Regalia Antiquus: Crowns, Thrones & Scepters

[Crothian]

I cannot say when it was that I first became enamored with the idea of compiling a catalogue of the royal artifacts of the ancient world. As a bard and a traveler, I acquired many bits of lore and legend pertaining to these forgotten implements of power over the years, and finally realized that perhaps I should put this knowledge down in writing for posterity. So it is that I have taken quill in hand and embarked upon this history and codex of some of antiquity’s most powerful and ill-remembered symbols of rule. In the following pages, you will find the histories, physical descriptions, and alleged powers of over forty of the ancient world’s royal artifacts. It is the author’s most profound hope that the reader will take these entries — and the knowledge they impart — as treasure enough, and not as inspiration to seek out these items, some of which are cursed, and all of which are guarded by mystery and peril. However, being young once, himself, your humble narrator understands the allure of lost and mysterious treasure, and will satisfy his conscience with the knowledge that the intrepid adventurer will, at the least, be forewarned and thus fore-armed by the knowledge imparted in this document. This 14 page PDF is an easy-to-integrate your local games and just the sort of thing needed for DMs to add depth to any great d20 fantasy campaign world and gaming session. Written by Jason J. McCuiston.

 

[Crothian]

Regalia Antiquus Crowns, Thrones & Scepters

Regalia Antiquus Crowns, Thrones & Scepters

Magical items are one of those things that is just assumed in the D&D game. The characters have to get them to increase in power in hopes of defeating the tougher opponents they will face. Most magical items though are just a list of abilities and really have no feel to them. It seems these days the only types of magical items that have this flavor are artifacts. Artifacts are usually more powerful and cannot be crafted. Usually they also have unique abilities that cannot be gained from other items. Relalia Antiquus is a book about artifacts.

Regalia Antiquus Crowns, Thrones & Scepters is a new PDF LPJ Designs. They have a quite a few PDFs out now most notable the Shakespearian d20 ones. The fourteen page PDF has one piece of art on the front page and has some borders on it. The Layout is in three columns and it is readable but not that great looking. There are no book marks, table of contents, or indexes. Since this is a book of a few dozen artifacts it would have been very useful to have one of these if not all three to make the right artifact easier to find.

The book covers artifacts that are crowns, thrones, and scepters. All of the artifacts are designed for a certain class. It does not say if one only needs a single level in the class so I guess a character with one level of barbarian and nineteen of wizard can use and operate all the barbarian artifacts. I would have liked to see more specific rules for what allows a character to use the item then just class. Unlike most artifact these seemingly can be created using the craft magical item rules. There is not price or rules given for them, but none of them really have abilities that are not easily priced up. The artifacts mostly give boosts to attributes, skills, abilities, or spell like abilities. They are also not equally powered with each other. Some of the items give big bonuses to spell DCs like +5 while others only allow for bonuses for charisma based skills and armor class bonuses.

While the mechanics of the artifacts are not well done, the histories are interesting. Each of the dozens of artifacts is given a description of about a column long. The histories are interesting and generic so they should be relatively easy to fit into almost any campaign setting. The usefulness of them though is limited since they only work for one class and can have bad consequences for people who use them not of that class.

The book is not that bad having some interesting items in it. The number of items does make it attractive as well. But the mechanics of the artifacts just does not really sit well with me. They seem to much like magical items and not enough like artifacts despite the nice history each of them gets. At the very least it would have been nice to see them more done up like the relics of Complete Divine that have special rules for using them as well as costs associated to them.