Pyramid Review: Guide to Hell

Pyramid Review

Guide to Hell

Published by TSR

Written by Chris Pramas

64 pages, $13.95

There are two ways to look at the Guide to Hell. For new players, it offers new spells, magic items, kits, and a chance to play a new race, a devilkin, half devil, half human. The other way is that this is a giant rehash that still fails to capture what was in the old articles of Dragon magazine.

For those who don't own the Dragon Magazine Archive, or the original issues (#75 and #76 for "The Nine Hells Part I and II" by Ed Greenwood, and #91 for "The Nine Hells Revisited," also by Ed Greenwood) they were all classics that provided vast amounts of information. The page total on these three articles alone is close to 30 pages. Throw in other articles like "Eight Devilish Questions," (#91) by Ed Greenwood, and "The Lords of the Nine" (#223) by Colin McComb, and you've almost got more pages than the new Guide to Hell has.

Still, for those who do not own those back issues, or have no intention of buying the Dragon Magazine Archive, the Guide to Hell offers very modular chapters that should be easy to put in most campaigns. Chapter One introduces a new turning table for clerics and paladins that is specific to devils. A brief section, "The Cults," shows how devils can use humans as tools in their games, followed by "Invasion," with a scenario where devils invade the prime plane, give inexperienced DMs some ideas for devils in their games.

Chapter Two will be quickly devoured by . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: November 19, 1999

Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.