Enemies and Allies
D&D Accessory
Written by Bruce Cordell, Jeff Grubb, David Noonan, Skip Williams.
Product Code: WTC11852, ISBN: 0-7869-1852-7
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast, $14.95
Enemies and Allies is a collection of villains and patrons for use in the D&D 3rd Edition game. It’s filled with statistics, minor backgrounds and play tactics on a wide variety of nonplayer characters, from minions to guards, and even a bunch of bizarre adventuring groups.
There is also a small section in the back of the book for creating NPCs on the fly, but it’s lacking in detail, and not of much use as far as I am concerned. In addition, they list the stats for the characters that are portrayed in the core D&D books, if you’re interested in that sort of thing - which I am not.
While I found the characters within this booklet somewhat interesting enough, I wasn’t too impressed with the book as a whole. It may be a good product for those who don’t have the time to create NPCs for their game, but if you like doing this, then you will probably want to pass this booklet up. At least the price isn’t too high.
I plan on just using this book if I’m in the need for a quick NPC that I can just grab from its pages, but then again this can also be done from most adventure modules out there. I’d advise browsing through the book before making a purchasing decision on this one.
(review (c) December 2001 / David Flemming)