The Fiend Folio has many great monsters.

No dissapointment here, ever.

I really like the Fiend Folio. No complaint on my part.

Quote from: RPGPundit;586659Seriously, the Fiend Folio had an extremely high ratio of ridiculous, stupid, or ultra- bizarre monsters in it compared to other monster manuals.  I've heard some people gush with love about how wonderful this is, but was there anyone who was disappointed by it? Who felt ripped off by it, either then or now?

RPGPundit

Nope. For me the FF is one of the most interesting books TSR put out back in the day. The reason is that a majority of those monsters were so different in feel and tone from what TSR was producing. Yes there were clunkers, but in all I really dig the variety and the breaking of convention found here. I still look at this book for inspiration.

Richard

Quote from: Sacrosanct;586748In the 80s, I really didn't like it, and didn't understand why people did.  I hated the Githyanki (and still do.  What the hell are those elbow sacks supposed to be anyway?).  But now, I don't dislike it anymore, and there are several creatures in it I like.  Emmanuel's art also grew on my a bit.

Those sacks are used to store extra fat that helps replenish a Githyanki after they cross over from the Astral Plane to the Material Plane. Like camels with their humps for water storage, the Githyanki consumes fast amount of food, and stores that in those sacks so they do not drain themselves when they to their plane shifting.

Well at least that is what I told my players.

Richard

Testicles, duh...

while there were clunkers inside, the russ nicholson art more than made up for it, as well as a fair bit of the monsters previously mentioned.  more useful than MM2 for us, certainly.

It had the Gith, which was the first place I'd seen them outside of the old Fedifensor adventure in Dragon mag.

Outside of that, it was okay.

All the TSR books after the core 3 are hit-and-miss in terms of utility at the table.  The FF is no exception.

That being said, I think that very few DMs took the time to utilize the stuff that was in there, upon which solid lairs/encampments/villages could be built - probably because custom random encounter tables were not as frequently used as the published ones, which had relatively few FF monsters, and a comprehensive encounter table by terrain or dungeon level was not created in the 1E period.

As I recall, it was one of the last AD&D books I purchased back in the day.  I got it more for completeness than for any other reason.  Although it was the book for Drow and Death Knights, which did provide some impetus for me to purchase it.

I wasn't disappointed or particularly happy.  I thought it wasn't as good as Monster Manual II.  It didn't have as much utility as the original Monster Manual, but there was still cool stuff in it.

A lot of the "iconic" FF monsters that everyone still talks about - the Gith, Slaad, and the Death Knight - were created by Charles Stross, who is probably known to many posters here as a best-selling science fiction author. (I'm an avid Stross follower; if he writes it, I read it!) If I ever meet him in person, I hope to have a copy of the FF handy for him to sign.

For those who haven't read him, I recommend the "Laundry Files" series, starting with The Atrocity Archives.

Quote from: EOTB;586864a comprehensive encounter table by terrain or dungeon level was not created in the 1E period.

They're in the back of the DMG, the FF and MM2 (which also has a comprehensive listing of possible monsters broken down by terrain and climate)?  Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that.

In my teen years Fiend Folio was not a disappointment. I raided it for its many cool monsters, all the same noticing "gee there are a lot of monsters that lay their eggs in you and also a lot of little foot high guys that try and fuck you up and some shit that makes no sense."

It's a random trawl through the White Dwarf Fiend Factory submissions so it's a great window into how fans of the day tried to fold sci-fi and horror into their fantasy. Some of the entries like Penanggalan and Revenant read like mini-scripts for horror stories.

MM2 was kind of a cheat because it drew on a lot more module and Dragon magazine monsters. When you subtract those you're not left with much - a lot of "lesser" or "greater" versions of monsters, enough "normal animal" types to populate a drugstore rack of men's magazine covers, some decent folklore types (korred, fomorian, quickling, barghest), and a whole lot of crap like the diakka and the zorbo. It's as if they wanted to go full steam away from the gonzo sci-fi feel of FF and get you back into a dirt-and-boils medieval world rampant with black squirrels and olive slime.

To sum up my old blog series of FF monsters that kick the ass of their MM equivalents - Gorbels beat Gas Spores - Sons of Kyuss beat Rot Grubs - Retrievers beat most demon types - Grell beat both Intellect Devourers and Carrion Crawlers - Necrophidii beat all skeleton variants - and Grimlocks beat all other 2HD soldiers.

Fiend Folio monsters that were awesome:

aarakocra, bonesnapper, crypt thing, death knight, oriental dragon, drow, ettercap, firenewt, githyanki, githzerai, grell, hook horror, huecava, iron cobra, kelpie, kuo-toa, mephit, penanggalan, quaggoth, revenant, scarecrow, skeleton warrior, son of kyuss, svirfneblin, vodyanoi, and xvarts.

Basically, tons of awesome monsters.

I think the Fiend Folio was about as good as you could have expected a monster book to be after the Monster Manual grabbed all the iconic monsters first (Unicorn, Dragon, etc).

The Fiend Folio's job was much harder than the Manual's--I mean, you create a unicorn and you don't even need a picture and people know what that is. The folio needed a good original picture or hook for every creature because they were almost all totally new.

Considering the ambition of the project, it did alright, especially with Russ Nicholson's entries and especially compared to books after.

Is there another all non-traditional, non-vanilla fantasy, non-default monster book afterwards that compares? The only thing I can think of that's close is warhammer stuff.

Or, more to the point: how many monsters can you name off the top of your head that we all will recognize created after the Fiend Folio for any game?

Considering all that, I think it gets at least a 6 out of 10

Quote from: Roger the GS;586889MM2 was kind of a cheat because it drew on a lot more module and Dragon magazine monsters.

Wait, wait.  I'm not interested in "defending" the MM2 but how then is FF not?  Most of it's contents came out of White Dwarf.  What didn't was mostly out of modules (Drow, Bullywugs, Lolth, Retriever, etc.)

...so, it's exactly the same as Monster Manual II.