When my friends and I were first discovering AD&D back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Deities & Demigods was one of my favorite rulebooks. I must have learned, or perhaps mislearned, more mythology from Deities & Demigods than from Hamilton and Bullfinch combined. Although the copy I bought upon its original publication in 1980 eventually passed to my brother and then into obscurity, a friend recently gave me his childhood copy. I’m delighted, nonetheless, to have access to the book in PDF format.

The content holds up as well as it ever did; it remains to be seen how easy it will be to plug some of the fightable monsters into D&D Next, but the important things about deities are their descriptions and portfolios, not so much their stat blocks. In this regard, Deities & Demigods remains the premiere D&D source for importing real-world pantheons and other fantasy mythologies into D&D. This volume contains some fantastic black and white line drawings, too—Jim Roslof’s fantastic action shot of Thor on p. 107 is one of the most outstanding. Sadly, this PDF contains the edition that omits the Cthulhu/Lovecraftian mythos and the Melnibonean mythos (even though the Credits and Acknowledgements still offered “special thanks to Chaosium” for permission to use those materials).

In terms of production values the PDF is fairly good for a scan, and the OCR seems to be pretty clean. The file is thoroughly bookmarked, although the bookmarks are poorly organized (the Egyptian mythos and beyond sit at a different outline/indent level than the others) and inconsistent (individual entries are bookmarked for the American Indian mythos through the Chinese mythos, but not for the Egyptian mythos and beyond). There’s also at least one spelling error in the bookmarks (“Foreward” instead of “Foreword”) that doesn’t reflect the actual text of the book. Otherwise, the conversion is well done.