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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="malladin" data-source="post: 2011269" data-attributes="member: 8230">Okay, lets first give you a bit of information on my biases.  I'm a big fan of the original Trinity Universe stuff.  Primarily Trinity itself, but Adventure comes a very close second.  Some of you may also know me as a D20 PDF publisher.  What I'm trying to get at is that I have no particular bias towards the old storyteller system or the new D20 one, but a big bias towards the actual setting.Let me first say that overall I was disappointed with this book.  You may think that I've shown it in a funny way by giving it a 4-star review, but please allow me to explain.  I would have given the orginal Adventure 5 stars, it was a brilliantly constructed world with some very nice mechanics to capture the flavour.  My disappointment is also confounded by the fact that I had hopes that the D20 version COULD have been better than the original storyteller version (the main thrust of this argument is that the level development system allows for more long-term dramatic chaarcter development than the 1-5 dots of the storyteller system, but I'll not digress any further).  However, in this regard Adventure D20 somewhat let me down.  But its far from being poor, just not as good as I thought it could have been.Anyway, on with the review.Firstly, for those who have got the original Adventure book in the Storyteller system, there is nothing new in this book apart from the D20 mechanics.  Bates (SSS and Trinity Universe head honcho) has never tried to suggest it would.  If you prefer storyteller system to D20 then stick with it and don't bother with the rest of this review.  If you're thinking about the possibility of running it in D20 then hopefully I might be able to give you a feel for the book so that you can decide for yourself whether to buy it or not.Overview:The book is divided into two "halves." The first half provides setting information, fiction and a lot of flavour.  The second is the crunch.  This format was developed form the start of the original Trinity (the called Aeon) rulebook where the setting material was in colour.  Adventure, however is B&W throughout, but does have that nice glossy paper.Setting:I don't want to go into too much detail about the setting as it is not new information, but there are probably some people who've had nothing to do with the Trinity Universe yet who might need to know before making their mind up.  The book has a lot of fiction in ti.  There are a number of short stories, one by Warren Ellis, that really capture the flavour of the Pulp novels of the era.  Ther is also a lot of information about the nature of powers in the game, built up from the perspective of the members of the Aeon Society, a club of adverturous daring-dooers.  This works really well and definately captures the flavour of the setting and the idea that they don't really fully understand what it's all about yet (they will have gained a much better understanding by the time of Abberant and even more so with Trinity).  As a quick overview for those who have no prior experience with the Trinity Universe, there is an explosion in an experiment which sends telluric energy spilling out all over the world.  This energy is responsible for giving people superpowers of sorts.  Peope who are affected by these Z-Rays (as they are also known) are split into three categories: Daring, Psychic and Superhuman.  Daring characters have a little power which usually just manifests itself in terms of luck and a drive to become the very best at their particular line of interest.  Psychic and Superhuman characters are a little more obvious; Psychics have mental powers and Superhumans have physical ones.  In the Adventure era these powers are fairly low level and superhuman characers are more cast from the Doc Savage mould than the Superman one.  Psychics are alot more Mandrake the Magician than Babylon 5's Psi Corps.  However, if you want to play something more lke these, watch out for Aberrant and Trinity coming later <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />.  The final section in this setting half of the bok is a more detailed nation-by-nation, organisation-by-organisation look at the world.  To my mind this provides a fantastic backdrop for a pulp game.  The pulp genre can, IMO, suffer from the desire to include both science and magic in a (relatively) contemporary setting.  The Telluric energy hypothesis allows this to flurish (its a science that explains magical phenomenon).  It also gives you soem good room for variation in character concepts which a lot of other pulp games don't manage.  