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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="dnd3dm" data-source="post: 2008992" data-attributes="member: 4680">I own two copies of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (FRCS). I keep one at home, so it remains in good shape, and I take the other with me to games, and it gets beaten up. I do this so I don't have to run out to the store immediately when my books become really "well-traveled". Yes, I paid around eighty bucks for both at once at my local hobby store. But the FRCS, probably the best of the hardcover Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks WOTC has put out, is well worth the forty dollar cost per unit. I consider the FRCS as much of a core rulebook as the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide or Monster Manual, because of the quality and breadth of its contents. Now that you know that this will be a favorable review, let us get the flaws described and out of the way. I will admit that I came into this with some big expectations. No book is perfect, of course, and if this one included everything that I, an FR fan all through second edition, wanted it to contain, it would be about six- or eight-hundredpages in length and cost about sixty or eighty dollars, which almost no one would want to pay. Anyway, my biggest problems with it are the lack of magic item descriptions (those are in Magic of Faerun), and that the adventures in the back are a waste of space. I also wish they had devoted some more space to the gods (of which there are over one-hundred and twenty, but only around thirty are given any detail) or at least the cosmology, since it is so different then from that of Oerth (Greyhawk). Finally, it is a tad difficult to find a region in the Geography chapter (though the index and table of contents help with this). Most of these are just nitpicks from a fanboy, but bear with me. The thing that bugs me the most about the absence of magic items in this tome is that it describes quite a few NPCs in detail who have fairly unique items, such as Elminster's eversmoking pipe, or Elaith Craulnober's moonblade. I'd like to know what these do, otherwise I feel like the NPCs aren't really complete. I suppose the DM could make something up, but since the Realms are such magical places, it seemed wrong to completely shove off the magic item section in another book like Magic of Faerun (MoF). (Moonblades are in fact detailed in MoF.) Also related to this are unique spells such as the Simbul' s synstodweaomer, which could have described in the spell section, but only gets a passing phrase in that NPC's description.The adventures in the back are not a great use of space. The first, The Color of Ambition, which is for beginning level (1st or 2nd) characters pits the PCs against the Red Wizards of Thay, setting them against a slave smuggling operation from a Thayan enclave. This one may not be original, but it actually has some promise, since it showcases some of the more notorious villains of the Realms, and how one might use them. The second, Green Bones, for 16th level characters, is a small dungeon crawl culminating in an encounter with an undead green dracolich. The one thing that the first scenario has over the second is that it does encourage some role-playing, while the latter adventure is mostly combat. Dracoliches are, in my opinion, a little too tough for most groups unless they are quite resourceful. Moreover, there is abig gap between 1st and 16th level; in my experience, many groups never make it that high. An adventure for 16th level characters just does not seem to be that usable to me. I would have preferred to see one adventure for 1st to 3rd level characters, maybe just The Color of Ambition, and the rest of that space devoted to something else like gods, magic items, or more spells. If they were adamant about putting in two adventures, the second should have been for characters of levels between fifth and ninth, in my thinking. I realize that most of this book was devoted to geography and Realms-specific rules, which I like, but the section on the deities is too thin, and they should have explained Toril's cosmology, or planar layout, a little better, since it doesn't use the Great Wheel detailed in Manual of the Planes as Oerth, the D and D campaign world, does. They should have put the monster section containing creatures such as the rothe, the riding lizards, and the dracolich template into the Monsters of Faerun book, since they already put out the separate monster volume anyway. However, my favorite gods and goddesses, like Mystra, Tyr and Torm got detailed entries, and I realize that the Realms deities filled up three second edition volumes, so they couldn't have put all of them in. I would like more than just a sentence on each of the gods homes, though, and a paragraph or two about using this book with Manual of the Planes. However, the chief demihuman racial gods are the same as in the Player's Handbook, and Faiths and Pantheons will be out a month from the time of this writing, so this nitpick of mine is pretty minor, except that you have to shell out another thirty bucks to get the rest of the gods. But then, you also have to pay another thirty for MoF to get the magic items and the rest of the spells, and about twenty-two dollars to get the rest of the monsters. The last of my problems is trying to find the region you are interested in, especially during game play, and it's a little more difficult to find an NPC. The NPCs are listed with the regions they normally frequent, but if you are unable to find the region, then you can't find the NPC, either. Before I forget, my last little complaint is that the history chapter should have been in the front of the book, or at least before the Daily Life and Geography chapters. Those are the negatives. I will point out the good parts now.  These will be brief, as others have described them as well in their reviews. The character creation chapter is great. The section on the various player character races is one of the most complete I have yet seen. It takes the races from the PH and not only adapts them to the Realms, it also presents variants such as the strongheart halfling, and the gold dwarf, which are interesting alternatives to the standard 7 in the PH. It also presents races such as the aasimar, tieflings, and genasi, who were originally from the Planescape campaign for second edition.It also provides some much needed options, such as lots of new feats, many of which are specific to the region the character comes from or has lived in for a while. My favorites are Spellcasting Prodigy and Greater Spell Penetration (for the shameless power-gamer in me), Improved Familiar, which finally provides a game-balanced way to get a pseudodragon as a pet, and Education, which allows you to simulate a character who has had formal schooling. There are a number of prestige classes, some of which are only five levels, but most of which are at least decent. My favorites out of these include the Divine Disciple (a class for divine casters) and the PurpleDragon Knight of Cormyr, both of which are five levels. The prestige class in here that I don't like is the Runecaster, whose ability to inscribe runes of divine spells make some of them way too handy. If have the Travel domain from the PH or the Time domain in this book, you can make potentially make haste, or teleport into runes that others can use whenever they want, which strikes me as broken. The best part of the chapter on characters, in my opinion, is the section on new cleric domains. It greatly expands the depth and breadth that a deity can have, and helps to illustrate the diversity of the Realms as a whole. The Life in Faerun chapter is a prize. Ever wanted to know how the other (non-adventuring) half lives? It's all here. The calendar of the Realms, forms of government, and the impact of religion and magic on everyday life are all delved into here. Overall, the setting could be characterized as somewhere between late medieval feudalism and early Renaissance culture. The latter is true particularly in the cities. And as other people have mentioned, the map of imports, exports and trade routes is unique. In what other game product are you going to find something like that? The color fold-out map that comes with the book isn't quite as useful, since it covers such a large area at once. Although it's a bit of a jumble, the Geography chapter is the main course of the book. Here you find nearly everywhere in Faerun detailed just enough to make it distinctive, but with enough latitude left for each DM to make it unique. Every area has at least a couple of adventuring hooks to get the gears in your devious brain moving. A chapter on History, which should have been toward the front, and a section on the gods, on which I have already commented, follows the Geography chapter. The good stuff back here is the chapter on running the Realms. It goes over various famous dungeons and adventuring sites of the Realms, such as the Haunted Halls of Eveningstar and Dragonspear Castle, in short paragraphs. It also gives the DM brief blurbs on which monsters might be found where, where to start a campaign, and how to go about developing an area that hasn't been covered in too much detail. All of these are handy additions to the advice and tips in the DMG. Handing out experience points to an adventuring party is also clarified, especially where it relates to races like aasimar and tieflings, which are slightly more powerful than standard PC races. In conclusion, this book is the new model for how a Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting should be presented. Even Wizards themselves will have trouble topping it. -Gary Townsenddnd3dm@netscape.net</blockquote>

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