The Fiend Factory of the Fans

Mention the Fiend Folio, then let the debate begin!

With this recent entry, the Grognardia blog stimulated response and further discussion elsewhere of The Fiend Folio, which appeared in August of 1981. Apparently this discussion was raised six years ago, too, on G+, and it's a recurring topic among gamer nostalgia experts. It was a debate back in the '80s, too, as I recall (and some of you readers may, too).

What's the discussion about? Basically the question is whether the original Fiend Folio was (is) good. It's an odd exception to the adulation lavished on the old-time game stuff published by TSR, because retro-style ("OSR") gamers today put most TSR products from this period on a pedestal. But not the Fiend Folio, not regularly. Why not?

The Fiend Folio was, in effect, a sequel. The standard for judging it is its antecedent, the Monster Manual of 1977. During the initial wave of D&D leading up to 1981, players in the USA had wanted a sequel to the much-loved Monster Manual of 1977. Apparently, as reviews from the time and still today indicate, the Fiend Folio was too different.

Superficially, the Fiend Folio looks like the Monster Manual--monsters, pictures, stats, explanatory blurbs--but it had a subtly different style and feel. The monsters seemed to have a different fantasy rationale--or none at all. Many different artists were involved, and they had slightly different models. It was somehow British, not American. There seemed to be a cultural difference, something hard to specify. Different styles of art, different sources of inspiration, and different principles of monster design were bound to disappoint players who wanted more of exactly the same flavor as Gygax's Monster Manual.

There is no accounting for taste, and I have no intention of trying to convince anybody to like the Fiend Folio or to dislike it. When I was a kid, I thought it seemed out of sync with the rest of D&D, with a greater emphasis on oddity or even absurdity. But is it really so different? The Monster Manual is full of standard beasts from myth and legend, like minotaurs and goblins, which has been cited as one of its strengths, but it also does have plenty of weirdos like the Roper, the Rust Monster, and the Bulette. Some of these were based on odd little plastic toys produced in China, which I had as a child, but I did not make the connection with the Monster Manual until recently, when I saw blogs like this one pointing it out.

The Fiend Folio's monsters are not like the Dryad and the Ogre. They're more like the Beholder and the Owlbear: weird novelties rather than "authentic" mythical beasts.

The different background of the Fiend Folio

It's not hard to find out why the Fiend Folio was so different. 

Partly, yes, it was an ineffable cultural factor. There was a developing British style of D&D fantasy that differed subtly from the US-American and Canadian styles. Just look at the distinctive differences between the D&D modules produced for TSR by UK gamers, or the quality of fantasy in the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf gamebooks, and even at what would appear in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I don't know how to describe it well, but somehow it blends gritty, grim, and weird qualities with settings that have a flavor more in touch with the imagined Medieval than the American products did. Even as a kid, I liked those British products more, and I still don't know quite why.

If we stop at an alleged subtle cultural difference, though, we miss out on explicit statements made by game producers at the time, in which they made it clear just why the Fiend Folio stands out as strange and off-target for those who wanted another Monster Manual.

Don Turnbull was responsible for the Fiend Folio, but he started out collecting his monsters in White Dwarf, a gaming magazine initiated in 1977. When White Dwarf started, D&D was still just the original D&D. It started slightly before the appearance Holmes' Basic set, when more new game ideas were published in zines than by TSR. Don Turnbull ran a regular feature about monsters. The cumulative collection of monsters sent in by fans is what led to the Fiend Folio. The collection was ready to go in 1979, but legal tangles delayed it until 1981. Those few years were critical for D&D, in which Gygax invested heavily in promoting a distinction between D&D and tournament-oriented AD&D, and a large slew of modules mostly also by Gygax, emerged. If the Fiend Folio had come out in 1979, it might have seemed more innovative. In 1981, it went against the established grain.

Turnbull apparently loved monsters. He first created "the Monstermark System" in White Dwarf #3, in 1977, a way to calculate how tough and difficult each monster was. This is a distant antecedent of the D&D monster Challenge Ratings commonly used today. In the same issue, Ian Livingston included an article "New Monsters for Use in Wilderness Campaigns." One of them was the Dunestalker, which would appear eventually in the Fiend Folio.

