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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="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2011182" data-attributes="member: 1129">Updates are tricky to pull off. For me, I prefer books that update monsters. The new feat progression, damage reduction changes and other more minor details, are often one of the more time consuming elements to handle in conversion.When I saw The Complete Book of Eldritch Might, I was pretty excited. For anyone who hasn’t purchased any of the previous books, this is a solid 4 star product with new spells, feats, magic items, alternative core classes, prestige classes, locations and even monsters. For those looking for comprehensive 3.5 updates or Arcana Unearthed, it’s not quite so good.The problem to me is not enough updates. For instance, there are a lot more spells in the SRD. Why is that a problem? Well, Monte updated the bard and sorcerer in his original Book of Eldritch Might II. His sorcerer had a spell list that was more geared towards combat with a higher base hit die. His bard used a different type of spellcasting where they cast spells that followed a more song like approach.Neither gets an extensive update. One could argue that since they were built better in the first place, that such a trade up is not needed. I’m not one of those people. I went through the first few levels and while I saw a few no-brainer additions, mainly in the spells that augment a character statistics, I didn’t see any differences in the spell list that weren’t based on the spells in the Book of Eldritch Might III. It’s great for those who were completely satisfied with the original and just wanted an ‘official’ 3.5 version but more could’ve been done.The same is true in several of the PrCs. Some tweaks were done to eliminate skills like alchemy and scry, but skill points, class features, and hit dice, are all the same. The good news is that from the first Book of Eldritch Might, you see a big update in terms of layout and art accompanying the material. The Ember Mage, Graven One and Mirror Master all look much better now. What about feats? Not too much seems to have been done to acknowledge that once again, there are more common feats now that provide some of the benefits that the feats here, mainly unchanged, do. Take Augment Summoning, a feat that provides your creatures with a +4 bonus to Strength and Constitution. The prerequisite is Spell Focus with conjuration. Monte’s book has Conjure Mastery, a feat that requires the caster be 7th level with a Charisma 17 go augment his creatures with a +2 bonus to Strength, Dexterity and Constitution. That’s a base +3 bonus vs. a base +4 bonus with fewer requirements.The part where the conversions are more obvious is in the monsters. The skills have been renamed, but more importantly, little things have been added. For instance, we now have number of squares the creatures move. We now have base attack and grapple bonuses. We have full attack listings, as well as extra feats when hit dice warrant it. In other areas, damage reduction appears to have been lowered and changed to correspond with the changes in 3.5. These conversions save me a lot of time and effort. I haven’t used all of them yet, but the ones I have looked over, mainly the angels, look correct. See, one of the player’s is a conjurer with a celestial or good theme going.  I don’t know if all of these are perfect though. Take the unholy river, a humanoid that was once a good aligned arcane spellcaster who performed a terrible deed and have become unholy rivens, creatures that drain spells and life, shrug off magic and destroy magic items. Formidable creatures but at 12 hit dice, they should have (12/3)+1 = 5 feats, instead, they have eight. None of them are marked as bonus feats either. Same problem with the original 3.0 creature so if it was originally a mistake, it was carried over. Instead I suspect that a few of those feats are bonus.Another benefit of this book is for those playing with Arcana Unearthed. You get various notes on how material fits into a standard campaign along with a master listing of spells with level, type (exotic, complex or simple), diminished, heightened, and magic item creation modifiers. Some of the level assignments are questionable, but most of the legwork has been done. The thing I would’ve liked to have seen instead of two pages of ads would be a Arcana Unearthed spell list so that I can quickly tell which spells are which level and under which category they fall.If you own the original books and are comfortable doing your own conversions on the monsters, the book probably doesn’t offer enough new material, outside of superior art and graphic presentation, to warrant the $34.99 purchase price. I like the Complete Book of Eldritch Might but wanted more from it. If you play Arcana Unearthed it’s a useful resource with advice on translating different material from the d20 engine to the Arcana Unearthed, a very similar, but slightly different engine. If you’ve never purchased any of the books, then you are in for a real treat as everything here is essentially self contained and updated for your use.Reviewer's Note: I have changed the grade to reflect the strength of this product on it's own with original comments about it's upgrade utility left intact.</blockquote>

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