By Eytan Bernstein
Published by The Le Games
Pages: 32 + OGL (Landscape PDF), 28 + OGL (Portrait PDF)
Fully bookmarked
Disclaimer: This is not a playtest review. I did not buy 17 Magic Hats & Helmets, it was sent to me for review as part of
Crothian’s Review Project.
As a product title, 17 Magic Hats & Helmets is laudingly precise. I could give you seventeen guesses as to what it contains, but that’s seventeen more than you would likely need. More importantly, however, is the question of whether or not you’ll get anything out of it. And for the answer to that, well, it’s not quite as straightforward.
The Le Games’ 17 Magic Hats & Helmets follows their familiar format of including multiple versions of their product in one ZIP, one in landscape format primarily aimed at onscreen viewing, one in standard portrait format for those who simply don’t like landscape format, or who wish to print it out, and an RTF version for easy copy-and-pasting into one’s own notes. The ZIP also includes a short text file describing the archive’s contents, as well as an image in JPG format of the front cover.
Breaking up the text are eleven pieces of artwork, mostly clip-art of some sort, by the looks of it. A smaller version of the cover art is reproduced on the first page. The landscape version of 17 Magic Hats & Helmets has a black border delineating the margins, as well as a black banner at the top and bottom of each page, listing the product name, its publisher, their motto, and the author and editor’s names. Should you wish to print the landscape version for whatever reason, it amounts to a fair amount of wasted toner. The portrait version loses the border but keeps the page banners. The artwork itself is nicely spread amongst the magic item descriptions, but is only vaguely tied to them. Which is to say, the characters in the artwork all have hats or helmets on them, even if it isn’t the focus of the image. Still, the pieces are all reasonably well done.
Following the Table of Contents are two tables, well one table really, which can be used to roll up the various pieces of magical headgear as random treasure. The first table uses a familiar percentile mechanic, while the second table is exactly the same, only using a d20. I’m not sure why. The random treasure table is a nice idea, but I’m not sure exactly how helpful it is in practice. After all, the DM has to have already decided that the random loot is to come from 17 Magic Hats & Helmets, and, well, there’s only 17 of them to choose from, really. Chances are he or she would already have something in mind. More useful, however, the table gives the reader something with which to quickly compare the relative prices of the various pieces of headgear. A point to note, while we’re at it, that most of the various brain buckets which follow fall into the medium-to-major magic item range. Only two are priced below 10 000 gp, and only seven below 30 000 gp.
Of even more dubious usefulness are the three provided plot hooks which follow. One of them is for your standard escort mission, while the two others at least have the potential to be interesting. (And which I won’t spoil for you.) But none of the plot hooks involve, in any way, shape or form, hats or helmets. To which I feel a wonderful opportunity has been sorely missed. The various powerful treasures which make up 17 Magic Hats & Helmets should be more than simply loot, they could be, they
should be the cause and catalyst for unique and exciting events! Having several or all of the plot hooks revolve around some of the items which follow would have been much more helpful.
While reading many of the descriptions of the included items I couldn’t help but ask myself, why exactly are these hats/helmets? Could not the Crown of the Storm God just as easily be his majestic Codpiece? What would be different if the Hat of Preparedness were instead the Girdle of Useful Toys, or Batman’s utility belt for that matter? If there is no functional difference, then why does it matter that these are hats and helms? And if it doesn’t matter, why should I shell out my hard-earned money for the PDF when I could just as easily pick a half-dozen special abilities out of a hat (hah!), tack them onto a random item affixed to a choice body slot, use the tables at the back of the DMG to estimate a price, and away I go?
Now certainly some of the items do work. Nevoltian’s Hat of Habitation is an interesting and entertaining item, because it is a unique item with an actual history, something most of the remaining items sorely lack. The Mnemonic Device works for me, mostly because it has an evocative description which sort of fits its function (namely boosting Knowledge checks and allowing the wearer to memorize things as if they possessed the psionic skill Autohypnosis), but also because it’s a low-level item that I’m more likely to throw at my players. The Skull of the Death Bringer makes thematic sense, since you’d be using the helm to view the battlefield via its
deathwatch effect, as do the Dragon Helms, seeing as, among other things they provide the wearer with a once-a-day breath weapon.
By far my favorite of the lot is the Wizard’s Hat, even if I would never use it as is. The idea is that a caster-type can store spell components in the hat, and each day, each component is duplicated until there are a maximum of 10 copies. Now I don’t know about your games, but I suspect that unless there is a gp cost involved, in the interests of keeping their games sane most DMs will instruct their players to hand-wave away keeping track of material components. They’ve purchased a spell-component bag? Good enough. There is no need to keep track of exactly how many pinches of bat guano the character is carrying. But the image of a wizard pulling doves, rabbits, small children and other sundry spell components out of his pointy hat is too good to let go, so why not instead allow the hat to provide the components for any spell up to a certain gp amount, so long as it is used immediately? You keep the flavor of a magic cap, and greatly simplify the requisite book-keeping.
The remaining dozen or so magic hats and helmets leave me feeling rather uninspired. A number of thematically-tied spell-like-abilities does not an interesting magic item make, in my opinion.
Half the PDF is taken up by an appendix. The onscreen version has 12 pages dedicated to describing the various magic hats and helmets, and 15 more pages in Appendix A: Definitions, most of which simply reproduce spells from the PHB. It appears that anything even briefly mentioned in passing in the item description, should it have an entry in the SRD, gets included. For example, the Skullcap of Identity grants its wearer immunity from possession, including from the
magic jar spell, so the
magic jar spell is reproduced for you in the appendix. Why? I would much rather the time and effort had instead been spent on developing interesting backstories for the items, along with useful plot hooks with which to incorporate them into my game, rather than reproducing material I am required to already own.
Kudos where they are due: Many of the issues I’ve griped about in my previous reviews of various The Le products seem to have largely been ironed out. The quality of the writing and editing is much improved, the Table of Contents has page numbers, the bookmarks take me to where they are supposed to, and the hotlinks work! Well, most of them. The one on the first page of the printable version of the PDF claiming that it will take you to The Le Games’ Yahoo group is cut across two lines, and the hyperlink only uses the top portion of that. But by and large, it’s slowly getting better, and my hat’s off (*cough*) to you fine folks busting elbow-grease in the trenches of PDF publishing, as it were!
The final word is this: If, like a pan-handler working the Klondike, you enjoy sifting through gravel for a few nuggets of gold, then 17 Magic Hats & Helmets may be worth looking into. If all you really want are some novel ideas to use as seeds for your own creations, again, this may be of use to you. But if instead you are expecting seventeen highly-polished gems of magical headgear, I suspect 17 Magic Hats & Helmets will leave you scratching your noggin.
Reviewed by Scott Benoit