The theory in Adventure is a bit wishy-washy, but when it was originaly published, Trinity was first on the release schedule, which explains the science in great detail, and is nicely tied in with 'unifying theory' physics. As someone whos has studied a small amount of physics for my degree, this was a very well thought out theoretical science in Trinity, and its just that the Adventure era scientists don't understand it yet. If you're reading Adventure and thinking the science is a load of bunkum, please persevere, it's worth it for the advantages this gives to characters, gameplay and, when Trinity comes out, you can really see how solid the science behind it actually is.Game Systems:The second half of the book covers game systems.  This begins with Inspired Templates.  Characters who've been zapped with the Z-Rays become Inspired.  This Inspiration manifests itself in one of three ways, as mentioned above.  Each of these templates provides the chaarcter with a bunch of 'stuff' (an Ability Score increase, powers development rules, etc).  Each template also has a 1 or 2 level 'class' with which your character can take levels to improve their Inspired power.  IMO these are the best new system in the D20 version of the game.  They're a lot more versatile than the original Storyteller system and I can see how they will make the 3 different game systems fully integratable (which they weren't by a long way in the Storyteller system).  Next comes the 6 basic classes: Aristcrat, Entertainer, Investigator, Scholar, Scoundrel and Warrior.  It's these classes that disappoint me most.  A lot of the prerelease Buzz was how the classes were, in the words of Bates himself, a mixture of D20 Modern and D&D classes.  That got me excited.  I like the D20M basic classes, for the main reason that you play multiple different character archetypes within each basic class, or (more importantly) with a combination of 2 or 3 classes.  This is what is missing from teh Adventure D20 classes and what is very much needed.  The classes are too rigid and the notes included indicate that you're not really expected to do a lot of multiclassing between these base classes.  Now I understand that pulp characters do fall into some clearly defined stereotypes, but they're not all obviously here and it really puts a strain on working out how to put together a charater with a more wayward concept.  Some of the more 'wayward' concepts I'm talking about appear as prestige clases, but there's no clear way to build a character to get to the PrC that doesn't leave you with some class features you're not interested in.  I'm certainly not a mad D20M zealot who's against anything other than the D20M basic classes (I've done something similar myself with DarkLore), but i think the key area is the talent trees which allow you to pick and choose your class features so that you're not nailed down to one particular archetype by the class. Now on to skills and feats.  The skills section builds on the 3.5 D&D skills and applies a few changes based on the D20M skill list.  I can't really say mroe than that it works.  The general featsare basically just adding in a few of the D20M feats, alomg with a few new ones for the superscience system.  On top of this we've got Background feats and Daring feats.  Background feats based on Backgrounds from teh Storyteller system.  I think its a prtty nice conversion and has nicely thematically named feat trees. For those of you without any experience of tehstoryteller system, these are basically a system to represent how much your character has as opposed to what they do.  They cover areas such as gadgets, wealth, fame, influence and eve a nemesis.  IMO this is a system that D20M really needs and I'll probably use it to some degree in my future D20M games as well.  Another big thumbs up for this.  Daring feats are the 'powers' of the daring characters.  These are a mixture of extreme competence or luck effects.  For example, Jack of All Tongues makes you a  master linguist where as avigation Hazard means that if someone is chasing you they're likely to find that obstacles keep getting in their way.The next chapter is 'Inspiration' which basically talks about the fundamental uses of Inspiration that all charaters can make use of.  Your inspiration score is determined by an ability score bonus (different for each type) and your character level (or at least levels since you became inspired, should the GM want to hold of making your characters inspired from 1st level).  Your total inspiration is then divided into 'Facets' which determine some basic powers and are used for determining how good your character is at using diferent types of powers.  Following this is Dramatic Editing.  This was THE BEST EVER RPG SYSTEM in the original Adventure rules, so I was very interested to see how the D20 version held up to the original.  Again, for the uninitiated, the Dramatic editing system is ways in which the players can attempt to alter the course of the adventure, having an NPC drop in to help the party out, or even saving them from near death.  This system may seem scary to many GMs, but I assure you from having played using it it is the most fulfilling system in the whole gaming experience I've used.  It really draws the players into the plot and forces them to develop existing backstories so that they can make best use fo the dramatic editing system.  