E.N. Armoury – Shields
By Adam Windsor
Published by E.N. Publishing
Pages: 31 + Cover + OGL
Fully bookmarked
Disclaimer: This is not a playtest review. I did not buy E.N. Armoury - Shields, it was sent to me for review as part of
Crothian’s Review Project.
In D&D, the extra strength bonus to damage and feats like Power Attack make fighting with a two-handed weapon very attractive to many players. Similarly, fighting with two weapons has always exuded a certain style and panache, an opinion many folks would share even if a certain dual-wielding drow had never shown up on the scene. In comparison, the venerable sword-and-board fighting style seems to rate a distant third. The extra Armor Class bonus provided by a shield simply isn’t all that interesting, it seems; conservative defense just isn’t sexy. This very lack of “Hubba-hubba” is the problem that E.N. Armoury – Shields seeks to address.
If you’re unfamiliar with the various E.N. Publishing products, you’ll be happy to know that they tend to have very good production values, and this one is no exception. It’s laid out in the standard two-column portrait format, and it’s unlocked, which is to say, you can select text and copy from it freely to paste into your own notes. There are no borders on the sides of each page, rather, there is a simple title line in the header, and a pleasingly complicated piece of artwork depicting a pile of assorted weaponry in the footer. On the topic of artwork, there isn’t much otherwise. Aside from the front cover and a few, what look to be, colour photographs of some historical styles of shields, there are two relatively small pieces black-and-white depicting shields in an almost heraldic fashion, and another action shot of what I would guess to be a shielded dwarf cleric charging to deliver some sort of touch spell. This last piece is also depicted in a very light grey-scale behind the text of the first page of four of the five chapters. Despite there being only a couple pieces of artwork, text on each page is nicely broken up by red titles and headings, a plethora of tables, the aforementioned footer art, and several helpful sidebars, often bringing up optional material worth considering. There’s enough going on visually that the reading experience never starts to feel like a long drive through the prairies.
E.N. Armoury – Shields is broken up into five chapters:
Shields: This section starts off with a quick introduction and a short, real-world history of the use of shields, and then goes into a bit more depth on the subject matter than what you would find in the PHB. This is in turn followed by a page of various statistics, which at first glance makes for dry reading, until you find you suddenly need to know something in-game. Need to quickly look up how many hit points the party fighter needs to carve through before he finally sunders the giant’s huge heavy wooden shield? It’s listed. Need to know the shield bash damage for a small light spiked shield? It’s also listed. Very handy. I could see printing off just that single page and throwing it into one’s DM binder. This section is also home to several optional rules that look entertaining, including using shields as back protection, and how to deal with what happens when a character picks up a shield from the battlefield and it’s the wrong size.
Shield Variants: When a simple pile of wood strapped to one’s arm just isn’t good enough, it’s time to throw in some variation. Here we have rules for a discus shield whose edge is sharpened to do slashing damage on a shield bash, a tower shield made from a giant turtle shell which can be used as a canoe in a pinch, a locking shield for when you want your party’s front ranks to form something resembling a phalanx, a parrying stick, a shield knife, and a pavise to provide cover for archers and spellslingers. Each variant thoughtfully includes a block at the end with the revised statistics, so you don’t have to monkey with the numbers yourself. This is followed by new materials to use in shield construction, detailing the use of hide and wicker, a new weapon, a new special material, and craftsmanship rules with which to physically enhance a shield, making it more durable for example, or reducing its weight.
There are a lot of options in this chapter, and they look to be reasonably bite-sized and easy enough to insert into a running campaign. Some of these options would make fun regional variations. Perhaps some lizard-folk make a lot of use out of tortoise shields, or the guards for the local duke have been trained to use discus shields to keep the common folk from approaching his lordship too closely.
Fighting and Feats: More than just providing a bevy of new feats, the author has also gone out of his way to describe some tricks and techniques the common warrior might use to try to make the most out of his shield. Using it as a dinner plate, for example, or buffing the shield’s face to a mirror-like finish and trying to use it to blind some enemy. Desperate and shivering campers may be forced to chop their wooden shields for firewood, or use it as a sled to try to escape some enemy. This is followed by ten new feats. I’m not sure what to say about the feats, other than they all seem to be reasonably balanced. Nine of them are fairly straight-forward and relate directly to using shields, go figure, but that last seems to have nothing to do with the subject, at least at first glance. Raging Power Attack grants a raging character the ability to use a one-handed weapon as if it were two handed for the purposes of the Power Attack feat, while in rage. Presumably this is to allow one to occasionally see a barbarian character use a shield from time to time.
Classes of the Shield: Five new thematic, ten-level prestige classes find their home in this section. The Faithwarden has dedicated herself to defending those of a particular church or deity. The Knight-Herald is something of a diplomat, representing the interests of his liege or client at the negotiating table. The Ramshield Berserker is a mountain warrior who uses various techniques with his shield designed to keep his opponents underfoot and off-balance. By focusing primarily on defensive magics, the Shieldmage also learns how to use a shield without being bothered by that pesky chance of arcane spell-failure. And the Tower Legionnaire combines the use of tower shields with light weapons to produce an interesting soldier-for-hire.
I’m not normally all that intrigued by prestige classes, by and large, but of the five, I personally found the Knight-Herald and the Tower Legionnaire the most flavourful. The latter because the mercenary company introduced really seems to highlight the “being part of an actual organization” aspect of prestige classes, and the Knight-Herald because a herald is an archetype I’ve never personally seen used in D&D before.
Shield Magic: The final chapter rounds out the document with a couple new shield-themed spells, five more magical shield enhancements, four unique magical shields, an alchemical item, and a new deity, not to mention a pair of clerical domains. Even more so than the rest of the PDF, this section is something of a grab bag of shield-related magical “stuff”.
While I didn’t go over E.N. Armoury – Shields with a fine-toothed comb, I did find a number of small errors, and one rather major one. In the small category were a couple of minor formatting glitches, “has” being written as “ha s”, for example. There was one “See page XX” reference under the Improved Shield Dazzle feat, which stood out primarily because the PDF isn’t all that lengthy and one would think that something like this would stand out. But the biggie was that Table 4-5, detailing the Tower Legionnaire prestige class, was an exact copy of Table 4-2, detailing the Knight-Herald. That said, the text descriptions of Tower Legionnaire’s various special abilities do indicate at what level they come in at, so if you find yourself with a copy that hasn’t been subsequently fixed, all is not lost. You might have to fiddle with the saving throw progression however. Aside from the above, I found the writing and editing of the document very well done. The layout, on the other hand, at times feels very dense.
For the seemingly dry and focused topic matter, E.N. Armoury – Shields is very easy to read. There’s a lot here, but it’s broken up into a bevy of bite-sized, and easily digestible chunks, to use or ignore as one sees fit. Most of it is discrete, so there very little that is dependant on something else, further along in the PDF, making it trivial to lift something you like and seamlessly drop it into your game. And the rules seem conservative enough that doing so won’t break or unbalance anything. E.N. Armoury – Shields is a good and solid piece of work, and if you’re itching to get more out of the use of shields in your game, it’s well worth looking into. Chances are high you’ll find
something inside that you’ll like, whether you’re primarily a player or a DM. With it, I can certainly see a many more players opting to create sword-and-board based characters in the near future, and that, I think, is a good thing.
Reviewed by Scott Benoit
