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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="Gez" data-source="post: 2011067" data-attributes="member: 1328">The third opus in the Creature Collection serie (fourth if you count the revision of the first) introduces some changes. Most notably, it introduces short italic descriptive texts for each creature (to follow the format adopted in the revised Monster Manual), and the layout break away from the one-creature-per-page format. Like CC Revised, it is updated to the "3.5" edition of the D&D rules, something which demanded extra work as the submissions sent to answer Sword&Sorcery Studio's Open Call were made for the "3.0" rules.The book is 224-page long. The last fourth are occupied by legal information (the Open Game and d20 System Trademark licenses) and advertising for other Scarred Lands products. Similarly to the previous CC, only the creature's statblock and Combat entry are OGC, the creatures' name and Description paragraph being product identity. The fact that names are PI is somewhat frustrating, as it hampers the capacity of other publishers to refer to these creatures in other books, although they can merely reprint them, with a new name and paraphrased description... Furthermore, a good number of these names are rather bland, like "Battle Angel" or "Bee Swarm". Claiming "bee swarm" as product identity seems somewhat bold, in my opinion. And by the way, they could update their STL, Nystul and Bigsby no longer appear in the d20 SRD.The presentation is similar to the previous tomes of the serie: one page for the credits, a double page for the Table of Content, and a preface at page 4. Following this are 6 pages of informations about certain categories of monsters, and how they vary from the MM norm in the Scarred Lands setting. Those are outsiders (NG angels, LG custodians, NE daemons, CE demons, LE devils, and LN intercessors), spontaneous golems, and phoenix. The celestials subgrouping of D&D are modified there, discarding the angel/ archon/ guardinal/ eladrin classification. Intercessors will probably be found more appropriate as  Lawful equivalent of the fiends and celestials than the clockwork modrons or insectoid formians. Equally presented here is a quasi-template for fiends, called Dark Triumvirates. It correspond to trio of fiends, from each evil alignment, working together. The concept is a little odd, especially in a setting where the baddies don't especially need to be united for survival.Spontaneous golems are an interesting idea, elemental spirits animating materials or objects by themselves when influenced by tragic evenements or extreme emotions -- such genesis are usually used for undead. In my opinion, it is an excellent idea, and one that could fit well with my spirit-heavy homebrew cosmology. The phoenix looked like an attempt to give importance to another mythical creature beside dragons. Three kinds of phoenix are described later in the book.Some creatures of note:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Allerghorai-horai (death worm): This creature is the second d20 version of the cryptozoologic celebrity, the Allghoi khorkhoi, or Mongolian death worm. <a href="http://www.parascope.com/en/cryptozoo/predators06.htm" target="_blank">Cryptozoology link.</a> Another death worm is found in the Tome of Horrors,</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ashcloud: This monster is especially noticeable because it gave me the two free copies from which I can write this review. It was my contribution to the book.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Bleak crow: This scavenger seems harmless enough, and is not much of a danger by itself, but its capacity to capture souls of recently departed creature and raise the corpses as zombies make it valuable for organizing traps, or for soul-freeing plot hooks.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Charduni battle ram: An entry I found a bit weird. Despotic dwarves that were turned into rams to provide mounts for their comrades-in-arms, and that have become a central part of the Charduni culture, and a picture of a nazghul-looking warrior on a bighorn ram.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Dallisad: A simple animal. A deer whose horns are useful to make antitoxins. This is an example of another emphasis of the book: Like CC1, it has several relatively mundane creatures, that are not evil, threatening, or supernatural.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Gate Worm: The weirdest transportation animal ever, they have an organ that teleport into one of their kin's gullet. When their gizzard is full, they don't stop eating but start sending food in this magical organ. If you know where is the "exit worm" and are not afraid to willingly step into the mouth of a gargantuan annelid to then crawl your way outside of another, you can take advantage of these creatures. Alternatively, they could be used by a devious DM wanting to move the PC away from their current location with a mere wandering monster.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Hive golems: It's not the first "monster carrier" idea, but these one are rather elegant. I don't especially see the need to give the fiendish template to the swarms, though, since the construct itself is neutral. I would gleefully swap it for equivalent templates, depending on the creators -- celestial, axiomatic, anarchic, or pseudonatural, for example... Incidentally, the hive theme was popular in the book, since there are also hiveskins and hive devils.