Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pogre" data-source="post: 2446095" data-attributes="member: 6588">17 Magic Cloaks17 Magic CloaksWritten by: The Le, Sean HollandPage Count: 14 pagesPrice as of July 27, 2005: $2.50 on sale for $2.00 at RPGNOWIntroduction   This is yet another pogre playtest review. I have gone into some detail, but if you are looking for the short version I have included a capsule review as a conclusion.Format   The folks at The Le Games are leaders of the pack when it comes to formatting the files for ease of use. Readers receive a pdf formatted for onscreen use, a pdf formatted for printing, and an rtf file for easy paste and cut. I really like this feature and it is a great selling point.The Material   17 Magic Cloaks is another in the “17” series published by The Le Games. The beginning of the piece warns that power levels vary in different campaigns and DMs will have to tweak the cloaks to match their campaigns. As I soon discovered this is an understatement. There is a neat idea about having PCs quest for the recipe to build certain cloaks instead of just making magic formula available to them. It was the most valuable item in the book.   The cloaks are each given a title, a brief description, and a summary of the necessary creation costs and market price. Many of the cloaks left me scratching my head on the creation costs and not just from my campaign’s power level, but as compared to one another. For example, one cloak allows underwater breathing and limited communication with aquatic animals and costs 18,000. While another cloak allows the wearer once per day to lower some or all of his armor's AC bonus, and for each point of AC that is lowered this way, his max Dex bonus is increased by 1 and his Arcane Spell Failure Chance is reduced by 5%. What’s the cost for your fully plated magic user? 5,000 market price! Admittedly, he can only pull this trick off once per day, but what caster would not use this cloak?   There are cloaks that do random different things every day, cloaks that emulate the paladin’s lay hands ability, cloaks that form walls, cloaks that turn into dragons, and so on. There were not any serious game mechanic flaws I saw in these items, they just were not particularly inspiring. There was one cloak I viewed as far too powerful for the price: The precognition cloak has three charges per day that allows a wearer to do one of the following – re-roll at attack or damage die from an opponent who attacked him, re-roll a hit dice when gaining a level, ask for a hint from the GM once per an encounter, re-roll a skill check, etc. Kind of like the ultimate lucky cloak this fine garment runs a mere 17,700 market price.   Reading through the material I thought it might be useful for someone running a very high magic level campaign with no holds barred. Playtesting in campaign was going to be impossible, as my magic levels are standard D&D.The Playtesting   I decided to playtest these cloaks in a somewhat unfair way. I’ll let the reader judge if at had merit. I had five friends draw up characters of 5th, 10th, and 15th level. I then set up a gladiatorial contest. Each contestant had a standard amount of money to equip themselves and could use magic items. The caveat, of course, was that each person had to take at least one cloak from 17 magic cloaks.   The playtest was a lot of fun and we discussed at length the merits of the various cloaks. One of the cloaks was voted as inspiring, the Cloak of Vampirism, five of the cloaks were voted as broken, and the rest were pretty much trashed. The players’ reflections very much matched my own. Capsule Review   The format of 17 Magic Cloaks is excellent and very useable. It includes a pdf for online reading, a pdf for printing, and an rtf for cut and paste. The price is very cheap; unfortunately I do not believe this product is worth it. There are a couple of decent ideas and one inspiring cloak, the Cloak of Vampirism, but the vast majority of DMs can do as well or better on their own. The product might have its uses in a high-magic no-holds barred campaign. I cannot recommend 17 Magic Cloaks for most campaigns.July 27, 2005Keith Pogue (AKA pogre)</blockquote>

Verification