This is a MUST have for any GM of The Black Hack 2e. Even more valuable than the (highly useful) bestiary, is the reference sheet. At the end of the document, there is a 2 page quick reference sheet that is a perfect GM Screen. It is up to date with the 2nd Edition's rules (including the Armor rules). It is the best quick reference sheet you will find anywhere for the system.

And again, the bestiary itself is very handy to have. Especially if you're running an old school adventure module and want to quickly grab a monster stat block to drop in.

An irritating book to use.

First off, the lovely art is gone, as are the quirky spins on monsters, so if you're expecting a product as high quality as TBH2e you might be dissapointed. There's no flavour, simply pre-adapted stats for common foes, which admittedly are useful for running old modules if you don't have the time or inclination. It's not, however, a flawless book for that purpose either.

The monsters sometimes have confusing abilities such as the Blink Dog requiring you to reroll initiative partway through a round without explaining what happens to creatures (even the ones on its side) that haven't gone yet. To my knowledge blink dogs either use their teleportstion to attack from unexpected angles or otherwise to retreat after attacking, based on the edition they appear in, so I have no idea where this confusing initiative rerolling ability comes from.

Perhaps most infuriating for me is the fact the double whammy of enemies not obeying TBH's damage rules, and only having average damage listed. Firstly, TBH allows GMs to know a monster's damage by it's hit dice, HD1 monsters roll a d4, HD4 monsters roll a d10 etc. Average damage has always been given after this in parentheses, however the author of this book assumes that all GMs will default instead to average damage and doesn't list the die used, but worst of all the damage often doesn't line up to the HD rule.

The aforementioned blink dogs are HD4 creatures and yet do 4 (average) damage, when a HD4 monster should roll a d10 and deal average 5 (given TBH's rounding down fractions). In another example a HD7 black dragon deals 10 (avg) damage, when it should be rolling 2d8 and averaging 8. For the GM who likes to roll damage it is so infuriating to not know which dice to roll since these monsters don't work the same way from one to the next.

The real icing on the cake is that at the back of the book there's a section on adapting your own monsters which includes the HD-to-damage table from TBH and tells you to use it to determine how much damage a given monster makes.

For a book that promises to take the effort out of converting classic monsters for use in The Black Hack, it manages to do 75% of the work leaving you to figure out how much damage a monster should really be doing, or else use average damage on each and every attack. The fact that some abilites are downright confusing and others are instead just dull, lacking TBH's flair and charm means this is a book I'd recommend if you're a)really lazy and b) are fine with running monsters verbatim without anything to spark your imagination.

It is fine, and it does what it says on the tin: it takes the old classic D&D monsters and converts them. However, recall the art of the monsters in the BH2e book? Recall how kinda fun & funky the take on them was? The tables? The little bits of what they might be carrying...the flavor? None of that is here. It is a book of stats. Which is fine and utilitarian, but kinda of a bore for $5...

This has been the missing piece for me. I've been running Black Hack 2 games 3 times a week for 6 months now. The most tedious part was converting monsters. NOT because it was hard, but I'm lazy and and I am low om prep and long on improv.

This does almost all the heavy lifting for me, and Appendix D Conversion guidelines define something I was winging before and make it very easy to stat out encounter tables that came with the adventure or existing monster book.

Used it at the table once this week already. Again tonight and again on Thursday.

This is probably a decent buy for anyone starting out with Black Hack directly. Having to look up monster descriptions elsewhere might be annoying.

This a must-buy for people like me, D&D 2E kids who grew up and want a lighter but familiar game like BH2, and proably already have tons of old school Monster books around. I have Appendix D printed on one sheet and I put a copy in each of my hardback D&D and AD&D rulebooks, which are now off the shelf again.

Great work.