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="Mr. Patient" data-source="post: 2719816" data-attributes="member: 4118">Ancestral Vault is the second and unfortunately final supplement for the brilliant African-themed Nyambe campaign setting, written by Chris Dolunt and Chris Jones.  The book focuses on equipment and magic items, but also introduces a few feats, spells, and other game mechanics.  It is a 96-page softcover book, retailing for $20.  Where applicable, the material is presented in both 3.0 and 3.5 form, which is quite handy.  For the most part, Nyambe-specific rules are republished where necessary to make use of the material outside of Nyambe, or else generic d20 alternatives are provided.  With some effort, much of the material in this book can be reused in non-Nyambe d20 campaign worlds.As noted above, the focus is on items.  There are a few mundane items, including basketwork shields, fetishes (which increase the utility of the Sanguar feat; they're a necessity, in my opinion) and some much-needed Nyamban ships.  The ships use the rules from Living Imagination's Broadsides!, an all-too-rare example of reusing open content d20 material.  Most of the book, however, is taken up with magic items of various sorts, including new weapons and armor, potions, rings, artifacts, and the like.  Some of the more flavorful stuff includes beekeeper's armor, which has a permanent repel vermin effect; monkey armor, which grants a bonus on Climb checks; the ngoloko backscratcher, a weapon which upon command sprouts fangs and can poison opponents; walk among clouds soup, granting a wind walk effect; and trophies, animal parts that grant certain bonuses when worn.  I also really enjoyed the trinkets, minor magical items that make life a little easier: a knife that is always clean, a ward against tooth decay, magical toys for children.  These are terrific for flavoring a campaign, if not so useful to adventurers.Ancestral Vault also includes rules borrowed from Atlas Games' Occult Lore for using the Natural Medicine skill to derive mundane and magical concoctions from plants.  It also presents a set of new feats to replace the existing item creation feats: Craft Minor Charged Item, Craft Minor Permanent Item, Craft Medium Charged Item, etc.  The reason offered is that Forge Ring and Craft Rod are quite useless, and no one will take them.  These are true statements, but the solution provided here is no better, as I'll discuss below.The last chapter of the book contains rules for Nyamban games called bao and shahmatq, which can be used in conjunction with spell duels of a sort.  This is a fun idea, undone by the fact that bao is completely incomprehensible.  Appendix B contains errata for Nyambe: African Adventures.  They're great to have, but more are needed.***Most of the material in here is good to excellent.  The magic items, particularly when they're really African-flavored, are very creative.  You're not likely to find anything like the elder's rod, a dehydrated bull's penis with the ability to reverse the effects of aging, in any other book.  If that's too weird for your tastes, there is plenty of stuff that will be more generally useful, like the stupefying weapon ability, which inflicts intelligence damage on its foes.There are some weaknesses, however.  For starters, the art is mostly just generic, public-domain African material reproduced from other sources.  It's a bit drab and uninspiring.  I also wish a little less real estate was devoted to the endless permutations of the planar ally/planar binding spells introduced in the book (e.g., lesser geographic ally, which calls a fey creature), and their accompanying items (the lesser geographic shrine).  A "template"-style approach might have worked better here.I would also like to have seen some discussion of Nyamban homes, architecture, and cities, which might have fallen under a loose interpretation of "items."  What does a typical Nyamban house look like?  How is it laid out?  What's in it?  These are things that a DM can really use, but they're not here or in Nyambe: African Adventures.  You'll have to do your own research to find out.The new item creation feats are a great idea, but there is no rules support to actually integrate them into a Nyamban campaign, or any other.  Using these rules, do mchawi get Craft Minor Charged Item at 1st level, instead of Create Gris-Gris?  If so, isn't this perhaps overly powerful, giving 1st-level characters the ability to craft wands?  Which of the new feats replaces the Craft Magic Arms and Armor requirement of the inyanga yensimbi prestige class?  If it's Craft Minor Permanent Item, doesn't that really lower the prerequisites for the prestige class?  Basically, these new feats are thrown out there with no regard for how they fit with existing Nyambe rules, let alone core d20 rules.  They'll require a lot of work from the DM to use.  I decided not to bother, myself.Overall, this is a pretty useful book if you're running a Nyambe-based or other African-themed campaign.  If you're not, there are plenty of fairly portable ideas, but you'll need to get creative to integrate some of the more flavorful and interesting material.</blockquote>

Verification