The Tome of Horrors Complete for Swords & Wizardry is a role playing game supplement published by Frog God Games for use with Swords & Wizardry. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.
The supplement is available from DriveThruRPG as a PDF for $29.99 but was purchased at the reduced price of $12 during a special offer. It can also be found in hardcover from sites such as Amazon. The PDF has 688 pages with two being the front and rear covers, two being the front matter, five being the Table of Contents, three being the Legal Appendix containing the Open Game License, 14 being ads for other products and one blank. The various sections are also opened with full page titles.
The Introduction explains how the original Tome of Horrors converted a host of older D&D monsters to the, then new, edition of the game, D&D 3E. Two more volumes then added new monsters. This takes all those creatures and converts them to Swords & Wizardry, which is based on the Original Edition of the game. First edition monster books are still easy to find; Original Edition ones are much harder to obtain. This explains that this book didn’t take First Edition Monsters that had been converted to Third Edition, and then convert them back to First, but instead converted them all the way back to the Original Edition.
The Tome of Horrors Complete is the main part of the book, containing the monsters listed from A to Z. The monster descriptions follow a fairly standard layout: name, stats, description, adventure hook and copyright notice. The copyright notice states where the monster came from, if it wasn’t created for the Tome of Horrors in any version, with a preponderance of AD&D first edition sources for modified monsters. Some categories of related monster also have an overall description of the category and a few monsters have details for variants described as well.
Appendix A: Animals is similar to the previous section with entries laid out in the same manner. This section covers animals, admittedly dangerous and/or unusual or giant ones, not monsters.
Appendix B: N’gathau covers these unusual humanoid beings, who inflict pain and mutilation on others but are themselves all hugely mutilated. Thirteen unique n’gathau are described, the Twelve and the tripartite demigod who leads, the Quorum. There are then some details on creating random n’gathau, including a couple of tables for adding mutilations. There is also a short adventure hook relating to an item called the Daedalean Cube connected to the n’gathau. If it cannot be guessed the n’gathau are, like the kytons, based on the Cenobites from Clive Barker‘s books and the Hellraiser films.
Appendix C: Monsters by CL lists all the creatures in the book starting at CL A to 1 and finishing at CL 40.
The Legal Appendix explains how to credit any monsters used in this book in the Open Game License. Every monster will need listing separately, and instructions are given as to how to do this. This shows why supplements that extensively use any of the Tome of Horrors range have such extensive listings of creatures.
Tome of Horrors Complete for Swords & Wizardry in Review
The PDF is decently bookmarked with every creature and most of the sections linked. The Table of Contents is to a similar level of detail. Navigation is decent considering the book’s length. The text follows a two column format and quite a lot of minor errors were noticed, including missing words and sentence fragments. There are as well as these what appeared to be language left over from the Pathfinder editions in a few places, from referencing conditions and combat actions that do not exist in Swords & Wizardry to leftover Pathfinder descriptive text at the top of monster descriptions and improper formatting. Proofreading could have been a lot better. Almost every monster has an illustration, all of them black and white but by a variety of different artists and the styles do not quite all combine well. Presentation is still good for a bestiary of this length.
There are also short adventure hooks for the vast majority of the monsters; the exceptions are when there are several related monsters with one that is a leader, such as an insect queen; in these cases there is a hook for all the creatures. Some of these hooks are also connected to others, although an internal link to the other hooks would have been useful. As well as the monsters, there are a few things, spells and magic items associated with them or that can be obtained from them. Some of the creatures have information on using them as characters and others, singular powerful ones, have details on followers who worship them as gods.
Unlike in the Swords & Wizardry Complete book, which actually came out after this one, demons and devils are given separate entries. However, there is some confusion in the actual descriptions, with devils sometimes referred to as demons and, in one case, the former President of Hell is referred to as being the second in command of the Abyss and in another succubi are in the court of a singular devil. Nor are demons are devils that are described in other material listed as to which they are in this book.
This supplement is a massive collection of monsters for Swords & Wizardry. Even with the errors, it is a vast resource for any GM and the many adventure hooks can help spark many ideas. Tome of Horrors Complete for Swords & Wizardry is recommended for any Swords & Wizardry GM, or one using a related system, who wants to increase the number of creatures in their game and it can be found by clicking here.
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