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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="Vurt" data-source="post: 2690905" data-attributes="member: 1547">Bardic Lore – OghamBy Daniel M. PerezPublished by Highmoon Media ProductionsPages: 11 + OGLFully bookmarkedDisclaimer: This is not a playtest review.  I did not buy Bardic Lore – Ogham, it was sent to me for review as part of <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=148294" target="_blank">Crothian’s Review Project</a>.Some of the most intriguing additions to the game often take an idea or item from real world culture or history and throw it into the fantasy realm.  Ogham is one such addition.  Historically, Ogham is a Celtic alphabet of twenty-five characters used primarily for stone and wood inscriptions.  The letters are each named after sacred trees, and consist of one to five perpendicular or angled strokes, meeting or crossing a center line. The form of the letters allows them to be carved easily into objects of stone or wood.Now if you just read that and immediately thought that might make a cool visual representation of the D&D druidic language, then you are clearly on the same page as the product’s author.What you get is a page of relatively well-written introductory fiction to set the mood, followed by a real-world description and history of the Ogham language, including a helpful diagram.  There is also a table listing each character, its Ogham name, pronunciation, corresponding English letter or sound, and the tree the character represents.  Since the language was originally meant to represent Irish, some liberties have been taken here.  Five more characters have been included in order to fill in for missing English letters, allowing you to tantalize and tease any amateur cryptographers in your group with secret messages.The bulk of the product talks about how to incorporate ogham magic into your campaign, including as a written form of the Druidic language.  The author also ties the idea to using ogham markers on standing stones and trees, creating something like a cross between a landmark and a stationary wand, which can produce a variety of magical effects for those who know how to activate them, until their charges run out.For example, the Ogham Stone of Binding Promise is used to guarantee and seal a deal, cursing any of the party who seek to subsequently break it.  The Ogham Stone of Land Title can create a magical barrier to hedge out unwanted intruders by race or bloodline.  (Never did like those McCloud’s…)  The Ogham Stone of Protection can be used to generate a surrounding bubble tied to a protection spell such as antilife shell for a short duration.  And finally, Tree Ogham markers can be used to provide instant metamagic feats to spells cast from specific schools of magic, or with certain descriptors.  Some of these markers use charges, and others are continuous.Finally, two new feats are included, Scribe Ogham unsurprisingly, as well as the metamagic feat Cursed Spell.  The former allows one to craft Ogham magic markers, while the latter allows the caster to effectively tie bestow curse to the casting of another spell, prepared in a spell slot three levels higher.  A short Lore table follows, giving DCs for various Ogham Knowledge checks, and the product ends with a half-page, hyperlinked bibliography.There’s not much in the way of artwork in Ogham, aside from a diagram or two and a quarter-page photograph of an actual ogham stone in Co. Kerry, Ireland.  One or two more might help break up the text a little better.  The pages are all laid out in standard two-column portrait format, with a green banner along the top and bottom of each page in lieu of the customary borders along the side.  The bottom banner sports a curly, vine motif.  The darkness of the green hues used may be a pain to print on older printers like my own where toner is difficult and/or expensive to replace.In the false dichotomy that divides fluff from crunch, Ogham-the-pdf lies balanced somewhere in the middle.  The product doesn’t have high aspirations, it simply wants to tie a very flavourful historic concept and mystique to druids in the d20 fantasy genre, and in that it is largely successful.  It is also tightly focused.  If you want to do something a little more to flesh out druids in your game, giving them more depth, then it’s certainly worth giving Ogham a look.  Ogham doesn’t try to make them super-powerful or anything, just give them a much-needed infusion of flavour.  Plus, it’s always fun to have the players huddle around a note or a map with a partial key trying to decipher its text.  There is that much more of a sense of discovery than simply giving one of them a DC 25 Decipher Script check and then telling them what it says.Reviewed by Scott Benoit</blockquote>

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