Tome of Horrors

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In the first year of a new Christian millennium, Wizards of the Coast published the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. This came alongside a new Monster Manual, to update the old mainstays into the new rules. Not all the hundreds of beasties published in the three decades before then could fit in that book; and not all of them even had the TSR/WotC copyright. Fortunately, 3e came with the Open Gaming License: if your monster didn't have a writeup, and wasn't proprietary under the OGL, you could write it yourself and post it, or even publish it, as you pleased - as long as it too was under OGL.

But that's a lot of work - and all house-ruling, such that not everyone might agree on the vital statistics. For two years, most of us had to wait for various 3e randos to stumble onto some beastie like the Pech and publish it somewhere somehow, which (since OGL) could be re-posted to a website somewhere if we were lucky. Necromancer Games, under White Wolf's Sword and Sorcery imprint, got particularly involved in Old School Roleplaying and converted quite a few of these.

Then, in 2002, Necromancer went "fuck this" so Scott Greene published the first Tome of Horrors, just dumping the best of these critters in there. Note the reference.

ToH was something of a spiritual successor to the Fiend Folio of yore, and indeed we got plenty of those monsters in here. It did let through some WTF, like the Carbuncle; but as a best-of publication, we have to admit, with Uncle Joe, that quantity has a quality of its own. And the book wasn't just for those of us converting oldschool modules to d20; it was a godsend to third-party publishers, especially those under the White Wolf umbrella, now able to publish first-edition nostalgia content without getting sued.

Necromancer went on to publish two more entries in this line, here with more original content, because they'd sent out the bulk of the oldschool content in that first Tome and, besides, WotC was beginning to catch up with more Monster Manuals and a new Fiend Folio. Although some monsters too stupid even for the first volume end up in the later ones, like the Piercer.