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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="tankmodeler" data-source="post: 2011471" data-attributes="member: 22302">Produced by Monkey God Publishing in 2003, Cataclysm on Cloudholme is a sourcebook-adventure combo that kicked off their Legendary Lands series.The book provides both a description of the land of Astenthal and an adventure that eventually gets the characters to the floating island city state of Cloudholme. The underlying premise is simple enough, stop the mad lich-like mage from creating a magical machine that will increase his power incredibly thus spelling wrack and ruin for the rest of the land. I will let you, dear reader, peruse the initial reviews by staff member, JoeGKushner, and by the d20 Magazine Rack reviewer, Bruce Boughner, to get a synopsis of the plot and the setting. Both reviews accurately relay that basic information from the book.Where my review will diverge from theirs is in my assessment of how well Monkey God have put together this package and how useful this will be to the average DM.First off is the cover art, and I agree that it is both quite stunning and does serve to give an older module feel to the presentation. The interior artwork is generally well done as well, but does, indeed, suffer occasionally from what appears to be pieces drawn as filler. There are not very many of these and, overall, the artwork supports the plot and the background information.The map drawings are reasonably good, if somewhat simplistic, however there are a number of problems. The placement of maps at back of the book is somewhat awkward but the fact that they do not follow the order of the encounters presented in the text makes them even more difficult to use. Given that this is not a sequential encounter adventure, it would have made much more sense to have the maps placed at the beginning or end of the text section that they referred to for easy DM access.Additionally, the ID numbers of the rooms resets to 1 for every encounter. This can make it a bit difficult to establish where you are while running the adventure as you are continuously flipping back and forth from text inside the book to maps at the back. Losing your place between room 2 in Vankor's Excavation and room 2 in Laison's Freehold can cause confusion. Unique ID numbers would have been much better.Another issue is the scale of some of the drawings. Most of the encounter maps are drawing with one square equaling 10 feet, the old standard. Why, then would one of the main buildings be mapped to one square equals 15 feet? It completely throws off the players and the DM. In addition, the actual building mapped seems disproportionately huge in that scale. An interior set of stairs is 30+ feet wide. The main hall is 150' wide and over 225' long. Individual rooms are 60' x 75'. The entire place is out of all human scale and will play significantly differently for this.An overview map is provided of all of Cloudholme as well as slightly larger scale maps of Castle Krystalyn after the cataclysm (when the adventure takes place) and before the cataclysm as well as a side view of the floating castle in the pre-cataclysm days (these are nice to have, but have no bearing on the play of the adventure). Here are some of the most confusing map issues. The overview map has no scale at all, but if you make a couple of estimates you can figure out that the floating island is about 2 miles by 3 miles. The numbering system for all of these overview maps has no legend in the text. You can figure out where the human settlement is by inferring from the descriptions in the text, but the other numbered sites are meaningless. The numbers denoting areas on the post-cataclysm map of the castle do not match the numbers on the pre-cataclysm map and the side view has another set of numbers that calls up the same features as the top view but with different IDs again. There is absolutely no excuse for this. Trying to figure out what you are looking at should never be a DM's complaint with the module maps in his hands.The inside front cover provides yet another map, of the whole Astenthal area this time. Unfortunately the publishers decided to bleed the map across the inside cover and the binding obliterates at least one ID number and makes it very hard to get a handle on the land you are running the adventure in.Speaking of running the adventure, this module claims to be something that can be dropped into an existing campaign. This really isn’t true. To use this with another campaign will require a large amount of work by the DM and a lot of hand holding if the players are not to wander around aimlessly for subjective and real-world years trying to sort out what the problems are that will make them go on this adventure. As was stated by Joe's review, there is nothing explicitly linking the various locales laid out in the text. Unless you want your players to simply go directly to the flying island, then getting them to interact with the rest of the main NPCs will be difficult and will require a lot of pre-work by the DM.If you are running this as a campaign setting, then having the various different encounters can be helpful. You can work to establish the reasons for the PCs to find the villain throughout the adventures that will advance them from 1st level to the 4th or 5th level that is appropriate for this adventure.Regarding appropriate levels, this adventure really doesn’t have much to consistently challenge a group of smart 5th level players, especially if they are experienced as players. The bulk of the higher level encounters are generally larger groups of low level creatures where a lot of hack and slash will generally get the job done. There are very few encounters that will tax the minds and creativity of the players and this is a shame as the setting could be home to some very interesting creatures that the players could take pride vanquishing. Beating up on 20 orcs for a 7th level encounter is pretty lame.The physical hassle of flipping back and forth through the book to find monster and NPC stat blocks is another knock on this product. There is no reason to have to flip back and forth in the middle of a combat, it makes for sloppy DMing and can ruin the flow of a cool encounter. It doesn’t help that there is no stat block for one of the main NPCs, the wizard Raven.All-in-all I was not impressed with this publication. The publishing problems detract from the meat of the text and the layout of the book will make it vary hard to use in a gaming session. There is a lot of promise in the source material and there are things I may use in other campaigns. I might even save the whole thing as a place to start off a new campaign, but there is just too much work required to shoehorn most of these encounters into an existing campaign.</blockquote>

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