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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="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 257801" data-attributes="member: 1288">Warning: Vaguely LengthyFirst, let me say that I'm coming from a different direction than a lot of people.  To me, and epic-level game is more than just "You've reached 21st level, now you have new abilities."  The feel of an epic-level game is so different that you will never see me using it in the same world that I've just run a year-long regular campaign.  The feel of the setting has to be different, more mythic.  Most of the campaign worlds I create wouldn't feel right with epic-level characters running around in 'em.  So even if I plan to start a campaign at 1st level and work up to epic levels, the world's going to be very different than if I plan to run a campaign that doesn't eventually get epic.Okay, enough of that.  What did I think of the book?The answer is--mixed.I liked parts of it.  Some of the new abilities are nifty.  I like the concepts behind new epic level spells--in fact, I might even be inclined to try to base a custom-made non-epic spell system on it.  And a few of the monsters look to be a lot of fun, even if they are blatantly borrowed--in feel if not in detail--from Lovecraft.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />But overall, I found the book disappointing in the extreme.  Not because it was bad--it wasn't--but because it could have been so much more.  It was at best adequate, mediocre, when it could have been good.In the end, just about everything in the book boils down to numbers.  Everything is about raising your attributes and scores to obscene levels.  I mean, a +15 sword?!  The last time I talked seriously about a character having a +15 weapon, I was in middle school, and we weren't playing with dice.  Many of the monsters and magic items seem to have no purpose but to bring together a huge clump of really high numbers, without any worthwhile idea behind them.Don't misunderstand me, I fully understand the need for higher scores.  But that should have been an incidental, not the focus.  The book spends way too much time on the numbers, and not enough on how an epic campaign should look, feel, and behave differently than a regular one.  Sure, they devote a few chapters to that, but they're insufficient.  One basically talks about epic character motivations--and how they're not all that different from regular character motivations.  And the other, the one that's supposed to be on epic settings, is crammed full of sample organizations and an entire epic-level city.  That, basically, is useless.  Don't give me silly organizations and a city.  Give me techniques.  Tell me how best to modify a campaign setting to make it feel epic.  Tell me how epic level characters interact with kings and lesser heroes.  Give me tools to build my own epic setting, don't try to shove yours down my throat.And really, how many epic organizations did we need?  Surely not as many as we got.As much as I hate to say anything good about 2nd edition as compared to 3rd, I think this is one place where they did it better.  The DM's Option: High Level Campaigns book for 2nd wasn't flawless, but I think overall it was a better book than this was (monsters and spells aside).Bottom line?  Epic Level Campaigns has some good qualities.  I'll probably use it--for occasional mini-campaigns.  But I'll never use it for a long campaign, and I won't use it often.  It's got nifty abilities, some cool monsters, and other goodies--but it absolutely lacks anything approaching a soul.  It doesn't grab, and that's the greatest sin a major RPG book can commit.</blockquote>

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