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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="Crothian" data-source="post: 2530337" data-attributes="member: 232">Cyradon[imager]http://www.harphq.com/images/SneakPeekPics/4300_Cyradon/CyradonCoverFINAL.jpg[/imager]    Welcome to HARP.  HARP is a fantasy game system that stands for High Adventure Role Playing.  It is its own system so not d20.  And that is one of its strengths and one of the reasons as a die hard d20 fantasy person I enjoy it.  Every game comes with assumptions that are built into the rules and the way things are done.  Now in d20 some companies have fought these and done a nice job of expanding beyond what D&D is but it is nice to view another fantasy game that has roots well away from D&D and see how they do things.  HARP is solid game that is a lot of fun and comes at fantasy in a familiar yet different way.  It is point based, has a nice spell system, has easier character generation especially for people that have to stat out ever NPC, and captures fantasy very well.  I have said that many of the books for HARP would make great d20 books if they followed the d20 rules.  They books about fighters and mages have a better approach then most of the d20 counterparts.  Their monster book is very useful allowing for construction of monsters as well as presenting ready made monsters.  One of my bigger complaints about the game was that it had no setting.  I find settings to be very informative as they tell me how the writers envision their game being played.  So, I am very pleased to see Cyradon, a fantasy setting for HARP.      Cyraden right now comes in a nice PDF format and will be coming out in print in a few weeks to a month I believe.  Iron Crown Enterprises (also known as ICE) are the publishers and have been doing a really nice job of making their books available as PDFs and as print books.  The book is one hundred and eighty six pages long.  The art is good to really good and the layout is easy to read and well organized.  The book does have page borders and is black and white; printing will be noticed by the ink and paper it consumes but it is not as bad as other books I have dealt with.  The book has a good table of contents, a great six page index, and nice book marks.  As a setting book that will be referenced a lot by DMs and players these tools are invaluable.      Cyraden has what I believe makes a good setting.  The first and probably the hardest part is the hook.  This is built on mystery of people basically appearing in the setting after some huge apocalyptic event it seems.  The world is being rediscovered and molded as the people go out and meet the races that have survived and find adventure and intrigue in the world.  The second thing I look for in a setting is details.  I do not want just an overview of everything I want good descriptions of places and people.  This book has it.  The first many pages is all about the world and the different places.  It has good descriptions of the countries and places of interest and has enough places left undefined for the DM to be creative and place in their own things.  Third, the book needs to have something for the players to do.  This book has the usual adventure hooks that I get reading through settings but it takes it even farther.  It has a section on just adventures.  This is brilliant and I found that the adventures I thought of while reading the setting were for the most part the adventures they are pointing out and expanding on.  I have never had a game company read my mind like that, it was quit eerie.      One nice thing the book does it is separates the rules from the setting.  The setting info is not intertwined with the rules parts making it easy to use the setting for other systems.  Do not get me wrong though, this book does expand on the rules for HARP over new player options for the classes and spells that really fit the setting.  HARP for me seems like a game that really can be easily molded make the rules fit the setting.  I never noticed it until I saw how well it worked for Cyradon.  I think that makes the game very DM friendly allowing not to much prep time for a new setting to go a long way.      Cyradon is described as a swashbuckling setting but it is not limited to being a swashbuckling setting.  There is a lot of potential for different styles of play and for a variety of adventures and campaigns.  That is another strength of the setting and the system as it really does support the game a DM and players want to run.      HARP is a game that is growing on me.  At first I was not as impressed with it as I am now.  It just seems that the support books are really well written and do a great job of supporting the core game.  This setting is exactly what the game needed I think to show the HARP rules in action and how they interact with a set place and how it can all be pulled together.</blockquote>

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