Two Immediate Quibbles re. The Swords & Wizardry Tome of Horrors Complete

1) A whole lotta white space going on here; I really would not have minded a smaller page count in exchange for a tighter layout (even sans the encounters; they're cool, but man, I dunno if I'll ever use any?).

2) No monsters by terrain type?!? Ahem, from http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/index.php/products/the-tome-of-horrors "... and plenty of charts dividing the compiled monsters by CR, type, and terrain...."; with my other monster books I use the monster by terrain listings as encounter tables (by penciling in the #s on a printout of the pdf), and I assure you, I would have gladly exchanged the encounters for some terrain tables, or especially encounter tables by terrain.

It's still a cool & bad-ass monster book, but man, I was really looking forward for there being charts by terrain type for my over the top obsessive encounter tables. ...unless I missed the terrain charts on my first breeze through the pdf?

EDIT: If you preordered it and can't find the PDF on the download site, try checking the "ezine subscriptions" section instead of PDF downloads when you log in.

Dear PDF Publishers: Please DON'T Do This...

So when I download a freebie or purchase a D&D/OSR/RPG PDF, I generally take it to my friendly local small independant print shop where the absolute dear of an owner uses an Acrobat plug-in to output the PDF in booklet format (although lately I've been handling the mouse-clicks) which is than printed, folded, and stapled into assembled booklet form by the absolute behemoth of a printer in the back.

However, whenever I've tried that with a purchased or free watermarked PDF, the plug-in is denied permission to output in booklet format. Which kind of defeats the purpose of exporting the file into an easy to read, store and use format (with the amount of reality TV that The Warden watches on MY computer, referencing the file on the computer is not a practical option, nevermind that I HATE using a computer while DMing).

So yeah, watermarking PDFs, please don't waste my time with that jive...and I seriously doubt it is going to help you make a living with your hobby publishing venture. Considering that EDIT 95%+ of purchased PDFs I own don't have watermarks, it really makes you look like a worried dork.

My Watermark is integrity and dedication to supporting the publishers that produce material that I use, there's no way that I'm going to be part of cash-blocking any of the awesome dudes out there in OSR publishing land!

Every Monster Book Should Include Encounter Tables

By terrain type and dungeon level, utilizing all of and only the monsters contained in the book, and not those 2-20 tables - which are great for specialized tables, but the failure of the AD&D Monster Manual II is that it doesn't have the comprehensive d% encounter tables in the back like the Fiend Folio.

With the caveat that monsters books containing only a few monsters would be exempt.

With such a protocol in place a DM could easily make up encounter tables like:

d% --- Monster Book Encounter Table
01-24  Human - use Swords & Wizardry City Encounters or other resource
25-49  AD&D Fiend Folio
50       Random Esoteric Creature Generator
51-60  Arduin Trilogy
61-70  OSRIC Monsters of Myth
71-80  OSRIC Malevolent and Benign
81-90  Swords & Wizardry Monster Book
91-00  Tome of Horrors Complete

With the number of monsters listed in each book, an obsessive DM could easily assign d% probabilities according to monster book content quantities.

I think it's great that so many OSR monster books contain indexes with monster listings by dungeon level, terrain type, and so forth, I just wish that they'd take that extra step and tack some sort of arbitrary random table function onto these listings, just for "instant functionality."