Unfortunately, among the weird and wacky monsters from the early days of the first edition of the Advanced Game, the one glaring absence would be the demons and devils. Yes, it would be easy enough to convert these...but they just seems to be much too noticeable in their absence, particularly in comparison to other much more thorough old school monster manuals that are on the market. Does this render Classic Monsters useless, or make it a less attractive purchase? Well, no to either of those questions. Classic Monsters is definitely much more affordable (and likely easier to find) than those other monster manuals, and there are still plenty of other monsters that are available in this book. With a couple of hundred new monsters, there is still a lot of meat for a Castle Keeper in this volume.
Comparing this book to the recent edition of the Tome of Horrors Complete (ToHC) for Swords & Wizardry, would not be a fair comparison for Classic Monsters only because ToHC has five times the page count of Classic Monsters. It does, however, not shy away from the conversion of Devils and Demons. You can almost call these infernal creatures the Great Schism of AD&D, as it was their removal from AD&D 2e that upset a good number of gamers who felt that the new edition was overly sanitized after the "Satanic" scares over D&D of the 80s. I am certainly not accusing Castles & Crusades or Classic Monsters of being sanitized, but for me this is a glaring omission. I like the existence of the infernal to test the goodness of characters, and as a fan of writers like Michael Moorcock I like to emulate his fiction with demonic characters. Not that I would not be able to adapt or convert this material myself, if I wanted. I don't want people thinking that Classic Monsters is a bad book, because it certainly isn't. I just feel that it could have been a better book with the addition of more material. Who knows, maybe someone at Troll Lord Games will want to do something along the lines of the great old Demons series for AD&D that Mayfair Games put out all those years ago.
One of the strong points of the write-ups for these monsters is the combat section. For those less experienced Castle Keepers, or those who were not around in the hobby when many of these creatures were first published, having that brief outline of how each monster acts in combat can be very useful. There is also enough ecology information to be able to place these monsters into an adventure in a way that makes some logical sense.
Yes, this is a volume that adapts material that is already available, but sometimes not having to do the conversion work is worth the price of admission, and not everyone still has copies of the original MM2 or the Fiend Folio around to use for their Castles & Crusades games. Because of that, this book is useful and a good addition to anyone's Castles & Crusades library.
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