Review: Tome of Horrors 1

 Extraordinary Collection of Creatures

"Tome of Horrors" by Scott Greene, published and distributed by Necromancer Games.

This massive 328 page sourcebook simply contains over 400 monsters for 3rd edition D&D.

The very short introduction has only three pages, a Credits page, a good Table of Contents, and a Preface.

One - The Monsters.  There's an entire menangerie of critters, from Adherers to Zombies.  Many were adapted from earlier editions of the D&D rules, most from first edition.  Altogether, they take up the vast majority of the bulk of this tome.  Everything from page 4 to page 285 is creatures.  That's 281 pages of crunchy goodness.  And almost all of them never appeared in other versions of D&D nil much later.  There's also a small drawing of each.

Appendix A - Animals.  These are just a few ordinary normal animals translated into 3rd edition.  There are only nine of these.

Appendix B - Templates.  There are only twelve of these, but they give creative GM's 12 different templates to apply to any other creature in the book. 

Appendix C - Snakes.  This small section gives a list of poisonous snakes and their stats.

Appendix D - Challenge Ratings.  Lists all the monsters in the book by Challenge Rating - not alphabetically.

All of the entries have a "credit" section which identifies the original creator and where the creature first appeared.  All entries are simply alphabetical, which means, for instance, that you needn't look for "Yellow Musk Zombies" under the letter "Z", but under "Y" for Yellow Musk Zombie.  All Giants and Golems are under "G".  This is the beginning of a three book set of Tome of Horrors.  I'm not even real sure of where they came up with enough creations to fill two more books, as I think this one is rather complete.  The only disadvantage to this book is that it uses D&D 3.0 stats.  There is a revised version using 3.5 stats, as well as a massive magnum opus of the "Tome of Horrors Complete Unlimited" that presents Pathfinder stats.

As it is, I wish I could give this more than the five stars possible.  It would serve any good GM as a powerful monster manual type reference.  Highly recommended.