Fiend Folio

The Fiend Folio was a 1981 Monster Manual-like book for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition. It served to gather up the various monsters that had been submitted to TSR works but not made the MM itself as of its 1978 edition - for instance, kuo-toa, svirfneblin and of course the official full writeup of drow. Most came out of White Dwarf's Fiend Factory as of then. Many of the latter monsters are laughable crap, like the Xvart which sounds like Fart, so have fallen into obscurity or - like the Flumph - notoriety.

But a few gems do appear amongst the dross: usually cited here, Charles Stross' badass Githyanki and Githzerai. We could also shout-out to the Dark Ones, the Creepers and Stalkers. Who knows why later publishers didn't publish stuff featuring those guys, they were fucking sweet.

A 3rd-party company called Necromancer Games vaguely affiliated with White Wolf released a spiritual successor to the Fiend Folio in "The Tome of Horrors", which adapted many, if not all, of these monsters to Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. WotC for 3e did its own Fiend Folio, figuring that was a decent brand for niche monsters - so Caryatid Columns and those Dark Ones were here. Others were brought back for Pathfinder. With the release of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, many of these monsters are starting to be revived and return to the spotlight. The Lava Children, Flumph, and Berbalang all entered the canon here, among others. 5th edition also has a new series of PDF supplements called Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio which updates even more obscure monsters from the original Fiend Folio to 5th edition.

List of Monsters

(Under construction)

