Published by Necromancer Games, which promises 3rd edition playability with a 1st edition feel, this book delivers on almost all fronts. Even the art has a cast of the old Fiend Folio to it, though just updated enough to not seem out-of-place or old-fashioned next to it's contemporaries.

The monsters all fit cozily into various niches of various kinds of campaigns. Really, there were very few monsters where I thought, "Where the heck would you even meet up with something like that?", and in most cases where the ecology wasn't clear, the critter was undead or an elemental, both monster types that don't necessarily mesh realistically into a campaign world.

The write-ups were clear and concise and, for the most part, accurate. It wasn't perfect, though, and so it doesn't get five stars. It'd get four-and-a-half if I could swing it, but . . .

DMs, buy this book. Surprise your players with brand-new monsters that feel like you've met them before. Highly recommended.

It's hard to take the Barenaked Ladies seriously. They're naturally funny guys, and their lyrics reflect this. They tend towards the zany and unkempt, and while those things certainly have a place on this album, they aren't the major theme.

"Another Postcard" and "Aluminum" aside, these songs are fairly serious. Even when an idea is treated lightly, it's more because the song's narrator sounds like a casual, easygoing feller, rather than because the idea itself is silly.

"Maybe Katie" talks about the difficulty singly women with kids have getting a good boyfriend.

"Take It Outside" is an entertaining take on machismo, and the drive to look large and in charge that most men seem infected with.

Even "Shopping," with its excessive pop-techno beats and meaningless lyrics, can be seen as a commentary on consumer-driven culture.

Even "War on Drugs," which deals with suicide and drug addiction, has a lightness about it that makes the song powerful without drenching it in ennui and angst. Listening to it has affected me far more than, for example, Trent Reznor's whining rambles about drug addictions he's never had.

The musical style has taken a more electronic and slightly hiphoppish turn on this album. They do it quite well, so no points off, but I rather prefer them when they're more acoustic. Still, their first album, the ubiquitous Yellow Tape, ended with a cover of "Fight the Power," so I don't suppose it's really surprising.

I got this book as a Christmas present, which is just as well as it was on my list of books to buy once I win the lottery.

This is a good book. The art is pleasant to look at, and I like the idea of seeing the events in Sandman: Season of Mists from the point of view of another of the Endless, but there are some major flaws.

First of all, the artistic style isn't consistent. Some panels will be detailed and realistic, with characters drawn in perfect proportion, while others will be distinctly child-like and cutesy. I know that in manga it's traditional to change the style of a panel to suit the emotional mood of the panel, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Sometimes, Death and Delerium will be engaging in silly banter in one style, and then the style switches with the next panel of silly banter, with no apparent break in the mood.

The other quibble, this one a bit more serious, is that not much happens in this book. It's a 192-page book that could have been done with half the pages and only added excitement and interest to the plot. It could best be summed up as "while we see scenes of Season of Mists again, Death, Despair and Delerium phumpher about Death's apartment with a whole bunch of lost souls." You could certainly tell 192 pages of good story from that, but the phumphering takes up too much space and we end up with great art and a tiny, tiny plot.

I've heard that Jill Thompson is planning on doing another volume, this one retelling another chapter of Sandman from the perspective of another of the Endless. Based on this volume, I look forward to the sequel, but I think I'll wait until I've flipped through it before putting it on my Christmas list.

Let me start off by saying that if you're looking to add some variety and spice into the fighters in your campaign, this is the perfect book for you. Just about every page will give you new ideas for your game.

The feats, prestige classes and fighting styles are particularly useful. The feats round out a lot of fighter abilities, giving greater benefit to a high Dexterity than the Combat Expertise feat tree, without being too over-balanced.

The prestige classes are a bit of a mixed bag. Some, like the Legend prestige class, are highly useful while others, like the Berserker, seem like pale imitations of other, better defined classes. Still, even the Berserker description contains some abilities that might be interesting to work into a campaign with barbarians.

The fighting styles are a relatively new concept. Basically, you spend some XP and spend some time training, after meeting some prerequisites, and you learn special abilities based on a fighting style. From trick archery to archery from horseback, to fighting with two light weapons, to fighting with the double-bladed orc axe, there's something for just about everyone. Some would argue that the fighting styles are too powerful, but since by the time you've mastered the fifth and final level of a style you've spent 7500 XP, three months game time, quite a bit of gold and focussed your feats, skills and abilities in one direction, I think the cost weighs pretty evenly with the benefits.

The equipment section is pretty handy, particularly the section on black powder weapons that gets into a lot more detail than any other book I've seen. The damages on these weapons seem pretty high compared to their ranged-weapon counterparts, but the dangers of a misfired shell, coupled with the long loading time, balances this out. I particularly liked the addition of the magical weapon abilities for black powder weapons.

The OMCS, the mass combat system, seems pretty useful, although it does seem skewed towards creatures with many Hit Dice rather than those with actual combat ability. The system also doesn't take into account the difference in speed between units and how that could change the nature of combat. Still, it's a good basic framework to hang things off of.

