Dragon's Hoard: Lost Treasures

[Messageboard Golem]

The dragon - the ultimate adversary any group of adventurers may face. The prize - the hoarded treasures those adventurers seek. The hoard includes new magic items and forgotten legends, lost to the world. For anyone who wants a hoard of fantastic treasures for their fantasy d20 game, we present the first in our line of Dragon's Hoard pdfs.

Six 'lost treasures' - forgotten magic items that have been in the dragon's clutches for decades.
Each lost treasure features background, history, and rumor that the characters have a chance to recall.
Four new minor magic items.
A fiery new spell.
The red dragon, Demrellkull. Statted and ready to be dropped into the lair or dungeon of your choice.
A quick reference sheet featuring the dragon's stats in an easy to use format (editable in the pdf format).

The newly revised version sports an improved cover and layout. The new features include:

Seven alternate stat blocks for the dragon - ranging from Wyrmling to Mature Adult.
A full-page color map of the dragon's lair.
A newly detailed set of minions for the dragon - the survivors of the White Horn tribe of orc barbarians, along with a human-hunting chieftain and a half-fiend cleric.

 

[trancejeremy]

Here be Dragons

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Note: This is for the original version, the revised edition might be better (I dunno)
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One of the newer innovations in PDF products for d20 are little mini-products, maybe 6-12 pages, priced cheaply, around a given theme. Phil Reed pioneered the concept, and a lot of people have followed - some good, some bad. This, "Dragon's Hoard: Lost Treasures" from Big Finger Games is one of the better entries.

Essentially, it presents one dragon and its treasure hoard, including 13 new and unique magic items.

The dragon is Demrellkull, an old Red Dragon, clocking in at a Challenge Rating of 20. You're given stats for him, as well as suggested tactics but only a brief description of his background and personality. And nothing on his physical appearance (though honestly, I'm not sure how different old red dragons look from one another). And there's no map of his lair that I can find.

So while not bad, the dragon aspect of this product could have been better (though it's not bad, you get more than enough). But the meat of this pdf is really the new magic items. There are 6 major ones and 7 minor. The 6 major ones have fairly extensive descriptions and histories. 3 of them are weapons (a bastard sword, a falchion, and a scimitar), the other 3 are miscellaneous items (a sash, a coin, and a branding iron). The bastard sword, "The Sorrow of Endless Winter" is a minor artifact. As you might guess from the name, its enchantment is frost themed.

The 7 minor items get only a couple paragraphs each, and are mostly miscellaneous items. Though now that I look closely, they don't seem to all be new items. It reprints a couple from the SRD - the Pearl of Power and Loadstone. There's also a single wizard spell, "Martyr's Immolation"

There are 13 pages in the PDF, but only 9 are really of actual content (1 for the cover, 1 for the intro, 1 for the table of contents, 1 for the OGL). And 1 is sort of a stat sheet for the Dragon to use in combat (which is a nice touch, actually). The PDF is nice and clean looking, and is fully bookmarked. More bookmark entries than pages, and the bookmarks are broken up into categories. Kind of overkill, since how hard can something be to find in a 13 page PDF? Like a needle in a shot of whiskey. But another nice touch, nevertheless.

There's a handful of art, mostly clip art, but nonetheless, nice looking. And the PDF makes good use of color, for instance, where most things are in bold face, they are also red, which makes it easy to jump from important bit to important bit. (It would be nice if they had a version of the PDF for printing, I'm not sure if they do or not).

As a PDF describing a dragon and it's hoard, it's pretty good. As I said, I do think they could have fleshed out the dragon and his lair more, but that's not the real draw of this PDF - the real draw are the new magic items. Those are interesting, and unique.

So I'm giving it a B- (I was going to give it a B, 'til I noticed that a couple of the lesser magic items were just from the SRD). But bear in mind, that is pretty much relative to other similarly priced/sized PDFs. You probably aren't looking for a CR 20 Red Dragon, but the major magic items are interesting. If you're looking to buy a PDF for $2, this compares favorably to the competition. (And really, what else RPG related can you buy for $2? Not much. I think Goodman games has a print mini version of a Dungeon Crawl Classic for $2, but that's like a promo deal)