Slayer’s Guide to the Undead Author: Gary Gygax and John Creffield Type: Accessory – undead Format: 128 pages, paperback Release date: 2002 Summary of content: Book in the Slayer’s Guide tradition, exploring undead creatures. Publisher: Mongoose. Rating: *

As much as I like the Slayer’s Guide serie in general, I did not like this book. Written by good old Gygax (yeah, right) and John Creffield (do you think we should we reverse this order?), the book is nearly useless, and full of no imagination templates.

But let’s go into details:

The first parts are about Orcus, the demon lord of Undead, about the senses of undead, etc. Nothing more then you could read in the WotC Monster Manual or quickly extrapolate from it. It is full of great stuff like “Undead are immune to virtually all spells that affect the mind (…) Some have hypothesised that the undead do not have working brains and thus magic cannot affect them.†First, it is false (wights, ghouls and vampires still have their brains and it’s not rotting) and second, the answer to that phenomenon is well known: it is simply because their mind is warped by undeath. The book is full of similar simplifications that do not stand under the most simple analysis.

Then you have templates. Poor ! They do not propose anything, it’s just that, i.e. for a skeleton – change the die to d12, speed: same as base creature, etc. Who really needed that? Poor page use, more like filling to me. Anybody could have done something similar without the book. Astonishingly poor grasp of basic concepts: a new undead, the skassassin, is an unwilled undead executioner able to follow its target anywhere on the same plane, hide and use camouflage. Mindless like a skeleton or a zombie, huh? This error would have been laughed at in any fan-made netbook…

The other undead covered by this book are bodak, devourers, ghouls, ghasts, mohrgs, mummies, wights, allips, ghosts, shadows, spectres, wraiths, liches, vampires: other great templates and bland flavour text. The section on mummy rectifies a funny mistake of the first edition of D&D: “Zagig†admits having done a mistake by saying mummies derive their magic from positive energy, and that it should be from negative energy instead. Great 1st edition mistake corrected. There is a recurring fiction about a prostitute finding a book about undead in the things of a sleeping client. She reads it and is lured to more power (yawn).

The cover is quite cool, but it nearly stops there. The inside cover art is gory, disgusting and tasteless. It is absolutely repulsive and unneeded, and the illustration of page 34 (and others) reeks of a pimple-faced teen drawer. The end adventure is cheesy to the max: a giant bodak-eagle? A spider-wight? A young gold-dragon-wight? But of course! Useless.

If you really want to read it, get a very cheap copy. Not recommended, even for a fantasy setting. Get the Van Ricten’s Guides or Libris Mortis, you won’t get filling in these.