Readers and gamers had submitted creatures to the "Fiend Factory" department of the magazine, and the most highly regarded of those appearing in the first thirteen issues were selected to be in the publication.

Games Workshop, with Don Turnbull as editor, originally intended to develop and publish the Fiend Folio tome (ISBN 0-935696-21-0) in late 1979 as the second Monster Manual volume, and would be officially recognized by TSR as an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons product, with the monsters mostly taken from submissions to White Dwarf's "Fiend Factory" column.

[2] Although the manuscript was completed on time by editor Don Turnbull, a business dispute between Games Workshop and TSR Hobbies delayed publication of the book for nearly two years.

[5] Some illustrations by Emmanuel were previously featured in the "Fiend Factory" column from issue 12: the Assassin Bug, Githyanki, Grell and Giant Bloodworm.

Besides creatures from the column, jermlaine, drow, kuo-toa, and svirfneblin, all of which had previously appeared in adventure modules from TSR, were included.

Cover art was by Brom and Henry Higginbotham, with interior art by Glen Angus, Darren Bader, Thomas Baxa, Matt Cavotta, Dennis Cramer, Larry Dixon, Jeff Easley, Scott Fischer, Lars Grant-West, Jeremy Jarvis, Todd Lockwood, Kevin McCann, Raven Mimura, Matthew Mitchell, Puddnhead, Wayne Reynolds, Richard Sardinha, Marc Sasso, Brian Snoddy, Arnie Swekel, Ben Templesmith, Anthony Waters, and Sam Wood.

[15] The extraplanar and swarm subtypes, and the allocation of skill points and feats to function the same way as they did for player characters, were introduced in this book, and then featured in the revised version of the Monster Manual.

Many of the creatures from the 1st edition Fiend Folio were updated to the d20 rules by Necromancer Games in their ENnie award winning[17] Tome of Horrors.

Greenwood, however, did consider the slaad, elemental princes of evil, and penanggalan "worthy additions to any campaign" and noted that the previously published drow and kuo-toa were "expected attractions, but good to see nonetheless.

Zumwait summed up his review by stating, "the FIEND FOLIO Tome is like a basket of peaches: Most of it is pretty good stuff, but part of it is the pits.

Turnbull cited the publication's legal holdups, and the AD&D game's evolution during that time, as part of the reason for the work's inconsistencies.

Creatures he commented on were the giant bat ("seems an obvious choice for D&D"), the death dog ("rumored to be a descendant of Cerberus"), Lolth ("which often appears on fantasy literature"), the elemental princes of evil, and the drow ("who figure prominently in a number of TSR dungeon modules").

"[3] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "while Fiend Folio was largely a dead-end for AD&D, it is a glimpse into the future of a behemoth of a different sort ... All of these aesthetic choices would coalesce in the years to come in the Fighting Fantasy series of adventures gamebooks and in the many faces of Games Workshop's gore-flecked, heavy metal-influenced Warhammer franchise.