101 Mundane Treasures

[Messageboard Golem]

With 101 treasure items, each one written specifically for this book, gamemasters may now start adding various mundane armors, shields, articles of clothing, pieces of jewelry, and even weapons to the treasure hoards their players find.

While players may find the contents of this 21-page book interesting, it is the gamemaster who will really benefit from the items within.

 

[JoeGKushner]

101 Mundane Treasures
Written by Philip Reed
Published by philipjreed.com
21 color pages
$3.00

Philip Reed once again manages to hit a part of the D20 fantasy market that hasn’t been trounced to death yet. In 101 Mundane Treasures, the author does a lot of the legwork of putting together descriptions for standard treasures and provides the GM items that can add depth to his personal campaign.

The cover is a striking piece with a dragon wearing a ring centered by dark borders. The first page is the general introduction, providing players and GMs the purpose behind the product and how to use it. One of the good things is that all text is 100% OGC. The material gets started on page three, with the first section, Armor. Each entry starts with name, appearance, appraise information, value, and special rules. The appraise information lists the DC necessary to know about the item, the value breaks down the individual components of said item, and the special rules provide details for new materials, poisons, and rules.

There are several sections in the book starting with Armor, Clothing, Jewelry, Miscellaneous, Musical Instruments, and Weapons. Each section has some new and unique attributes to it. For Armor, for example, there is a suit of leather made out of basilisk hide. Not good enough? How about some mithril dwarven half plate? Need some special clothing? Try the Hydraskin Open Coat, so warm that it provides a bonus to Fortitude Saves vs. cold damage. Need a little more protection from the cold? Use a Yeti Cloak.

To me, one of the most useful sections for filling out the background of a world is the miscellaneous items. You can see how much ornamental goblets run, as well as playing cards, mirrors, cages, dolls, crystal skulls, and other unusual goods that have little adventuring use are worth. A few items thought will fine some use in a standard game like the Masterwork Climber’s Kit whose components are crafted from adamant or the Finely Braided Rope.

Of course, many people will flip right to the weapons section. Here you’ll see a lot of masterwork weapons but also some made out of different metals. Take the Demon’s Sword. This gains a +1 bonus to attack rolls for being masterwork and another +1 for being made of a special metal. How about a mithril dueling blade? Same deal, bonus from masterwork and material. One of the interesting things though, is not every weapon has a bonus. One of them, the Two-Bladed Sword of Ceremony, looks attractive but is worthless as a weapon and will shatter if used in such a fashion.

Outside of the items, there are new poisons used with the items. The Spider Arrows use hellstrike, a bright crimson paste while the vial of poison has cleric’s curse, a thick clear liquid that causes cleric’s healing spells to inflict damage.

Art is clip art from the Larry Elmore collection and ww.arttoday.com. Some of the Elmore pieces have been touched up with a little color. The borders are huge marble blue frames with the page number set on the center of the bottom like gemstones. Layout is standard two-column text with art generally wrapped around the text to follow the outline.

There are some problems with the book though. 101 Spellbooks costs the same price and even without the spells (which are OGC from other contents), is longer. Throw in the cover, license and wide margins, and you’ve got very little product. I know, the margins are the same here as they were in 101 Spellbooks, but because they’re a different color then the background, they’re much more noticeable here. Which is problem number two. As Bastion press and other publishers have discovered, on PDF’s, people want a minimum amount of color used in their products. Do we need two-inch borders on the top and bottom that suck out printers dry? Nope.

Is there anything I’d like to see the author do outside of putting more items into the book? Not as far as items themselves but sections on unusual metals, their bonuses, hardness, hit points, etc… Some of the goods used in the weapons and armor section for example, would make prime candidates for such inclusion. Does basilisk armor made into studded leather grant a better bonus? How about volcanic class with special properties? 101 Mundane Treasures helps fill a niche in the GMs world and hopefully we’ll see a version without the borders and that fills up 24 pages without counting the cover.

 

[Krug]

Ever GMed and found that all players were concerned about were magic items? If you want to add a little variety to that hoard, you should take a look at this book from PhilipJReed.com.

Herein you'll find a wealth of mundane items for GMs to drop into their campaign. Each item is described in about 3-4 sentences, has appraise information (including value) and special rules around it. Many of these items are masterworks but not all have bonuses. Some are actually a liability, such as ceremonial swords. Items covered include Armor, Clothing, Jewelry, Miscellaneous, Musical Instruments and Weapons, and range from the fairly common (such as Iron Keys) to the special (such as the Orc Barbarian's Greatsword, which has a +3 bonus to attack rolls).

I can see this being very useful for GMs who run low-magic campaigns. It's a great resource for filling out details of your world and adding flavour, though I wish there would have been more historical background for some of these items. For example, who was Wregan and why are there seven skulls on his lance?

I have some reservations though; I certainly wish Reed had done away with the borders. Simplicity works better and the thick blue borders at the top and bottom just suck away too much ink. Otherwise, art work is sparse and some of it is taken from Larry Elmore's collection. A better table of contents would have helped as well.

Overall, this supplement is not essential, but helpful if you're in a pinch and want to give out something other than a +1 longsword yet again. At $3, it's useful is you're strapped for time to come up with some interesting treasures.

 

[GameWyrd]

101 Mundane Treasures gets off to a magical start. In between downloading the product and starting the review I received a free upgrade. So did everyone else, I think, who ordered the original. Bonus.