For the next few issues, Turnbull stepped in with a feature "Monsters Mild & Malign." It gathered fan-produced monsters from Jaquays' Dungeoneer zine and from Lee Gold's Alarums & Excursions. Soon it was turned into the regular White Dwarf feature "The Fiend Factory." The Fiend Folio is thus rooted in the earliest D&D zines rather than TSR's Wisconsin gamers.

This series of monsters was the basis of the Fiend Folio. Contributors to the Fiend Factory who got their monster published would get a free issue of the magazine. Many of them never reached print. A lot of them were saved up for the Fiend Folio.

The Fiend Folio was a compilation of fan contributions. They came from DMs who wanted new surprises for their players.

This was the decorative heading for the recurring Fiend Factory feature. Drawn by Alan Hunter, it is the kind of thing that seems to have inspired "OSR" artists like Stephen Poag.

The Fiend Folio is much closer to the kinds of creatures that original D&D players were coming up with independently when they had exhausted the limited range of monsters available in the original books. From that point of view, the Fiend Folio is a good representative of D&D as actually played by the earliest veterans of the new game. Fans like you are the ones who dreamed up the monsters that were filtered into TSR's Fiend Folio.

Don Turnbull presented his rationale for promoting monster design already in White Dwarf #4, Dec 1977 to Jan 1978. You can't understand what he was doing unless you realize that he started this before he saw the Monster Manual, which was published in the US in December of 1977. In other words, all Turnbull had to go on then was the original books and, possibly, the Holmes Basic set that had been issued that summer. Besides that, monster creation was at that time a creative fan activity. There were almost no D&D modules published at this point, too, which would set the tone for "normal" D&D fantasy ever after. (Some creatures from Gygax's modules, like the drow, were included in the Fiend Folio.)

Turnbull wrote this in White Dwarf #4 to explain the reason for collecting monster ideas.

Despite the free-form nature of D&D, the DM who restricts his monsters to those in the TSR rules and supplements may eventually find that he has rather a dull dungeon on his hands as players gain more familiarity with monster characteristics and particularly their vulnerable points.

 D&D should be an exciting and intriguing business - a prolonged test of players' ingenuity as they tackle novel challenges, even on the first dungeon level. Killing Orcs and Goblins soon becomes dull - and, indeed, relatively unrewarding if they guard small treasures. Throwing fire-bombs, assuming your DM allows them, at Mummies soon palls; turning away Ghouls and even Vampires becomes meaningless after a while. However, the game takes on a completely new level of interest as soon as you meet a fireproof Mummy or Ghouls who refuse to turn away.

The elements of surprise and novelty are, I think, very important in a successful game. If your dungeon has the usual quota of empty rooms, make sure it has MERIT (Make Empty Rooms Interesting Too) by setting up an array of magical effects, interesting traps, intriguing though valueless pieces of furniture, curious artifacts, new magical items or whatever strikes your fancy and which will present something of a challenge to intruders. Those rooms which are not empty should contain more than just the standard array of monsters. Particularly, the monster list is limited for the 'simple' dungeon levels - each DM should try to assemble a much more comprehensive library of interesting, yet low-level, beasts to test the players' ingenuity and imagination.

I have spent many happy hours scouring through D&D magazines in search of new monsters interesting enough to use in my own dungeon. I have come across scores of 'impossible' monsters - impossible in the sense that they are much too tough for most parts of a normal dungeon - but have also recruited quite a collection of new worthwhile beasts. In presenting a few of these to White Dwarf readers, I must from the outset acknowledge that none are of my own devising. I am particularly indebted to two US magazines which carry 'creature features' - the excellent Dungeoneer by [Jennell] Jaquays (available in the UK) and the equally excellent A.P.A. Alarums & Excursions edited by Lee Gold, 2471 Oak Street, Santa Monica, California 90405, U.S.A. These are almost certainly not the only publications which provide a source of new monsters (News From Bree and Owl & Weasel should not be forgotten) but in my experience tend to present complete data and offer a very wide range.

It is of course very easy to 'design' a new monster. Take a common earthworm, give it AC -6 and 15 8-sided hit dice, allow it to bite for 5-60 damage per round and confer on it 90% magic immunity and you have a beast which is likely to survive any encounter (its Monstermark would be somewhere around 50,000). But it's not very interesting, is it? I am exaggerating, of course, but it's surprising how many new monsters fall into the 'too fierce' category and can't be put into a normal dungeon if anything approaching balance is to be maintained. Similarly, if a monster is too weak and can be killed without any problems, it is not respectable enough a challenge to include. A weak monster can be strengthened by giving it limited spell use, for example, and a strong monster can be weakened by making it vulnerable, say, to four-letter words, but I prefer a monster to be self-consistent and in some way vaguely credible in the context of its surroundings. More, I prefer it to have interesting, even humorous or asinine qualities and to make me wonder what the hell to do with it when I come across it.

