Dungeons and Dragons Blog

Alright, this is a little later then I would have liked for this.  With the holidays, Amazon.com must have been pretty busy so I didn’t get my book until earlier this week.  Then I had to get through it so I’m about a week later then I wanted.  Anyway, here’s my review of Fiendish Codex II – Tyrants of the Nine Hells.

The name says it all.  Anything and everything you want to know about devils is in the book and I’d say it’s much more of a DM’s book then a players book.  It’s light on prestige classes, feats and spells and heavy on game information.

Chapter 1 kicks things off and like it’s title “All about Devils” it gives you the ins and outs of how devils operate.  It talks about soul harvesting and the hierarchy of the devil caste and there’s a section on the Blood War between demons and devils.  There’s a small section on creating devil encounters and there’s a nice little list of ninety nine devil names you can use to liven things up.

Chapter 2 is the largest and it goes through each of the nine layers of hell.  Each section includes a discussion on the lord of that layer along with it’s dukes.  And then it goes through the important locations on each of the layers.  This is a good 44 pages of the book and there’s a ton of information in here, especially if you’re going to have your players entering the plane of hell.

Chapter 3 is more the player’s section.  There’s a new race called Hellbred and some new feats, including a new type of feat caled the Devil-touched feat.  Most of this is for evil characters so if you play a traditional campaign, this will be more useful for creating your bad guys.  There’s also a few new prestige classes.  The Hellbreaker is particularly interesting.  It’s a thief who specializes in entering infernal strongholds and stealing what’s in sight.  The Hellfire Warlock also makes for a very cool bad guy.  There’s also some new spells, most of which are investiture spells which allow the spellcaster to take on some advantage of a particular devil.

Chapter 4 is the monster section and you get some new devils.  The coolest is the Assasain Devil.  There’s also a front line Spined Devil that’s pretty cool and there’s also a summary of which hardcover books have which devils in them.

Chapter 5 talks about each of the nine lords of hell and has a stat block for their aspects in the event the players want to take them on.  So if you want to take on Asmodeus, he’s CR27 (probably by himself as I’m sure he’ll bring some friends).

Overall, I really enjoyed the book but it’s obviously not for everyone.  If you’re never going to play a devil, then Fiendish Codex II – Tyrants of the Nine Hells isn’t for you.  A large part of my campaign centers around devils though so I can see using this book to it’s max.  In that respect, I give it five stars out of five.