The major problem is that the system gives too much benefit to PCs. A single character proficient with two weapons can, at 6th level, inflict nearly as much damage on a unit as an entire platoon of infantry of the same size as their target unit. That just doesn't seem quite right. Also, no credit is given for the effect that attacking from horseback would have on damage, defense and chance of striking one's opponent. All you get are extra hit points.

The book loses one star for the illustrations and story excerpts contained in the book. There are far too many cleavage-baring "chicks in chainmail" done in a simple line-drawing style. The stories, when they aren't directly offensive and misogynist, are just useless and rather drab, not doing anything but taking up space on the page.

The book loses another star for a lack of balance. Using this book, by 8th level I could create a fighter who, 30% of the time he strikes, inflicts quadruple normal damage with his attack, if he confirms his critical. That's just not a good thing, considering that his weapon, the flamberge, rolls 2d6 for damage.

The tale of the CSI's hunt for the Deuce is rather gripping. There were several times when I wished that this was an actual TV episode because without all the exposition necessary in fiction, the tension of a scene would be broken earlier. That the author, Max Allan Collins, didn't sacrifice exposition for the sake of audience gratification is a testament to the man's skills as a writer.

He does a good job of sketching the CSIs. No one's given the personality detail that they've developed to now on the show, but this book was likely started shortly into the first season of the show, when the characters themselves were somewhat sketchy. Still, he manages to capture Nick Stokes Boy Scout charm and sense of humour, Sarah Sidle's wry humour and lack of personal skills, and many of the quirks of the rest.

The examination of the evidence, the slow, methodical process of investigation, is the crux of the book, of course, and Collins presents these scenes in a very realistic and, at least to my understanding, accurate fashion. They use many of the same techniques we've seen on the show, but they employ some new tricks. Due to the evidence-light nature of the case, there's also a lot more footwork than is typical on the show. There, of course, they're limited in the number of shots and locations they can employ, but Collins knows he's not that limited and presents a variety of settings.

So, if this is such a great book, why only four stars? The ending is very weak.

I think he wrote it in an effort to give the case that one final twist, to separate it from all others, but this plot twist is clumsily handled and comes across as rather forced.

Still a good book, though.

I originally bought this book as a gift for a friend. It almost didn't make it to her. Only a few pages into the book, I realized that I needed to have a copy of it for my very own. My dedication to my friend won out in the end and I'll be ordering my own copy shortly, but I'm counting the days until it arrives.

This is the first D20 supplement I've seen that is consistently useful in every area. Spells, prestige classes, races, feats, magic items, monsters, templates, the description of Faeryland itself, it's all good, meaty useful stuff. If it talks about a major player in the world of the fey, that player is given a stat sheet. If it talks about a magic item, that magic item's described.

The art is excellent, the editing is tight and the format of the book flows very well.

This book misses five stars for a few nitpicky reasons. First of all, it coul dbe a little thicker. Don't get me wrong, this is pretty much a must-buy book if you're going to have the fey take any kind of active role in a campaign, but a few more monsters, and a few more magic items would've added even more depth to this book.

Also, the book has some rather startling errors, most particularly the exlusion of the Mite Fighter feat which is a prerequisite for several feats and prestige classes. Some of the other, more minor error were fixed with errata on the publisher's site, but Mite Fighter exists in a different book entirely. Spells & Magic, from Bastion Press, in case you're interested.

Some of the templates don't seem to be properly balanced as far as how they adjust character level, particularly the high fey and shadow-born templates.

Again, these are minor quibbles and easily corrected. I highly recommend this book.

In his novels, Max Alan Collins manages to capture the feel of CSI quite well. He only defines the investigators with a few brush-strokes, just as the show does, spending the majority of his time focussing on the crimes themselves. The crimes he portrays are interesting and, when they aren't unique, keep your attention quite well.

In this graphic novel, the crimes are . . . well, dull. A woman is strangled and her murderer is quickly and easily uncovered. There's no tension or interest there at all. I realize that many crimes are resolved quickly through forensics, but I'm not really interested in reading about them in graphic novel form.

The other crimes echo the career of Jack the Ripper. Here, the foreknowledge of the characters about where the new Jack is going to strike, and who he's going to strike against, prevents us from really being in suspense over what's going to happen next.

Perhaps because he's working in a purely visual medium, Collins gives us virtually no insight into the internal motives of any of the characters. As I'll note later, the characters are remarkably expressionless, so without internal monologue, external exposition or physical expression, the characters seem to be just meandering through a series of brutal murders with only a little character interaction to let us know what's going on in their heads.

The graphic novel is hampered even further by decidedly amateurish art. The characters seem too short-limbed and stiff to be realistic, and in trying to copy their appearance on the show, the artist has drained them all of any meaningful expression. It sort of reminded me of watching a puppet show, with emotionless faces going about their tasks.

That said, the plots are fairly solid, with only one major creditibility gap. At one point, Grissom makes a rather astute but legally meaningless connection between a suspect and somehow gets a search warrant out of it. Other than that, the plots seem fairly tight.

