Fifty Fiends Review — Fiendish Foes, Mismatched System

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.

Vault of the Faceless Giants free for playtest

The upcoming adventure PA1 Vault of the Faceless Giants from New Big Dragon  is currently free in playtest form. If you download it now, you'll get the updated version when it goes live.

What's the catch? Well, besides it not being final, apparently it features psionics from his psionics book. Ugh, I hate psionics.

Other than that, looks pretty neat and Indian themed.

Free racial gnome classes for Labynrith Lord — CX1 Extra: Gnomes

While the B/X rules are really quite elegant and fun, I've never really understood the point of racial classes, at least for humanoid races like elves, dwarves, & hobbits.  But if you do, and are dying to add gnomes to your game, New Big Dragon just released a free supplement with gnome racial classes, apparently a preview of a larger book of classes.

I did like the Creature Crucible line for D&D, where you could play monsters.

Creature Compendium Review—Must Buy Monster Book

 You can never have too many monsters, or for that matter, too many monster manuals. Some say you should always make up your own original monsters, but to be honest, I think most people's creativity is naturally limited in scope. At least I tend to think along certain lines, and one of the reason I like other people's monsters, characters, and places is that they are things I wouldn't have thought of.

When creating new monsters, the catch is, all the easy monsters have been created. D&D borrowed quite a bit from folklore and fantasy fiction, not always describing things true to the source, but the inspiration is often recognizable. It also had many original items that really captured the imagination, despite being somewhat silly in nature. The owlbear and gelatinous cube for instance. It can be a hard act to follow, as Fiend Folio showed...

Creature Compendium from Richard LeBlanc and New Big Dragon Games is a really good try, featuring 200 new monsters for old school D&D. Some are taken from folklore (some pretty obscure), one is from a movie, but I think most are original. It has an almost ludicrously low price of $2 in PDF, which is even more astounding given that it has a lot of original artwork by the author.

Creature Compendium released

From New Big Dragon comes a book of monsters, statted for both 0e/1e and B/X, all for a staggering low $2.

ABYSMAL • ADARNA BIRD • AIRWALKER • AQRASETH • ARASSAS • aziza
BAT, ARCTIC (ICE) • BAT, DEATH • BATAR • BEETLE, GIANT FLAYER • BESTIAL BEAST •
BILOKO • BLOODBEAST • BLOODGILL •
BRAIN BAT • BRAINCRAB • BURU
CACTUS CAT • CACUS • CADEJO •
CALYTAUR • CENTAUR, CYPRIAN •
CHÖTGÖR • COW DEMON • CYCLORC
DEVIL MONKEY • DINGONEK • DJETABI •
DOBARCHÚ, GREATER • DOBARCHÚ, LESSER •
DONESTRE • DOVER DEMON • DRACOPEDE • DRAGI • DRAGONBOAR, WOOLY • DRAUGR • DUNTER • DWARF, BLACK • DWARF, RED • DZEE-DZEE-BON-DA
EAGLE HOUND • ELEMENTAL, MUDMIST •
ELEMENTAL, SAND • ELEPHANT, WHITE •
ELOKO • EMERALD STINKBUG