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Grim Puppeteer: Giant spiders who use their silk strands to move corpses like tethered puppets.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Jungle Squid: It seems someone was inspired by the <a href="http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html" target="_blank">Tree Octopus</a> joke, as this is a tree-dwelling kraken.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Living bog: This bog is actually an ooze. Like the Patient Doom (a flat arachnid whose legs are disguised as trees) or the Sand Trapper (that hids beneath sand dunes), this monster turns landscape elements into dangerous traps. In the same category, several carnivorous plants are included.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Marble sentinels: A variety of intelligent constructs used in armies. Like both previous CCs, Savage Bestiary has a large number of golems and other constructs, which all (except, of course, the spontaneous golems) have their construction prerequisites detailed.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Phase Mass: The creature that seemed the most out-of-place. Large cones of flesh, with a tentacle, a mouth, and a ring of eyes, that cast spells, can shift into the ethereal plane, want to dominate the world, and come from another dimension. They feel much more like pulp sci-fi than like heroic-fantasy, in my opinion.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Silver Puma: Cat-lovers will like the book, for it contains three species of magical feline that can become pets, the Jin-Sat jaguars, the Pearl Cheetah, and this one. All have spell-like abilities (silver pumas have psionic powers), and all are cute and fluffy.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Swarm of Perahnikyit: People are now familiar with swarms: creeping hordes of little ugly pests, like rats, oozes, or vermin. Well, this swarm is as dangerous as others, but is made of cute, brightly colored birds. There's also a swarm of butterflies with a touch poison on their wings.</li> </ul>The creatures are thus not all mere monsters -- a number of them, from angels to constructs to potential cohorts or familiars can be allies. This makes this book as useful for players as it is for GMs, especially to spellcasters (who can summon outsiders, create constructs, and befriend creatures as animals or companions). However, giving the book to players would reduce a bit its value, as it would spoil the creatures that are good sources of plot hooks and interactions, like the bayou witches and the Piper of the Carnival of Shadow; or these constructs created by forsaken elves to keep memory of their fallen civilization, the Remembrances. Some creatures tie-in nicely with creatures from previous CCs; for example, if you used a "false lover" unhallowed (CC1) in a previous plot, then the love-scorned soul could allow you to spawn a new plot from a finished adventure.The art is comparable to the Grotesque Menagerie (CC2), for it contains good and bad, and a rather low quantity of ugly/lazy. Much better than CC1 (unrevised).An annoying trait is the frequent references to other sources. Typical spell lists contain spells from Scarred Lands setting book (not merely Relics & Rituals), the description of the Seraphic template says that creatures with this template result from "the god's catastrophic experiments with the Seraphic Engine" and you are left wondering what is this Seraphic Engine -- I don't even know in which book it is mentionned, by the way. It seems a close concept to Monte Cook's Chaositech, otherwordly alien, chaotic, evil, inducing madness and mutations. These dependencies are slight enough to be ignored, but are frustrating nonetheless. You'll need <a href="http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=currentprod&which=CCR" target="_blank">CCR</a>, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=currentprod&which=CreCol2" target="_blank">CC2</a>, to take full advantage of creatures that, like the Carnival of Shadows, are part of organizations spread on several books. All spell list will include a reference to <a href="http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=currentprod&which=RERI" target="_blank">RR1</a> or <a href="http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=currentprod&which=rrii" target="_blank">RR2</a>. And even with all that, you'll still miss out stuff -- for example, the terali are often mentionned, and they are only described in the Termana Gazeteer. (For those who don't have it, they are panther-like catfolks.)I would have preferred they cut a bit on some flavor text (notably the spontaneous golems, which have each an example of specific background, it's a bit longish) to reprint more of the necessary information, so as to reduce the dependence on other sourcebooks. I guess most buyers of the CC and RR series don't use them especially for Scarn. And I'm not sure this behavior is more effective in making people buy the other books, or in making them discard the line altogether.Overall, I find this compendium really good -- more diverse and useful than CC2, with solid, up-to-date rules, I would recommend it to people who already have the previous collections. For those who haven't, the Creature Collection Revised is maybe more interesting, because of its reduced dependencies on material (unless they took advantage of this revision to fill it with references to Relics & Rituals, CC2, and half a dozen setting books). If it wasn't for these gripes, I would gladly have given it a Superb rating.</blockquote>

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