Fiend Folio, the last of the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardcovers, with their bright wrap-around art, was published in 1982.

It’s a bit unusual, as it mostly contains monsters created for the Fiend Factory column in Games Workshop’s White Dwarf Magazine. There’s a fair amount of in-house TSR monsters, too, like Drow and Kuo-Toa. The result is a mixed bag. A lot of monsters don’t serve a clear purpose (though cool, why exactly do I need Princes of Elemental Evil?). Several are just hyrbids or
imposters of earlier creatures (Ogrillons and Norkers, lookin’ at you. Crabman…I don’t know what to say about you). Despite that, classics abound: Hook Horrors, Death Knights, Grell, Penanggalan and Githyanki are all worth the price of admission.

The real star of the book is Russ Nicholson’s art. The cover is bright and mysterious – why is that mummy dude wearing bejeweled armor? Why is the other one disappearing? His interiors are dark and crowded and perhaps the most vivid illustrations to appear in a TSR publication to that point.

I’ve always had trouble putting my finger on the difference in tone between the American and British approaches to RPGs, but Fiend Folio is the perfect illustration. The Brits like their fantasy weirder, more brightly colored and more horrifically violent than we do. Or, at least, that’s what the folks at Games Workshop have led me to believe…