After the extremes of Book of Vile Darkness, the two-volume Fiendish Codex once again tames demons and devils for broader audiences.

The first Codex, Hordes of the Abyss, tackles demons. The approach here is similar to the 3E Draconomicon, Lords of Madness and Liber Mortis: explain demons through an ecological lens. This is a stupid idea. Demons are incarnated evil, unknowable to mortal minds. But that doesn’t stop Hordes of the Abyss from literally dissecting them anyway.

Worse, it expands the demonic meta-story, introducing the obyrith, a sort of progenitor race of demons that came before the tanar’ri, which, again, reduces demons to a tangle of bloodlines and species in a way I find utterly demystifying for planar entities.

On the positive side of things, Hordes reintroduces several demon lords weirdly absent from Book of Vile Darkness – Pazuzu, Baphomet, Fraz-Urb’luu and Zuggtmoy – and introduces a couple new ones (I find Malcanthet, the queen of succubi, an excellent addition). There is also an excellent King Kong-eque illustration of Demogorgon and a swell Wayne Reynolds portrait of Iggwilv (though I don’t care for his Graz’zt). I generally find 3E’s approach to the planes a bit conservative, but there are some good landmarks detailed in the 15 layers included in the book (the drooling jungle of Hollow’s Heart, the illustration of which I included here, is one of them).