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Title: Diablo II: The Awakening (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) by Bruce Cordell, Mike Selinker ISBN: 0-7869-1612-5 Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Pub. Date: 01 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (10 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: WAY too much hack-n-slash.
Comment: If you are expecting a normal AD&D adventure with a Diablo twist, you'll be surprised. It's the reverse: Diablo with an AD&D twist. All of the spells are just different damage ranges; there are almost no non-offensive spells in the book. The "million" magical items are arragned in random tables that have a tendency to produce really stupid items ("holy spear of corruption".... a HOLY spear of CORRUPTION...!), the "100" new monsters are actually about 20 with four or so varieties, with no habitat/society or ecology. They write down intelligence scores, but why bother? The monsters have no use besides hack-n-slash tactics. There is no plot at all. There is no motivation for the players beyond monsters to kill (which apparently is fine for the targetted demographic of this sourcebook). Mike Selinker's foreword made me want to vomit.

Basically, it's a carbon copy of the Diablo video game, only with D&D rules. Get the Diablo computer game instead; it's exactly the same, except that its sheer pointlessness can be forgiven.

Rating: 5
Summary: A great resource and lots of retro fun
Comment: There's two ways to use this product, both of which I heartily recommend, although "The Awakening" doesn't succeed equally at both.

As a sourcebook, it's terrific: There's five new AD&D kits (Amazon, Barbarian, Paladin, Necromancer and Sorcerer) that can be used to flesh out the standard AD&D characters of the same names (lifting new skills and spells for necromancer specialist mages, for instance) or to replace standard character types with these more colorful archetypes.

There are dozens of new spells, many of them quite good (the "corpse exploder" is a hoot), 100 or so new monsters (in true Diablo-style, though, they're actually variants on 20 or so base new monster types) and, of course, over a million new magic items, using the Diablo system of variable enchantment types piled atop one another (a system so interesting, it's how magic items are going to work in the upcoming 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons).

This is how I'm using the book. I'll be dropping Scavengers and Acid Spitters and Fallen Ones into my dungeons. Maybe my players will recognize them, maybe they won't. An upcoming necromancer archvillain will also have spells the players have never encountered before, drawing on this book, the wonderful-but-impossible-to-find Complete Necromancer's Handbook and the skills in this book. Great stuff all around.

The other way to use the book, though, isn't as successful: The dungeon crawl is fun - and HUGE - but the editing mistakes that were mildly annoying in earlier parts of the book (at least one monster's hit dice is clearly a major typo) become a real problem here, with items listed on the maps that don't show up in the description and vice versa. (The two chest sizes allegedly indicated on the map are actually both shown with an identical image, for instance.) And while Tristram is described - with spoilers, for those who haven't played the original computer game - there's no map, which seems an odd omission.

Having said that, though, this measures up quite well against the classic "Temple of Elemental Evil" module from AD&D's heyday, and I'll likely be using this as a straight forward dungeon crawl on those occasions when my full gaming group can't all get together. But even if you just use the source material that make up the first ¾ of the book, "Diablo II: The Awakening" is a great value and a terrific campaign resource for any DM.

Rating: 3
Summary: For fans of the Computer edition
Comment: Most of the monsters, items and levels are quite similar to the cd game. However, if you are looking for a role-playing challenge, find a different adventure. This game crams treasure down the party's throats. It is earned, but only because this is just one long hack and slash adventure.