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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="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2080520" data-attributes="member: 1129">Lost Empires of Faerun is the latest support book for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting by Wizards of the Coast. Written by Richard Baker, Ed Bonny and Travis Stout, Lost Empires weighs in at 192 full color pages and runs for $29.95.Art and layout are up to the Forgotten Realms usual standards. Paper is crème colored. Two columns of text frame the art while boxed sections with a darker ivory color are used for sidebars. Art is handled by many fan favorites including Jason Engle, Wayne Reynolds, William O’Connonor, Steve Prescot and others. It’s a nice mix of styles.The material starts off with an introduction but quickly moves into the player focused arena with prestige classes, feats, and spells. These PrCs are often focused on older organizations or ideas from the past.  The Cultist of the Shattered Peak for example, are out to stop wizards because their background involves the ascension and decline of the Netherese wizards while the Magelords are from another point of Faerun’s history of the Stag Kingdom.Game mechanics vary. For example, I feel that the Magelords are far too powerful. They gain spellcasting every level and special abilities every level. These include sneak attack three times and mastery of spells. While they have to give up some spellcasting ability to enter the class as they need evasion as a special ability, it doesn’t seem enough.The good news though is that like other recent PrCs, the material here doesn’t just pump out dozens of PrCs. Instead we get a bit of background,  how to become the PrC, the game mechanics, how to play such a character, including ideas on combat, advancement and resources, how the PrC fits in the Faerun, NPC Reactions, Lore, giving Knowledge arcane or Knowledge history checks and the knowledge from them, as well as that PrC in the game, and encounters. This provides the DM with more than just several PrCs and allows him to add them into the game in a deeper and meaningful way.While there aren’t a ton of new feats or PrCs, some will quickly catch any player’s eye. For example, the feat Wounding Spell, inflicts bleeding wounds with any damage-dealing spell, while in spells, we have a few sun based ones like Aura of the Sun, where light damages undead and hampers magical darkness, to Toothed Tentacle, a three mouthed entity that the caster attacks his foes with.Before getting into the specifics, the chapter, Dreams of the Past, gives general guidelines on ancient empires. This includes a quick list of twenty Ancient Adventure Ideas, random ruin generators, a listing of dead gods, some epic magic, including two seeds, Mythal and Shadow, and a two-page spread of the Forgotten Realms in the year –626 DR.The book then delves into different sections of Forgotten Realms history, starting with a general bit of information, the history, broken down in multi-page timelines, then separate sections for the following: Keepers of the Past, individuals or sites where knowledge of the lost empire can be found, including Knowledge History DC checks from 5 to 30, Songs and Stories, details about empire broken down by location, important sites, legacies, and in some cases, adventure sites, which act as locations with populated monsters and NPCs for the players to interact with.After covering several empires, the book moves back into game mechanics with Artifacts of the Past. Some of these are general abilities for magic weapons like Sending, where the foe struck with the weapon, on a roll of a ‘20’ with a confirmed critical, is sent to a desintation chosen by the weapon’s wielded, to specific artifacts like the Nether Scrolls and the Elfblades of Cormanthyr. Unfortunately, magic items, while always including cost, don’t always include caster cost and experience point deductions. Odd as for some items like Delimbiyra’s Shining Bow have it, while none of the rings or Scepters do.The book ends with monsters. Some of these are old favorites like Tomb Trappers, giant constructs that  wield huge maws who seek the treasures of ancient empires, to Deepspawn, huge aberrations that spawn further monsters. The section has a lot of undead like Dread Warriors, Flameskulls, and Helmed Horrors. One of the most interesting updates here is the Phaerimm. They now have age stages, much like a dragon, and their physical aspects, like space/reach, claw, bite, and stinger damage, is based on their size, which is determined by their age. This makes them a little complicated as you now have several tables to look over. You’d have to look over the age category first to see how big they are and what their stats are, as well as information on attack ability, then check the other table to see how much damage they’d do if they were forced into melee.In terms of general use, while the mechanics could be tweaked for almost any setting with some effort, I can’t imagine that the majority of the book could be easily used in another campaign. There are exceptions however. Take the Crown Wars for example, some of these events took place in the year –30,000. Yeah, much like the Scarred Lands and it’s various happenings with the elves,  the conflict here takes place so long ago that few people remember what actually happened so it’d be easy to use the details.On the other hand, when looking at Fallen Netheril, it’d be difficult to put into another campaign as this history is still having an effect on the Forgotten Realms today via the Return of the Archmages and the unique creatures that caused some of the downfall via the creation of the Anauroch desert from the Phaerimm to the sky ships that formed different kingdoms in the south. Only on the surface could ideas of the Suel, for example, in the Greyhawk setting, use some of these bits as there is a lot of specific names and locations set in the Forgotten Realms.Having said that, it’s a great source of general purpose ideas for the Forgotten Realms. For example, if you want to increase the amount of psionic abilities and powers used in your campaign, hunting through the empire of Jhaamdath, once ruled by powerful psychic warriors known as bladelords, would be a good way to do so. If you want to see the elves return to a position of power, then having them hunt down and find the various elf blades would be one method to do so.One thing I almost forgot to mention, is that the book references just about every other Forgotten Realms book in the series, as well as optional books like Expanded Psionic's Handbook. In most cases it's just a named reference and how something in the past has effected the current setting, such as countries in the Shining South or Unapproachable East, but there are still references to older books that might be difficult to find, but can be easily substituted.For fans of the Forgotten Realms, Lost Empires of Faerun brings a lot of old lore mechanics up to 3.5 standards and provides a ton of general ideas and even sample adventures to get the game running.</blockquote>

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