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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="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010054" data-attributes="member: 18387">CRIMSON CONTRACTSFour assassin product hit shelves at nearly the same time. So what is one to do? Buy them all and sort the chaff.Crimson Contracts is the man of the hour. Crimson Contracts arrives in your email box as a 129 page PDF including cover & OGL. $3 = 8 page equivalent for Mongoose's Power Class book$5 = 40 pages for Whispers of Death (PDF)$7.50 = 128 pages for Crimson Contracts (PDF)$19.95 = 64 pages for The Assassin's HandbookWhat Crimson Contracts has is flavor, and it has it in droves. The entire book (twice as big as any other assassin product on the market) is driven by the story of a single man hiring an assassin, and the messy end that the person he is hiring from suffers in the end.Art throughout the book is good, with the color plates at each chapter header being particularly impressive. Downright fantastic. The layout is particularly clear and pleasant.The book introduces itself with background on the types of assassins, their roles, character background ideas and so on. All flavor. And nice.There are a selection of NPC classes for killers; not just warriors can kill, so we gain brawlers, hit men and thieves. Nice filler for a thieve's guild if you don't want to populate your town with level 5 rogues.The collection of prestige classes is impressive, and most seem based on the DMG assassin, and should fit in nicely in any campaign that uses the assassin class as is - these seem to be variants and supplements to the assassin, specialists in particular ways of killing. Even nicer, most of these classes do not overlap directly with the assassin, meaning that a character could become an assassin in a guild (taking the DMG assassin PrC) and then specialize along 'standard' guild lines (such as becoming a scarf dancer, a brutal killer, and so on). I was impressed, and found that these added quite easily to my game, while each class had enough flavor and background material (via the continued storyline of the book and the individual descriptive text of each class) that they weren't JUST plug-ins, but plug ins with attitude.But there are still some problems, as with most books, the prestige classes are sometimes overpowered (Brutal Killer) and sometimes underpowered (Stalker of the Sands)... But the sheer number of classes (16) makes it so it is easy to find ones suitable to a particular campaign or style of play.The feats and skills chapter is a weak point in the book, with insufficient feats to get my attention, and many of the skills seemingly belonging as new uses for heal or craft skills instead. The new poisons in this book also shone through as something unique. In addition to stats, there is a nice description of how it appears, how it acts, and what effects it has beyond simple stat damage (laxatives, psionic blocking, and more). The rest of the equipment chapter is good too, but you will sooner or later have to decide which bloody garrotte you will be using in your games, as there seems to be a new one in every rogue and assassin book out there. But the strangulation rules in this book are nicely handled and consistent with the PHB.In addition to several pages of magic items (most interesting such as the second skin, which comes with a VERY creepy illustration), there are several of psionic items, something still rarely touched in products these days. Although I rarely use psionics in my own campaign, the differnet feel of the psionic items makes them keepers instantly like the Shard Blade - a magically enhanced psionic shard turned into a knife or sword which requires daily expenditure of power points to keep magical. With all these psionic items, I expected there to be psionic powers, but instead there was a large selection of (mostly lower-level) arcane and divine spells. Wave of Venom creates a splashing wall of poison, and Anti-Magic Blade creates a weapon that can strike through just about any magic spell that would otherwise protect a wizard.There are also monsters in this book. But atypically, they are all templates to make deadlier assassin NPCs. Some start at grisly (the wirebound - an assassin magically melded to metallic wire that has been wrapped around his entire body in an eldritch ritual), and proceed to the disturbing (the demon driven - an engineered child of a woman and evil outsider who must be slain once before he rises with his true powers). The highlight, however is the excellent guild section, highlighting a dozen assassin's guilds, each with a stat block including leader, ranking, apparel, markings, weaponry, and other details to get the gist of the guild on the fly, with a page to two pages of descriptive text. What makes these great is they are varied enough that there is a guild for just about every city you could be gaming in. Plus some guilds have ties to the Yuan-Ti, and one is run by a group of powerful undead.Finally the book ends with variant rules for torture (without getting too graphic or detailed), breaking necks and garrotting. Not necessarily keepers (although the torture rules struck me as well done), but optional rules to consider (I'll only ever use the torture rules, and even then I'd rather just gloss over as much as possible, thank you!). And a sample encounter with a pair of Brutal Killers (which I haven't used yet).Overall, this is definitely the best of the current batch of assassin books. Still not perfect (but nothing really is), but VERY useable, and economical - I seriously prefer the guilds in this book over the ones in the other two that detail guilds as they are more useable than the two in The Assassin's Handbook, and more fleshed out with more to pick from than Whispers of Death.A VERY solid 4/5</blockquote>

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