I think it's clear from this why the Fiend Folio came to seem so different. Turnbull's immediate influences were the zines of gamers independent of TSR and new D&D fans, mostly in the UK--not Gygax. The Fiend Folio is a collection that comes from different design principles than those of Gygax and his players. It represents an alternative take on what D&D could be, one that fans overall came to disfavor. The weirdness and whimsy of the earliest D&D players, who wanted to surprise each other, would be winnowed out of the shared D&D imaginarium of fans, becoming an increasingly generic set of newly-ingrained tropes that Turnbull found boring.

That generic, re-run D&D quality that has developed from edition to edition of D&D is one that players still struggle with today in a tug-of-war between the impulse to get back to an imagined vision of "how it was originally" and the desire to keep it fresh. Today's players are still trying to keep it fresh just as much as Turnbull was in '77, but the earliest players, like Turnbull, had no antecedents to emulate as a standard for what was "authentic" (besides fiction). The more players today try to recreate the old days, the more they drift away from what it felt like, because players in those days were aiming solely at fresh delights, not the recreation of an idealized past. That is the bind of all retro movements. Trying to be authentic makes you less so. The past is gone, our nostalgia alone remaining.

Players who are sure that the Monster Manual is better than the Fiend Folio are absolutely entitled to their tastes, and I personally don't fault anybody for their preferences, but it is interesting to contemplate why we have our preferences to begin with. What formative experiences determined your tastes?

Don Turnbull's answer to the negative reviews of the Fiend Folio in Dragon (Nov 1981 #55) responds to the blame attached to the whimsy of his creature collection: "it would be a dull world (real or fantasy) if everything was explained and comprehensible." He adds,

A personal point of view, certainly, but one which I believe is shared by many. Once every problem is solved, every question has an answer, and every mystery has been explained, the imagination can turn up its toes and call an end to the matter, its work accomplished. A sad and boring death.

I think that this sums up the difference in his approach, and it accords with the rationale for the monster features in White Dwarf that led Turnbull to that point. He wanted fresh surprises for players, not boring, hackneyed creatures that every player knew how to beat. This is a quest that continues. It will continue as long as players play these games.

Ultimately, the difference between the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio comes down to the different sources. The former was Gary Gygax's product. In his Preface to the Monster Manual, Gygax gives credit to a few others for a very few monsters, but takes "the burden of full responsibility" for the rest (i.e. "credit is all mine!"). By contrast, the Fiend Folio was--to use a term that did not exist then--crowd-sourced over several years.

It's not just my observation. Turnbull says exactly this in the Foreword to the Fiend Folio:

There is one major difference between the two volumes - the source of their contents. The Monster Manual is very largely the sole work of one person - Gary Gygax - who not only created and developed most of the Monster Manual monsters himself but also developed those he did not personally create. The new monsters in the FIEND FOLIO Tome, however, are the creations of many people.

The index to the Fiend Folio lists the contributors with each monster entry. There are many of them. While the Monster Manual remains the canonical index of D&D beasts, the Fiend Folio is a better representative of the innovations of independent Dungeon Masters in the late '70s--what non-corporate DMs were coming up with on their own. The Fiend Folio's contents therefore have more in common with both the old A.P.A. collections of zines of the science fiction fans who fell in love with D&D, with their many contributors, and also has more in common with the monsters that bloggers invent today, than with "official" D&D products with their centrally-approved contents that you pay money to dream about. Of course, the Fiend Folio is discussed today in these terms only because it was published as an official TSR product. Otherwise, it would be relegated to the status of All the Worlds' Monsters (nearly forgotten).

The historical context helps us to understand why the two books are regarded differently. The Fiend Folio is a product of different design principle: evasion of boredom and the embrace of surprise, even if the cost is accepting the bizarre, humorous, and "asinine" qualities to make it so. And it comes not from a self-appointed, "official" source, a "master of the game," but from engaged fans with more ambition to have a fun session than to be game designers.

And it started to come together just before the Monster Manual appeared.