Children of the Night: Werebeasts (1998) feels a little less dynamic than Ghosts and Vampires, probably because it is all the work of a single author, William W. Connors. None of it is bad! But with the ghosts book, you had thirteen folks each bringing their one best ghost NPC/scenario. That kind of arrangement is almost always going to outshine in this format, I think.

Connors does well, though, regardless — the variety here is impressive. There’s a wererat pirate, a werefox opera singer, there’s a werebat who is basically pretending to be Dracula, there’s a house cat that can turn into a human (this is not nearly as amusing as it sounds), a wereboar that wants to be a great artists and a wereray (forget the story, the existence of wereray at all is interesting enough). My favorite is a weregorilla who has a sort of traveling museum, though the werejackal that tangles with a mummy in true Universal Monsters fashion gives him a run for his money.

That Robh Ruppel on the cover and Kevin McCann on the interiors. I don’t love McCann as a Ravenloft artist, but I do enjoy his art generally, which is good, because this essentially a generic D&D book.