Fifty Fiends from
New Big Dragon Games (Richard J. LeBlanc, Jr.) is a curious book. Firstly, because like almost all his other work, it's a ridiculously low price ($1) given the amount of content (70 pages). That includes original illustrations, albeit by the author, but he's as good as some "professional" artists who sell stock art. The other curious thing is that despite it being a book of demons and devils and chaotic neutral outsiders, it's for Basic and Expert D&D (B/X). Which didn't have demons, devils, or really outsiders at all. You had something like them introduced in the Immortals set, but they were meant to be a challenge for Immortals, not normal characters.
To me this is one of the odder, even maddening trends of the OSR — re-creating everything from 1E instead of just, you know, playing 1E. This is especially puzzling to me in the case of B/X and BECMI. Although I was (and am) mostly a 1E fan, I did enjoy BECMI because of its differences from 1E. The different classes, different spells, different monsters, different cosmology, and the consequences of its rules on the world it developed. Adding everything from 1e to B/X & BECMI makes BX/BECMI worse, not better, because they deserve to be their own thing, not a copy of 1E. But it's like 1E has cooties or something, in the eyes of the OSR.
