Fiend Folio
The Fiend Folio was a 1981 Monster Manual-like book for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition. It served to gather up the various monsters that had been submitted to TSR works but not made the MM itself as of its 1978 edition - for instance, kuo-toa, svirfneblin and of course the official full writeup of drow. Most came out of White Dwarf's Fiend Factory as of then. Many of the latter monsters are laughable crap, like the Xvart which sounds like Fart, so have fallen into obscurity or - like the Flumph - notoriety.
But a few gems do appear amongst the dross: usually cited here, Charles Stross' badass Githyanki and Githzerai. We could also shout-out to the Dark Ones, the Creepers and Stalkers. Who knows why later publishers didn't publish stuff featuring those guys, they were fucking sweet.
A 3rd-party company called Necromancer Games vaguely affiliated with White Wolf released a spiritual successor to the Fiend Folio in "The Tome of Horrors", which adapted many, if not all, of these monsters to Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. WotC for 3e did its own Fiend Folio, figuring that was a decent brand for niche monsters - so Caryatid Columns and those Dark Ones were here. Others were brought back for Pathfinder. With the release of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, many of these monsters are starting to be revived and return to the spotlight. The Lava Children, Flumph, and Berbalang all entered the canon here, among others. 5th edition also has a new series of PDF supplements called Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio which updates even more obscure monsters from the original Fiend Folio to 5th edition.
List of Monsters
(Under construction)
1st Edition
- Aarakocra
- Achaierai a giant evil bird with a spherical body and 4 long legs it attacks with.
- Adherer, a weird creature that looks like a mummy but sweats glue.
- Alaex, a personification of a god's anger that resembles a duplicate of the person it has been sent to punish.
- Algoid, a humanoid that actually is a mass of intelligent algae.
- Al-mi'raj, a killer rabbit with a unicorn's horn.
- Apparition, an undead that cannot cause physical harm, so it tries to scare people to death.
- Assassin bug, giant flies that attack humans in male/female pairs. The male paralyzes the victim so that the female can lay their eggs in their wounds.
- Astral searcher, a spirit formed from violent thoughts that attacks people psychically to destroy their mind to it can posses their body.
- Babbler, a mutated form of lizard man.
- Giant bat, just a giant bat.
- Berbalang an ugly bat winged humanoid that spends most of its time with its body dormant while its spirit hunts on the astral plane. During the full moon it instead hunts on the physical plane by sending out a physical projection of itself.
- Blindheim, a frog-like creature with brightly shining eyes.
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2nd Edition
2rd Edition's version of the Fiend Folio was the 14th volume of the Monstrous Compendium series.
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3rd Editon
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