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.