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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="fafhrd" data-source="post: 1503000" data-attributes="member: 18517">There's a fanstastic short story by Clark Ashton Smith called "The Double Shadow"(highly recommend the read if you can find it).  Its told in a reflective style by a wizard's apprentice through a journal.  It relates the exploits of a mighty conjurer who is perilously confident in his powers and abilities.  He has bound devils, undead, mighty wizards of previous ages and the like.  He has no fear of the dark.  One day, he discovers a tablet dating back to a long lost reptilian civilization.  The tablet bears arcane inscriptions in an unknown tongue.  The wizard, curiosity piqued, sets out summoning all sorts of fell being in order to riddle out the power of the icon.  Many of them are either ignorant or terrified by the implications.  Eventually he manages to discern the contents and engages in the summoning of the being, despite the admonitions of his conjured interlocutors.  To sum up,the  bound beings quail in the wake of his summoning.  Even undead spirits and demons fall before the insidious evil that is manifested and the wizard is, of course, unable to put the genie back into the bottle.  I like to think of the Far Realms in a similar fashion.   Mortals and fiendom alike share some basic sympathies of power, ego, and purpose.  The denizens of the far realms are alien, lacking in these basic parities.   Even the mighty lords of the Abyss fear the inscrutable powers of the far realms.</blockquote>

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