The purpose of D & D, at the start, was to crawl through dungeons while killing monsters and finding nifty pieces of equipment. The game's come a long way since then, with hundreds of core book and supplements adding layer after layer of moral complexity to the fantasy world.

Demons and devils were defined. Evil was given its own spells, magic items and races. The good guys, for there part, had morally limited and easily stereotyped paladins and the occasionally pure-hearted cleric. That was it. There was no real reason for a fighter, rogue or wizard to be any more good than their alignment description read.

The Book of Exalted Deeds changes all that. Good has been given power, real power, and is now just as capable as evil of showering benefits on its devotees - though at no less cost to those devotees.

This book opens with a discussion of the motives of good. What acts are good, which are not, and the exceptions to the rules. It's never a problem for me, but this section would be quite handy for those DMs and players who have trouble figuring just what a character's alignment means and practice.

Also included is the idea of being "exalted." This isn't being on a moral high-horse or anything of the sort, it's simply the idea that just as some villains can be despicable beyond human comprehension, so can heroes be righteous.

Next we get to the meat and drink of the book: the new stuff. The magic items are adequate, not much more. There's only so many new adjectives you can add onto the beginning of item names, and only so many powers you can give, but at the very least this book includes special enhancements that directly counter enhancements from the dreaded Book of Vile Darkness.

The same goes for feats and spells, really, although some completely new concepts are also entertained.

The book really comes into its own with the prestige classes, monsters and descriptions of greater creatures of good. In these sections, you're given some specific statistics, but you're also given a really good guideline for just how you can create your own special and sacred servants of the eladrin, the angels and the guardinals. Various otherworldly and mortal servants of the three great bastions of good are described, including a lot of the eladrin that were missing from previous supplements. The tulani and the firre were particularly appreciated.

The greater creatures of good, the angels, the high eladrin, the greatest of the guardinals, are described in detail, with thorough descriptions. Given their tremendous power, I'm a little surprised that they weren't generated via Deities and Demigods, but that's a minor quibble.

What I liked best about this book is that, as opposed to the majority of WotC's other products, this book appears to be cleanly edited, neatly presented and well-organized. I'm not an organization freak in my waking life, but when it comes to reference supplements, I really appreciate having everything laid out in plain, simple order, particularly when it's information that's useful.

I can sum up the first 125 pages of this book as follows: Slayer slang is very creative, occasionally rebellious, and slang should be appreciated for what it is.

Michael Adams makes these three points repeatedly and often, giving case after case after case for each one. It's not a bad thing to make a point strongly, but making it repetitively gets a little tiresome.

Still, the prose flows well, and his arguments are clear and well-put, so it's not as though it's simply a hundred pages of retreaded material. Adams' points may well be new ones to the ears of some, and in that case the essays are definitely worth the read.

Of course, that leaves us with almost 200 pages of glossary, the part of the book that provides us with the most useful and most interesting information. The entries are formatted clearly, providing plenty of quotation to put the words in context, and the selection is broad, covering not only the episodes, but also the original movie, the Bronze message boards, newspaper and magazine articles and books and graphic novels.

I wouldn't count this as a "must-have" for hardcore fans of the show, as they either know the words already or don't need a hardcover glossary to catch up. This book is most useful for people with a casual interest in linguistics and the show, as well as those who are just interested in slang and its place in modern society.

I held off on buying the Fiend Folio for a while. There was no real reason, other than the fact that the first time I had the chance to look at the book, I'd just been to the optometrist and my eyes were all woogly. I didn't take the chance to look at it again until later. I'm glad I took that second chance.

The clear emphasis in this book is on outsiders, undead and constructs. The back of the book says that the major focus is on "fiends," which is a trifle misleading as there aren't that many new true fiends, meaning baatezu or ta'anari. The ones included basically flesh out what was once available in the second edition Planescape compendiums and other sources, so it was very much appreciated.

The remainder of the book has some lovely creatures as well, including a number of neutrally aligned inevitable and rilmani, giving the party more than just demons and angels to cope with.

CRs are quite high in this book, but again the cover warns you of this, and a simple glance through will show this. Few of the monsters are in the truly unkillable category, though, and many of the high CR guys would make suitable behind-the-scenes villains, bad guys for a low-level party to take on after taking out the beasties minions. This book also doesn't suffer from the Monster Manual II's overemphasis on the Improved Grab feat, which makes for some powerful monsters that won't just grab the PCs and never let go.

The grafts section is interesting, providing a way for willful PCs to increase their raw power, for a price. I really liked the fiendish prestige classes, which enable you to create a barbaze or even a lemure with just that extra edge of power and ability to drive the PCs nuts.

Once again, though, WotC has decided to shuffle the templates in with the monsters, which is needless and a little confusing. There are also some minor typos and some slight disagreements between the main body of monsters and the stat block, or between the description and the picture. All these issues are easily resolveable, but for [$$], I expect them to be resolved BEFORE I buy.