Now we come to the real selling point of the book. The D20 system, if could ever be the case, is actually better than the orginal!!  The basic system works prett much the same, but there's additional systems to capture the flavour of your character class, and to affect the actual map, putting useful props and the like readily to hand.The next chapter is Knacks.  Knacks are the powers used by the Psychic and Superhuman characters.  There are three levels of power fo each.  Knacks is another major area of disappointment with teh D20 version of the system.  For a start, in the original Adventure you could simply buy whatever Knacks you fancied, provided you had the characer pints to spend on them.  I built a Doc Savage inspired character who was a superhuman with two level three knacks with a starting character.  To get to two level 3 knacks in the D20 version I'd have to buy 4 level 1 knacks and 3 level 2 knacks first.  Given that you get one knack every other level and require two levels in superhuman to get up to level 3 knacks you need to be 17th level before you could manage this, and that asuming that you became inspired at 1st level.  Anotehr issue is with how some of these knacks have converted over to D20.  Blazing Speed, a superhuman knack, emulates Haste (but probably for a shorter duration) and is a level 2 knack, where as Body of Bronze, a level 3 knack, provides you with probably about 3-5 points of damage reduction.  Now I can cope with the haste power.  At the very earliest you'd get to Blazing Speed at 5th character level, making it the equivalent of a 3rd level spell for a wizard in standard D&D, but Body of Bronze would require you to be 11th level, and thus the equivalent of 6th level spell.The next chapter is Super Sience.  When I was running an Adventure! game on the original rules I never had anyone who was interested in using this system, so I can't really comment on what it's like in the old system, but as for the new system...   In my mind this is a pretty good, but not great, system.  It has a nice step-by-step approach and works well for creating a variety of gadgets and the like.  The simple idea of adding knack powers to the creations is a nice simple way of doing supersience which I like alot.  I also think it ties in quite nicely with the 'Invent' feats which are the equivalent of item creation feats.  Certainly a better system than basic D&D 3e item creation, IMO.Next we're on to 'Adventuring' which is basically equipment and a few extra rules.  I really likethe equipment section.  Weapons are statted up base on their class rather than an individual model.  Gunnuts might not approve, but as an ingnoramus in this area, it makes my GMing it a lot easier.  Probably the best bit of this chapter is the Pursuit systems, which wihilst being unashamedly nicked from Spycraft, doesn't stop them from being a great system, and as I don't have Spycraft I was glad to have them to hand.  A nice touch is that the advanced manoeuvres which I'm led to beleive are class-based in Spycraft are now Daring, requiring the Barnstormer, Wheelmen (etc) daring feats rather than class levels.Now we're pretty much at the end of the book. This chapter is Roleplaying which covers a really good primer on Pulp and how to run pulp games.  It talks about how to create plots and villains and discusses the theme and mood of the world.  As usual with White Wolf products, this is a great chapter and shows a fantasic level of understanding ofthe genre and the world, and (most importantly), conveys that to the reader.Finally we reach the appendicies.  This includes a description of all the Aeon Society members and standard Villains, followed by 'odd and ends' which provides an new 'monster' template (the Minion) a new PC race (Sentient Apes), brief details on some organisations and a timeline.Summary:All in all this is a very good product witha few, but significant flaws.  It's not as good as the original, but its still pretty good.  I can't think of any better game for doing D20 Pulp, andI think the setting is probably a bit better than a basic pulp one would be - its more in depth and has a nice pseudo science behind it which will enable you to pull together differences in the worlds of the various different pulp classics.  The basic classes are too rigid, but not not unplayable, and the individual class features for these classes are well crafted, if the actuall class is flawed in design.  The powers are a mixture of really good systems and really bad ones.  The templates and dramatic editing rules are fantastic, the Knacks are diodgy as hell.  I'd definately recommend it to the uninitiated, or even those whove played the original but can't get anyone to play it because its not D20 (which is a lot like my group <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ).  However, If you've got the original, its still the best.</blockquote>

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