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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="MeepoTheMighty" data-source="post: 2009471" data-attributes="member: 3216">The Book of the Righteous is the latest book in Green Ronin's Arcana series, which includes The Secret College of Necromancy and Arcana: Societies of Magic.  This is the first hardback in the series, and is a massive undertaking which attempts to provide a number of plug-n-play churches which can be slipped into any campagin.I should note that I am a fan of deity books, and I almost always end up "stuck with" the cleric in games.  The original Deities & Demigods, Legends & Lore, and books like Faiths & Avatars were among my favorite gaming books of all time.  I am happy to say that, despite my inital skepticism, BotR did not disappoint me in any way.The book is a massive hardback, weighing in at 312 pages, with only two pages devoted to an index and one to the OGL liscence.  The body text is incredibly dense, and I kid you not when I say this is a hefty chunk of reading material.  Margins are almost nonexistant, columns are spaced closely together, and the illustrations never seem like pagefillers.The art ranges from average to very good, with contributions from around a dozen artists.  This provides a variety of looks and feels, which is a little different from the more defined look that would come from a smaller art team.  However, I was pleased with most of the artwork, and it all seemed to relate quite well to the text it accompanied.   My only quibble is with the cover art, which seems to be rather static.  I'm not sure if this is meant to reinforce the distant nature of the gods, but the god depicted on the cover doesn't even seem to acknowledge the existence of the mortal by his foot.  In addition, the same art is repeated on the back cover, and due to is color manages to obscure much of the text describing the book.The book describes a pantheon of twenty gods.  In Dieties & Demigods terms, the pantheon would rank somewhere between a "loose" pantheon and a "tight" pantheon.  Though the gods tend to be diverse and somewhat squabbling, all twenty are non-evil, and are united against the forces of evil in the world.  Only a handful of evil gods are described.  Though the gods have interdependencies and relationships, it doesn't seem like it would be any problem at all to simply swipe a god or two for use in your own campaign.At first, I was a little put off by the lack of evil gods.  However, once I thought about Green Ronin's reasoning behind this, it made more sense.  The majority of people are simply not going to worship the gods of baby eating and torture, so it makes sense that there just wouldn't be all that many of those gods.  In addition, the gods described in this book seem a bit more aloof than Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk gods, and a number of their churches have schisms resulting in different viewpoints on the nature of the god, as well as a handful of evil cults who worship the darker side of some of the neutral gods.Chapter 1 of the book is an introduction and describes such things as "why do I need to care about religion?"  It takes a few friendly potshots at "that other" god book, and explains why this god book is different.Chapter 2 provides an overview of the mythology.  I wont' go into the specifics here, but the mythology admittedly combines a number of familiar elements from real-world myths and creates a believable story of creation, both mortal and divine.  This chapter also covers the cosmology assumed by the rest of the book, which is different from the standard cosmology but familiar enough that it shouldn't cause anyone any problems.Chapter 3 presents the "Great Church," which reminds me of the Wal-Mart of churches.  All of the gods have shrines in the Great Church, and the common folk can go there to venerate whichever god they need to pray to at that time.  Because the church is so pedestrian, it has a great appeal among the common man, which translates into a lot of secular power.  However, the worship there is a rather watered-down and homogenized version of what you would find at any of the churches dedicated to one god or another.Chapters 4-7 go into detail on each of the twenty gods and their churches.  A typical entry is around 10 pages, with an illustration of the god, his symbol, and one or more of his priests or followers.  Considering the density of the text, this is an astounding amount of information on each church.Each entry begins with one or more myths about the god in question.  These provide a great context for understanding the god and his church, and tend to be quite interesting.  Some of them touch on the creation of heavenly bodies, or the creation of wine, or other such ideas.  The book then describes the god, and the natural phenomena, creatures, virtues, and worshippers associated with him.  Each god is given an alignment, though some of them are seen to have more than one alignment, which results in schisms among their mortal worshippers.  For example, Tinel, god of knowledge and magic, is either true neutral or chaotic good, and damned if mankind knows how to figure out which one is right. <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 church descriptions are lengthy, and provide a breakdown of the organization, common prayers, dogma, clothing, holy days, and saints of the faith.  Each church has its clerics fully described, in addition to at least two other orders:  holy warriors, and a prestige class.  The holy warriors are derived from the paladin class, but essentially get to change around some abilities to make them more suited for individual gods.  This is a very neat idea and one that will see use in my campaign for sure.Chapter 8 describes the four evil gods of the pantheon.  Many might not like the fact that Asmodeus is the main evil god.  I'm not sure which way I feel just yet, but the description of him makes it seem like he could make as excellent a god as he does an archdevil.  This chapter also discusses the evil or heretical cults of the mainstream faiths.  Chapter 9 is entitled "Campaigning" and provides ways in which to use the mythology presented.  It begins by providing interpretations of the various alignments as a religous scholar of the pantheon might see them.  This is a very well-done section and is a better explanation of the various alignments than provided in the PHB, though it does take more of a "how does a chaotic good god act" stance than a "how does a chaotic good character act" stance.The chapter discusses the relationships between the various churches.  It also provides adventure hooks for various churches and describes the things you should think about when designing a campaign from the ground-up.Chapter 10, "Do It Yourself," is much like chapter 9, but is aimed more towards fitting various parts of the book into an existing campaign.  It discusses different ways in which your current mythology and this new mythology could overlap or meld.  It also talks about ways to tweak the mythology to create the feel you're looking for.Chapter 11 provides the rules for the holy warrior class, a number of obligatory new feats, and a handful of new domains,  spells, magic items, and creatures.  To be honest, I haven't gone over these with a fine-toothed comb looking for balance, but there aren't that many and they don't seem, on first glance, to be too overpowering.Appendix 1 provides a much more in-depth history of the gods than that presented in chapter 2.  Appendix 2 is a glossary, and Appendix 3 is a guide to the various forms of address used by the churches.Overall, I was very impressed by this book.  If you ask me, this is what Deities & Demigods *should* have been.  While the gods described in the book may not be for everyone, I think they are detailed enough that most GMs should be able to pull a lot of useful information from this book.  While the $39.95 price tag seemed steep to me at first, there is an awful lot of reading material and useful gaming material in this book, and I found it to be worth every penny.Oh, and this is my first review, so if I did anything wrong, don't hesitate to yell at me. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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