't competitors). The original writeup is not particularly inspired and the original drawing is actually fucking awful. So really I don't know why the Bullywug went on to being the gold standard of Frog people. The original writeup is a bit more obviously Lovecraftian in its inspiration, talking of degenerate Humans interbreeding with Bullywugs, but no indication of how Bullywugs actually reproduce or how the bloody hell a Human could interbreed with a presumably egg-laying amphibian. In later editions, the entire miscegenation angle was dropped, and that's a good thing.
There are more and less civilized groups of Bullywugs, with the civilized ones using armor and metal and the uncivilized ones being largely unsocialized and not having those things. There's a glimmer of a cool idea there, where having a life cycle involving a fucking tadpole stage means that the tribe has to go out and find all the Bullywugs when they grow legs and are ready to learn language and tool use – and some just slip through the cracks and become somewhat dangerous feral swamp monsters. That's actually pretty interesting, but the book doesn't go into it at all. Instead we get a rant about how sometimes they show up as the mooks of Chaotic Evil masters – and all that does is remind me of how terrible AD&D's alignments are and what a farce it is that D&DNext is bringing them back.
AncientH:
The Giant Bloodworm is not a Klingon delicacy, as you might have supposed, but a 20-foot long living trap that attacks it it's hungry or if you step on it. It's name comes from it's tendency to latch on and drain the blood from you. Which generally means that this is the sort of monster where you sent the torchbearer on ahead a bit, and when the worm is otherwise engaged draining the little fucker you kill it with fire.
Hill giant doctors are rumored to use immature bloodworms in their medical practices, bleeding out the excess humors. I just made that up, but it's a shit load more exciting than this entry.
The Bonesnapper is a small dinosaur, because dinosaurs are awesome. Specifically, it's a retarded cousin of the T-Rex that's about five feet high. It's not supposed to be intelligent, but apparently it has an instinctual desire to collect human jawbones to decorate its lair and demonstrate its superiority to the rest of its kind. That's kind of weirdly specific, and I almost want to use this monster in a game just to explore how insane it would be to come onto a little cave where there's a mound of humanoid jawbones organized about into patterns. The PCs would shit themselves, thinking they'd come across a feral, cannibalistic toothfairy or something.
Honestly, this isn't any less terrible than the actual illustration.
I'll say this for the bonesnapper however: it's straightforward. No-one decided that this critter needed any special abilities to justify its name or predilection for reptilian-hominid dentistry. Small dinosaur that collects jaws, that was the whole pitch and that's what there is.
The other monsters in the Bs are pretty shite. The Booka is one more of the umpteen types of fairie, and I'm pretty sure the stupid bastards meant Pooka, which means this has a better than even chance of being a monster-by-mispelling. The other critter is the Bunyip, which was probably provided by an Australian because its their second national cryptid after the Drop Bear. The utility of bunyips is somewhat diminished by the fact that they won't attack anything bigger than a dwarf, which means that the next time I want to dispose of an annoying halfling PC I'm going to use a bunyip as a trap door alligator.
FrankT:
That's right. In 1981 you could have naked chicks for monsters.
The same monster in the 3rd edition Fiend Folio had clothes on for no damn reason.
The Caryatid Column is an enchanted stone statue that comes to life to fight intruders. That probably sounds exactly like a Stone Golem to you, and it kind of sounded like a Stone Golem to the editor of this book as well. The very first sentence tells you that they are much like Stone Golems and that you should probably go read that entry for some of the basics on enchanted stone statues that come to life to fight intruders.
The actual mechanics here are kind of garbage. They are much weaker than actual Stone Golems, and they take longer to build because “go fuck yourself.” They have very arbitrary and confusing defenses, where they have a variable damage reduction that is more effective against more powerful magic weapons for no apparent reason. And they have an even more arbitrary chance of breaking weapons you hit them with because “go fuck yourself.”
But for all that, these are actually much more reasonable as a “guardian statue” monster than Stone Golems, or any Golems. The description is good, and they are nicely atmospheric. Obviously it needs to be streamlined and made less bullshit, but this is honestly what an enchanted statue that comes to life to fight intruders should look like.
AncientH:
The early Cs don't offer a lot of great monsters. The Caterwaul is a panther on speed which is almost impossible to hit, because it has a random AC of between 6 and -1. The Cifal ("colonial insect-formed artificial life") is a walking termite colony shaped like a man that escaped from a bad comic book. The clubnek is a mutant ostrich. A coffer corpse is...uh...the actual description is confusing:
So...yeah, I dunno. It could be a dead viking whose flaming longship hit an iceberg, or...I dunno.These foul creatures of the undead class are found in stranded funeral barges or in any other situation in which a corpse has failed to return to its maker. Though the coffer corpse resembles a zombie it is treated as a wraith on the cleric/undead table.
Ran out of gas on the road to hell.
FrankT:
The badassery of this drawing is in no way matched by the coolness of this monster.
The Crypt Thing is the DM trolling you. That's literally 100% of what it's for. It's a big “fuck you” from the DM directly to you. They are neutral skeletons who sit around in robes (the robes in my book are purple, but according to the description they are supposed to be brown) waiting for adventurers to come in and get trolled. They don't attack unless you attack first, and if you converse with them (in the neutral alignment tongue,
because it's AD&D and that existed), they make fun of you. Their big power is to use a scatter teleport on the entire party – everyone who fails a save gets teleported a long ass way in a random direction. Apparently they can choose to troll the party a little less badly by paralyzing their victims and simultaneously turning them invisible. In any case, having made all the party members who failed a save vanish, they then make fun of anyone who remains and tell them that their friends have been disintegrated because that's hilarious (for the DM).
Actually, yes. Yes I am.
So basically it looks like a Lich, but it's actually non-hostile and has no evidence that this is the case. And when you inevitably assume it's an evil villain monster, the DM laughs at you for a while and the game grinds to a halt while everyone very slowly gets the group back together. Ugh. This is one of the biggest DM “fuck yous” that ever fucked you.
AncientH:
We're going to sign off for tonight with Crabmen. I actually like Crabmen, based entirely on an appreciation of the works of William Hope Hodgson and this Conan the Barbarian comic:
No seriously, the art is terrible.
Crabmen are terribly underdeveloped, but they are the kind of race which actually should work in a fantasy milieu - hell, add "-men" to any critter and you've got a 70s Sword & Sorcery fantasy race - but that's the kind of thing you should be able to work with. Really, how cool would it be to be traveling through a region and you wander into a bustling village of crabmen, and none of them fucking attack you, because they recognize humans and they're on decent terms with them? The racial love of silver and fear of sahuagin are minimalist elements to build a culture on, but come the fuck on, think of all the potential there.
"I'm a doctor, why not?"
Of course, in this scant little entry its all potential, but our mothers and fathers didn't pop open monster manuals back in the day to read six pages on humanoid crab culture and economics. That came later.
