JasonKoivu

And the winner for "Least Creative Cover" goes to the...

Fiend Folio

Good golly miss molly, it may not be the worst cover D&D ever used for one of their books, but jayzus, it's lame! A monster wielding a sword and essentially nothing else? This is tantamount to a band photo of a rock singer shouting into a microphone. Come on, try a little!

On the whole, I'm not a fan of the artwork within either. One artist, who shall remain nameless, particularly liked to use that dot-shading style, so all his monsters ended up looking warty, pimply or like they'd just come out of the ocean and rolled in the sand. Gotta give it up for the artists though in this respect: there are some gruesomely realistic violence portrayed...



And a bare breast or two appears, so three cheers for sex and violence!

My knock on the illustrations aside, in my mind the Fiend Folio book of monsters (third tome released on the subject by D&D and TSR if I'm not mistaken) included more unusual, bizarre, and oddly original beastly creations than its predecessor, Monster Manual II.

FF provided players with lots of powerful skeletal creepos (often called Death-something-or-other), plenty of more goblin-like sword fodder, a few more giants (filling out the ol' material elements: fog and mountain), more dragons (but this time all-"oriental"!) and the oh-so popular evil elves, the Drow:



However, it also came with a heaping share of ridiculous and downright silly boogermen such as the crabmen (yes, men with crab claws), a giant snail with morning star antennae, a "frostman" that looked like a 70s pornstar on his way to a Halloween party in a mixed up half caveman/half pirate costume, an ice troll that looked a lot like The Simpson's Mr. Burns, lots of things with heads WAY too big for their bodies, and the lava children. Who could take serious something that looked like a cross between a hairless gorilla and Howdy Doody?



So all-in-all D&D gave us players some good old wacky wickedness to infuse into our games, and although this publication may not have been wholly necessary (and was probably pushed to publication by D&D's overwhelming popularity at the time,) I did appreciate having it for at least one reason: the game in which I inserted a Crypt Thing. It teleported away the players' characters, scattering them about the dungeon and wreaking havoc. It was the first time they'd been "on their own" and they shit themselves. Good times for the DM!