1st Edition

• Aarakocra
• Achaierai a giant evil bird with a spherical body and 4 long legs it attacks with.
• Adherer, a weird creature that looks like a mummy but sweats glue.
• Alaex, a personification of a god's anger that resembles a duplicate of the person it has been sent to punish.
• Algoid, a humanoid that actually is a mass of intelligent algae.
• Al-mi'raj, a killer rabbit with a unicorn's horn.
• Apparition, an undead that cannot cause physical harm, so it tries to scare people to death.
• Assassin bug, giant flies that attack humans in male/female pairs. The male paralyzes the victim so that the female can lay their eggs in their wounds.
• Astral searcher, a spirit formed from violent thoughts that attacks people psychically to destroy their mind to it can posses their body.
• Babbler, a mutated form of lizard man.
• Giant bat, just a giant bat.
• Berbalang an ugly bat winged humanoid that spends most of its time with its body dormant while its spirit hunts on the astral plane. During the full moon it instead hunts on the physical plane by sending out a physical projection of itself.
• Blindheim, a frog-like creature with brightly shining eyes.
• Blood hawk, a bird of prey that likes human flesh.
• Giant Bloodworm, just a giant blood sucking worm.
• Bonesnapper a dinosaur that like to collect human bones.
• Booka, a small and ugly but helpful creature that lives in peoples attics.
• Bullywug frog people
• Bunyip, a seal like creature with strong jaws.
• Carbuncle, a strange creature with a jewel on its head that follows travelers around and tries to get them killed for its amusement.
• Caryadit column, a stone pillar shaped like a woman holding a sword that can come to life.
• Caterwaul, a chaotic evil feline predator with blue fur.
• Cifal, a tightly packed swarm of insects that forms a humanoid shape.
• Clubnek, a giant mutant ostrich.
• Coffer corpse, an undead creature that can only be damaged with magical weapons. If you hit it with non-magical weapons with will pretend to be damaged and fall down, only to get up again and scare you
• Crabman, humanoids with hard shells and crab claws instead of hands.
• Crypt thing, an undead guardian that teleports intruders to random places, or paralyzes them and turns them invisible, but claims that it disintegrated them.
• Dakon, Lawful neutral talking apes.
• Dark creeper small humanoid that love to steal magic item. They have the abilities of a 4th level thief and creating magical darkness and detecting magic items.
• Dark stalker taller and stronger leaders of dark creepers that can create walls of fog and explode when they die.
• Death dog a two headed dog with a bite that spreads a deadly rotting disease.
• Death knight, a powerful undead created from a fallen paladin transformed into a lich.
• Demon
  • Lolth, the demon queen of spiders.
• Denzelian, a peaceful creature resembling a large sheet of rock that slowly eats through rock, creating tunnels.
• Devil
  • Styx devil, a humanoid devil with a oversized head and black wings. Their attacks have a chance of inflicting the imprisonment spell on their target.
• Devil dog, a chaotic evil hound that uses its white fur to blend into snow.
• Dire Corby, a flightless humanoid bird that lives underground.
• Disenchanter, a tapir like creature that sucks the magic out of magic items
• Doombat, an evil giant bat with a barbed tail and a shriek that prevents consentration.
• Oriental dragon
  • Li lung
  • Lung wang
  • Pan lung
  • Shen lung
  • T'ien lung
  • Yu lung
• Dragonfish a well camouflaged fish with poisonous spines on its back. Don't step on them.
• Dune stalker, an evil humanoid that attacks with powerful vibrations.
• Elemental princes of evil
  • Cryonax
  • Imix
  • Ogrémoch
  • Olhydra
  • Yan-C-Bin
• Drow Elf
• Enveloper, a shapeshifting mass of flesh that can copy the abilities of people it eats.
• Ettercap, a humanoid with the ability to generate spider silk, which it uses to make weapons and traps.
• Eye killer, a monster with the lower body of a snake and the upper body of a bat. Once per day, it can absorb light from light sources and fire it from its eyes as a death ray.
• Eye of fear and flame
• Firedrake, a Dragonet with flaming hot blood.
• Firenewt
• Fire snake, a snake that is only found in fires.
• Firetoad, a toad that hates water and breathes fireballs.
• Flail snail
• Flind, a relative of the gnoll that often leads gnoll packs.
• Flumph
• Forlarren
• Frost man, a humanoid that radiates cold and can lift its eyepatch to fire a cone of cold. They can have class levels.
• Galltrit, a small winged gremlin that lives in dirty places and feeds on blood. If avoided being detected when feeding on victims with its anesthetic saliva.
• Gambado, a very strange monster with a skull for a face that can coil up its body to launch itself like a spring. It ambushes prey by pretending to be a skull sitting on a pile of rocks with its body hidden in a pit behind the pile.
• Garbug, a flying lobster with tentacles that cause paralysis.
  • Black Garbug, attacks with a sharp proboscis.
  • Violet Garbug, attacks with powerful claws.
• Giant
  • Fog giant
  • Mountain giant
