Van Richten's Monster Hunter's Compendium Volume Three

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition

by Steve Miller, David Wise, Teuwynn Woodruff

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fans who own the first two volumes of Van Richten's Monster Hunter's Compendium will complete their set with this Volume Three.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

About the author

From 1995 to 1999, Steve worked on Dragonlance meta-story direction and specific print products, along with Doug Niles, Harold Johnson, Stan!, Sue Cook and Miranda Horner. When Wizards of the Coast aquired TSR, the influential Dragonlance authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman once again took charge of Dragonlance story direction, and Steve soon moved onto other things.

Reviews

[Ville Kokko · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never actually got around to playing (A)D&D in the 2nd edition times, other than computer game adaptations, but I enjoyed reading the background material. This is one book that I would have loved to make use of to create stories as a DM. It really contains three books, Van Richten's guides to fiends, Vistani and witches. The books are written interestingly and rather intelligently as if they were written inside their fictional universe by Dr. Rudolf van Richten, a learned, practially experienced and intelligent sage and monster hunter who nevertheless can't know everything - but with out-of-universe interjections that give the definite information on how things really are, complete with game rules and statistics.

All three books contain a wealth of interesting material for adding a certain element into a game world. Due to the subject matter, the first one about fiends was by far the most interesting to me, describing the standard AD&D fiends chillingly in terms that made them into very serious horror genre flavoured adversaries. The guide to Vistani is about the Ravenloft magical gypsy equivalents. The guide to witches is about both literal and benign magic-using witches on one hand, and the monster-witch-creatures called hags on the other, again making them sound much more scary than their Monstrous Manual entry does.