Wednesday, June 1, 2011

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many monster books...

Actually I don't care about being rich and body image issues are a serious problem, but I freaking love monster books.

So I'm pretty jazzed about the impending August release of Frog Gog/Necromancer Games' "Tome of Horrors Complete."

This 1000-page "monster" of a tome (har har har) consists of critters from the three Necromancer Games Tome of Horrors in both Swords and Wizardry (sigh... no morale score or hoard class) and Mathfinder versions.

The S&W wizardry version, due to the brevity of the stat blocks, also includes write ups of lairs/hex descriptions for each monster. Initially I was dubious of this scheme, considering it padding, but when I read that Jon Slater of NOD was responsible for these write ups my position completely reversed based on the awesomeness of the hex contents in the Nod material I have read; I have no doubt these are going to be wild!

The preorder period expired as of today, and the books are shipping in August, and I'm bemused by the lack of a buzz regarding this product. Certainly it carries a hefty price tag, especially with shipping factored in, but come on, 700 Necromancer Game monsters with Nod style lairs/encounters? Compared with how expensive everything is nowadays, such as console games, dining out, or boardgames, this strikes me as a solid return on your entertainment/hobby dollars. And the word is that the binding will be top-notch.

Plus if have an uppity power gamer with a sense of entitlement at your table you can use this hefty, well-bound book to knock some sense and respect for the DM into their thick skull... *POW!*



8 comments:

  1. I don't know. for those not overly concerned with collecting or publishing OGL products, I think the realization is that, yes, they DO have enough monster books. Converting monsters to 0E or B/X stats is easy enough. It's the concept that's important, not the slight differences in the stats.

    That said, I wouldn't mind having a copy, but I guess I just don't want it bad enough.

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  2. Maybe if I win the lotto! Yeah that's the ticket!

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  3. I wanted to buy it, but it was too expensive.

    If it comes out in pdf at a cheaper price, I will likely grab a copy then.

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  4. If I were too rich, I could afford to buy the book.

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  5. I'm bemused by the lack of a buzz regarding this product.

    The price tag is a huge issue here. It's rare for an OSR product to cost more than about $35 and this is more than twice that. Plus, it's a retread of D20 material that quite a lot of us already have and, as The Iron Goat rightly says above, converting monsters to OD&D isn't exactly hard.

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  6. I'm hoping for a reasonably priced pdf version myself. It looks sweet indeed.

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  7. I preordered the hardcopy. I missed almost all of d20 (and almost all of 2nd edition for that fact). In fact, last monster book I got was AD&D Monster Manual II... so I suppose I'm due.

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