The revised copy comes in two PDFs. There’s a full version and a cut-down black and white copy for printing ease. This review is of the latest full version. It’s a pretty version filled with bold colours, bold layout choices and full colour detailed illustrations. Philip J Reed.com seems to have the knack of picking talented and interesting artists. This time round it’s Studio Ronin. There is a solid colour sidebar but it’s on the right hand-side of the page not on the left. I don’t think words do that that justice. Years of the internet and traditional RPG book layouts have taught us to expect sidebars to appear on the left. You will notice the yellow bar on the right here even though it’s fairly slim. There are no traditional grey boxes for extra comments; there are yellow ones instead. There’s a yellow line at the top and bottom of each page. Yellow. Yellow. It works for me.

101 Mundane Treasure’s goal is simple – to give you 101 mundane but presumably interesting treasures. This new version actually squeezes in 104. A mundane treasure is a non-magical one, this doesn’t stop them having special features of their own though.

The first chapter is by far and my way my favourite. It was actually with some disappointment that I discovered the bulk of the download wouldn’t be more of the same. 101 Mundane Treasures is 26 pages long. As with the other 101s the supplement is concise and cheap. The Unusual Material chapter is 3 pages long and as it the name implies lists some interesting materials. Some of the suggested material seems rather unpractical for busy adventures but certainly has a lovely artist quality. Deepland Crystal, for example, seems rather too prone to breaking in your hand and stabbing you with splinters. Night Bark, on the other hand, strikes me as a great wood to make bows out of. For me, better than the game mechanic side of this are the short but effective descriptions for the materials. Night Bark is actually wood from the Midnight Trees. These tall and black trees grow in the frozen forests of the far north. Sure, okay, you’ll have to change that if you don’t have frozen forests in your far north but that’s easy enough to change. Either way the description is a winner. Stories tell that the Midnight Trees were once sentient guardians of the forest but who abandoned their posts. It’s this sort of flavour that I lap up and that inspires me to include these unusual materials in my game.

The great thing about the unusual materials is that they’re fairly generic. You can apply them to different equipment or weapons. I’ve already mentioned bows made from Night Bark but you could also make a shield. You could build your catapults or village out of it if you wanted to. Generic is good, specific is... well, it’s still useful but it’s not my preferred way to present equipment. The rest of the download is chock fill of specific equipment.

There’s strength in numbers. There’s therefore plenty of strength here. There is special strength in a PDF product too. With the aid of the find function it’s easy to whisk through all the leather items, mithril or so something that weighs exactly 50 lbs. You can do that in any PDF but it’s especially useful here.

There are four pages of armour. Since these are specific examples we’ve the likes of a damage set of chain (and appropriate modifier) that’s studded with gems (and appropriate cost). There are spiked shields (with damage rules) and orcish warlord half-plate.

There are just over two pages of clothing. Here we find everything from luxury such as sequined gloves to adventuring basics like leather scabbards. Nearly two pages of jewellery offer fantasy stalwarts like elf rings to more unusual items like the crown of the medusa. The miscellaneous section is about five and a half pages long. I found some excellent items in here; the costs and weight for a vial of poison, playing cards, dragon bone nice and crystal skulls. On the other hand some of the stats here are less likely to ever both a GM. I doubt I’d ever stress over the need to get the price and weight (let alone the description) of a vase correct or a set of iron keys.

I’ve often found it hard to get to grips with the costs of musical instruments in fantasy games. Should they be more expensive or less? The prices in the half page section here seem about right.

Yes, there are weapons too. There are four pages worth of masterwork or otherwise notable weapons with appropriate stats. It is worth noting that the pages here aren’t as long as a traditional layout is but they are probably a little wider.

It really is quite fun flicking through this visually impressive download on the screen. It’s less impressive but probably more practical once it’s printed off. The changes made in the revision are good; they take a product that does what it sets out to do (that critical point which marks an acceptable book in a GameWyrd review) and add a little bit more.

* This GameWyrd review was first published here.

 

[Crothian]

Treasure is one of the backbones of a fantasy role playing game. Players like finding it and DMs enjoy trying to make it all seem not so standard. But book after book we see more and more magical items. We rarely see items that have use and interest that are mundane. Thankfully we have 101 Mundane Treasures to give us a full book filled with these types of items.

101 Mundane Treasures is a twenty six page PDF by Ronin Arts. Philip Reed is the author of the 101 series and like the rest of them the books in the series it provides the reader with many options of the subject. Christopher Shy does the art in this book like he does in the rest of the series. I find his style unique and easily recognized. It gives the series a good feel and visual consistency that not many series of books have. The PDF makes a good use of bookmarks but not everything is bookmarked. I prefer to see an it all bookmarked as a linked index making things easy to fine. It saves time when using the PDF at the table be it on a computer or laptop.

The book starts with more unusual materials. Many of them are the hide or skin of certain creatures like a demon or a hydra. Each item is given a value, hardness rating, hit points, how it is uses and any special rules the material may have. The materials here vary in value from fifteen gold pieces a pound to an amazing 3,500 gold pieces a pound.

The book then goes on to the meat of it, the treasures. They are divided up into different sections like armor, weapons, music instruments, etc. Each is fully described in its appearance section and they all have DCs for being properly appraised. There are no histories or any hints as to wear the item may have come from or how it was constructed. That would have been a nice additional detail to the entries. The items presented are varied and will make a more interesting addition to any treasure trove.

101 Mundane Treasures is a PDF that gives exactly what it says. The items presented are easy to use and are ready to drop into any campaign.