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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="lwmarti" data-source="post: 2011139" data-attributes="member: 15912">Ah, Conan! There's perhaps no single character that has fired the imagination of more gamers across the planet. And now Mongoose has managed to create an OGL game that lets us enter the world of Conan and see if we can somehow win a Hyborean kingdom of our own. It certainly sounds promising, doesn't it?A first glance at the book tells you that your $50 has bought you a hefty book, although one with one of those annoyingly cheap bindings that game books tend to have. So let's open the cover and see what's inside...The first thing we see is map of the world. It doesn't agree in all details with the world as understood by Conan purists, but that's OK with me. The scale of the map is huge: it covers all of what are Europe, Asia and Africa today, so there's not room for much detail. There are often hundreds of miles between cities, so you can tell that this world is fairly sparsely inhabited, just like in the Conan stories, so we're off to a good start. After a brief introduction and overview, the book hops right into characters, and the skills and feats that they need. The usual d20 classes are replaced by ones that fit better with the world that we're trying to game in, and that's another good sign: barbarians, borderers, nobles, nomads, pirates, scholars (someone has to use magic, you know), soldiers and thieves. And the races that feature so prominently in the Conan stories are all here, each with their own particular strengths. If your character can survive long enough, he can become very powerful as his stats increase and he picks up more feats than, well, whatever the appropriate cliché is for lots and lots of feats. Next comes equipment, combat and sorcery, or how those characters that we just created can go out and slay their foes, and here we find that the OGL mechanics are used in a fitting and appropriate way to model Conan's world. Combat is quick and violent and magic use is serious stuff that shouldn't be done casually. Then it's on to the Hyborean age and a gazetteer, where we learn about the world of Conan, and then to sections on religion, a bestiary and then tips on running a Conan campaign. Everything seems to nicely fit together to create an excellent game world where you can follow Conan's footsteps across his world. Everything looks good so far.Then you start trying to get into the details of actually creating a character and running an encounter and things start to look a bit worse. That's when the signs of the sloppy editing reveal themselves. How much damage does that weapon do? It says 1d8 on this page but 1d6 on that page. What exactly is that feat? It's referred to but never described. What's that reference to a half-orc doing there? And so on. Plus there are a quite few typographical errors. The typos I can understand. They're maddeningly difficult to catch, but if the author and editor were running a spell checker, most of these errors should have been discovered at some stage of the production process. The other errors are somewhat more difficult to explain.It looks like the first draft of the Conan manuscript might have been the latest SRD that was then modified to create the Conan rules, and I'm guessing that the pressures of getting the book out on schedule overwhelmed the editors who, in all fairness, are probably doing their best to catch problems like these. The result was a finished product that looks fairly amateurish and cries out for a corrected second printing. There are rumors that the second printing is already planned, but as I'm writing this there's been nothing definite announced.To summarize, the Conan game has the right elements all pulled together to let you do a fairly good job of entering Conan's world, but the less-than-adequate editing job makes actually using the rules rather frustrating. When the corrected printing is available, this could easily become one of the best games on the market. The rating that I've given this book reflects a significant drop from what it could have had if the editing were better. If the editing were better, this book would be an extremely solid 5.</blockquote>

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