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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="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 2011896" data-attributes="member: 59">Reviewer's Bias: I received a review copy of this product.Athenaeum Arcane: Cursed Items is a short PDF written by Mark Gedak and released by <a href="http://www.roninarts.com" target="_blank">Ronin Arts</a>. It details ten cursed items and supplemental material for those items (new spells and psionic powers, new templates, and a new monster).  Christopher Shy's cover, which uses the same design as the other Athenaeum Arcane products that I've bought and reviewed, depicts a sad young woman, framed in muted browns and blues.  There is no other art in the product.Like most Ronin Arts products, the layout is extremely clean and functional, with the emphasis on the latter — the interior is readable and professional looking without feeling plain.  The editing, on the whole, is acceptable, although (and this is a matter of taste) I felt that parts of the text were unclear (for instance, "the wielder becomes the target of the guilt spell if he meets the alignment restriction with a Will save (DC 15) as well") or over-written ("Jerith Lars wanted to rise to power using his good looks, and why should he not?" — the rhetorical flourish at the end of the sentence is what I'm looking at here).  As a gamer, the former concerns me far more than the latter — although I'm now familiar with the guilt spell and have figured out what the sentence means, before that I was completely out to sea when I read that sentence.  In the end, if these are the greatest sins a product commits, it's doing pretty well.As for the items themselves, I found that they ranged in quality from not bad to very cool.  I particularly liked the Harp of Heroes, the Keeper's Toolbelt, and Winterscarred Silver.  The first, which penalizes braggarts for boasting by creating a questing beast (a new template included in the book), struck me as something that could be involved in a neat little side-quest with, as Gedak notes, the overtones of faerie tales and legend (I'm a big King Pellinore fan, myself).  The Keeper's Toolbelt gradually transforms the wearer into a keeper, a tiny construct native to the demiplane known as the Clockwork-Driven Lighthouse (from Ronin Arts's A DM's Directory of Demiplanes, although I could think of all sorts of cool extraplanar locations just based on the name itself, even if I didn't own that product) — it's a great item to hook the players into some planar adventuring, particularly if the campaign has a strong law vs. chaos theme.  Finally, Winterscarred Silver reinforces the idea that tombraiding, as a rule, is generally frowned upon in civilized society, which could turn itself into a plot arc as well, especially given that all eight ingots need to be returned for the curse to be lifted (although this could really tick off some players).There weren't, to be honest, any items I didn't like at all, although I should mention that I found Noble's Honour and the Elixer of Freedom less than useful, as they wouldn't fit into my campaign or play style.  The former functions as a +4 cloak of charisma that causes grievous harm to the character for any hint of romantic or sexual infidelity (8d6 damage from a variant of the spell jealousy, which is included in the appendix and seems to be from the Valar Project's Book of Erotic Fantasy based on the OGL's section 15, although I could be wrong in this conjecture).  The Elixer essentially works as a cure light wounds potion/severe laxative.  I'm just not sure that explosive diarrhea is really in the cards for my game at any point.  Aside from these two concerns, the only thing I thought the PDF lacked was sample monsters for the templates — a sample questing beast or a sample reverberant would both be nice and helpful, as I have a hard time imagining using a template if I can't see it working.In the end, I really liked this product — it's a strong group of items and everything's put together well.  I had initially thought of it as a 4, but thinking more about it and considering potential utility, I have to bump it up to a strong 4.5 — it's not perfect and everything won't be exactly right for everyone's game, but it's a really good product and a strong entry into d20 game design for Mr. Gedak.Final Score: 4.5, rounded up to 5</blockquote>

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