The rest of this week, I’ll be looking at some of the square bound campaign-specific Monstrous Compendiums from 1994-95, the first being the Planescape Appendix.

First things first, the cover is a bit of a disaster. It keeps the Easley trio established in the previous Monstrous Compendium appendices, but plops it rather unceremoniously onto the rusty Planescape background with zero graphic design elegance. Which, whatever. The interior is full of hot new DiTerlizzi art, so all is forgiven.

I love this book. Granted, it is essentially a reprint of the Outer Planes appendix with new art, but that is why it is so important. Where DiTerlizzi’s art in the Planescape box set gave me a new way to see D&D in a broad, general way, his work on this book transformed things I knew and loved into things that were strange and new. This reinterpretation is what finally drove home the idea that D&D could be anything I wanted it to be. That, more than anything else, has sustained my interest in it and other RPGs for decades.