• Giant strider, a flightless featherless bird that can shoot fireballs from its head. Fire heals them but they are vulnerable to cold. Firenewts use them as mounts.
• Gibberling
• Githyanki
• Githzerai
• Goldbug, a beetle with a deadly poison bite that looks like a coin.
• Gorbel
• Gorilla bear, a gorilla with the arms and teeth of a bear.
• Grell
• Grimlock
• Gryph, another evil four legged bird monster. Not as giant and silly looking as the achaierai. Females gryphs lay their eggs in people's bodies xenomorph style.
• Guardian Daemon, a daemon that has been summoned and bound to guard a treasure.
• Guardian Familiar, a cat that guards a treasure. It must be killed 9 times to destroy it, and it gets stronger the more times it has been killed.
• Hellcat, a cat from hell that serves lawful evil beings. It is only visible in darkness.
• Hoar fox, a fox with ice breath. They are resistant to ice and vulnerable to fire, but you will want to avoid using fire because their pelts are very valuable if undamaged.
• Hook horror
• Giant hornet, just a giant hornet.
• Hound of ill omen, when a character does something to seriously offend their deity, this hound may appear and put a curse on them that prevents them from healing and quadruples all damage they take until they take a certain number of wounds. There is no saving throw for this curse, the remove curse spell is only partially effective and only has any effect if applied immediately, and the hound is impossible to harm in any way. This probably was put into the book to give DMs a way to more easily kill off misbehaving player characters without having to resort to falling rocks or sending monsters that risk a TPK.
• Huecuva
• Ice lizard, a small winged lizard with magical abilities, including the power to turn into a white dragon twice per day.
• Imorph, a weird tentacled slug thing that slowly transforms into a copy of whatever it fights. Its liver can be used to make a potion of polymorph self.
• Iron cobra, a powerful construct in the form of a metal snake that obeys its owner's commands.
• Jaculi, a snake with sharp bones on the sides of its head and the ability to camouflaged itself like a chameleon. They can only attack by leaping at enemies from above.
• Jermlaine
• Kamadan, a relative of the displacer beast that looks like a leopard with several venomous snakes growing from its shoulders and fires a cone of sleep as a breath weapon.
• Kelpie, a shapeshifting seaweed monster that transforms into either a woman or a horse and charms men into drowning themselves so it can feast on them. Women are immune to its charm.
• Kenku
• Khargra, a very strange looking fish like creature from the elemental plane of earth that eats metal and can swim through stone.
• Killmoulis
• Kuo-toa
• Lamia noble
• Lava children a hybrid of earth and fire elementals. They are size of a man but look like children. They can be warriors, magic users, or clerics. They are immune to earth and fire magic. Metal objects cannot touch them and simply pass through them.
• Lizard king
• Magnesium spirit, a fast moving flame that needs to possess a human in order to cast the spell to let it go home. They attempt to merge with a human, draining their energy and strength in the process. The human must be at least 9th level to survive the merging process due to the energy drain. If it succeeds the body it possesses will vanish with it. Victims that don't survive can't be resurrected without a powerful such as wish. They can only be damaged by silver and magic weapons, and can only be damaged by holy water while it is trying to merge with a human.
• Mantari, a flying ray with a stinger tail that does more damage the less constitution the victim has, and does quadruple damage if it hits the same target again the next round.
• Meazel, an ugly humanoid that likes to sneak up on prey from behind and strangle them with a cord.
• Meenlock
• Mephit
  • Fire mephit
  • Lava mephit
  • Smoke mephit
  • Steam mephit
• Mezzodaemon
• Mite
• Necrophidius
• Needleman
• Nilbog
• Nonafel
• Norker
• Nycadaemon
• Ogrillon
• Osquip
• Pĕnanggalan
• Pernicon
• Phantom stalker
• Poltergeist
• Protein polymorph
• Quaggoth
• Quipper
• Qullan
• Retriever
• Revenant
• Rothé
• Sandman
• Scarecrow
• Screaming devilkin
• Shadow demon
• Sheet ghoul
• Sheet phantom
• Shocker
• Skeleton warrior
• Skulk
• Slaad
  • Blue slaad
  • Death slaad
  • Green slaad
  • Grey slaad
  • Red slaad
  • Ssendam - Lord of the Insane
  • Ygorl - Lord of Entropy
• Synad
• Son of Kyuss
• Stunjelly
• Sussurus
• Svirfneblin
• Symbiotic jelly
• Tabaxi
• Tentamort
• Terithran
• Thoqqua
• Thork
• Throat leach
• Tiger fly
• Tirapheg
• Trilloch
• Troll
  • Giant troll
  • Giant two-headed troll
  • Ice troll
  • Spirit troll
• Tween
• Umpleby
• Urchin
  • Black urchin
  • Green urchin
  • Red urchin
  • Silver urchin
  • Yellow urchin
• Vision
• Vodyanoi
• Volt
• Vortex
• Whipweed
• Witherstench
• Witherweed
• Xill
• Xvart
• Yellow musk creeper
• Yellow musk zombie

2nd Edition

2rd Edition's version of the Fiend Folio was the 14th volume of the Monstrous Compendium series.

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3rd Editon

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5th Edition

See Mordenkainen's Fiendish Folio.