I'm treading on thin ice with this review -- the thin ice of my own criteria for a good review. Most of the time, I think a good review talks about what a product is, rather than what it is not. However, I think I'm about to spend a lot of verbiage talking about what these books are not.

When it comes to material like the ecology articles in Dragon magazine, I always have mixed feelings. On one hand, it helps me, as DM, to establish verisimilitude in my game world if the monsters make some sort of sense. On the other hand, that sort of material rarely adds much to actual game play. Clearly, you don't need to know at what age a catoblepas matures in order to fight one, and even the most die-hard, hack-and-slash-hating roleplayer is rarely going to need to know how a beholder keeps its eyes moist.

So, when I learned of the existence of entire products devoted toward one monster, I was skeptical but hopeful. The 2nd Edition AD&D products I, Tyrant, The Illithiad, and Sea Devils were pretty good, after all. They had a little fluff, but also a lot of interesting and useful game information. And even the fluff was fun to read. I mean, who doesn't want to read about how mind flayers develop in their disgusting little pools and mature into everyone's favorite monster to hate? So, okay. That's cool. Can you pull off the same thing with a whole book about hobgoblins or gnolls? Skeptical but hopeful.

The answer that I arrived at after reading these products is, unfortunately: no, not really.

There just isn't much to these 32-page books, and that's my biggest gripe. The writing is good, and the game mechanics in the monster stats at the end appear fairly solid with a couple of exceptions (when you add class levels to a monster, you shouldn't modify the treasure listing, you should just give them treasure as NPCs -- a very small point).

To feel like I've received any value, I just need more from a product than these give. There's a sort of history of each creature at the beginning, but it's terribly non-specific. And it could have been specific. I have a fairly detailed campaign. The Forgotten Realms is an extremely detailed campaign. Yet neither has a detailed history of gnolls or hobgoblins. These are uncommon enough monsters that the author could have gone into much more detail and not worried about contradicting established material in someone's game. And that sort of problem is pervasive. I assume the products offer very few specifics to keep them generally applicable.

Here's what I would like to have seen:

Under religion, tell me what a gnoll temple or shrine actually looks like, so I can put one in my game. Tell me what sorts of spells gnoll clerics usually prepare and why, so when I create an adventure with gnolls, I have a direction to go.

Tell me what sorts of creatures these races use as pets or guard animals. Tell me what members of these races think of each other. Tell me what they think of orcs. And dark elves. And trolls. You get the idea.

Go ahead and make some definitive statements, even if it means changing the common conception of the creature. In the Slayer's Guide to Gnolls there's a bit about gnolls' susceptibility to sound, but then the author clearly backs off from actually giving any sort of game mechanics, and that's a shame. I'd have loved it if it said that gnolls suffered extra damage from sonic attacks, or went into a barbarianlike rage for 1d6 rounds after hearing a certain low-frequency sound, or something like that. If I'm reading this product, I'm looking for ways to make gnolls more unique, so go ahead and give them to me.

If you're going to call it a "Slayer's Guide," tell me how best to fight them. If I'm a player, I might want tips and tactics on combating these creatures. Tell me what my ranger character knows about them if I choose hobgoblins as my favored enemy. I might even like a prestige class devoted to slaying these creatures, or a magic item or two associated with them -- something more than just the fluff of how many gnolls are in a typical litter.

There are good things in these products. The statistics for some basic classed versions of the monsters are useful (although they don't have appropriate equipment), and well-done maps accompany pretty good example lairs for each. The art is excellent. However, too much of the information is not terribly useful, with unnecessary lapses into fictional prose describing encounters with the creatures, and far too many general rather than specific statements for me to recommend these products.

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