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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="Diremede" data-source="post: 2517857" data-attributes="member: 7964">Well having decided to run an oriental campaign, I decided to start researching supplements and accessories outside of the the actual oriental adventures core rulebook, and so I turned to Rokugan, as that is the campaign setting that the OA corebook was based upon.  Upon arriving at my local gaming store I started looking for the Rokugan book, found it, purchased it, and then went home to begin absorbing the campaign setting.  I was glad to see that AEG had used a nice hard cover and full color art and pages inside the book, although color isn't everthing, and pictures don't really provide any rules, its always nice to see a book that has some interesting and quality artwork, as well as some color.  I also noticed that the book had a similar layout to the PHB as it listed the clan descriptions where you would normally find races, followed by the character classes, skills, feats, combat, and magic.  This immediately made me feel at home with the book as I already felt as if I had gone through it several times.  After making my quick reference through the book and catching some of the headlines I backed up and really started reading.ClansThe clans section was great, pure and simple.  It goes through each of the major clans and describes the clan actions, motives, and overall view that each clan expresses.  This section goes into much greater detail then the OA book and adds on several new minor clans that offer the DM and players clans that they can manipulate and alter as they are only briefly described.  I immediately locked on to one of these minor clans and am using it as a focus for my campaign.  ClassesThe classes section is layed out just as you would expect and actually has more to offer than one would think.  First of all your common D&D core classes are mentioned and they are each given a small paragraph to describe how they would fit into the Rokugan campaign.  Then the move into the actual OA classes, the samurai, the shugenja, etc.  Now the first thing I noticed was that the monk, shaman, sohei, and the wu jen where not really mentioned or referenced to, which was kind of disappointing.  The campaign setting itself has made the shugenja the magic user of choice, and has apparently completely left the sohei, shaman, and wu jen out of the loop.  While my campaign will include these classes you won't find any relative information on them in this book.  Even with this negative the book does give very good descriptions on the samurai and the shugenja, offering some rule variants to the OA versions.  There are also two new core classes in the book, the ninja and the inkyo, which is a monk variant, which offer some different options to players.Skills & FeatsNot much changes in the skills department, just your typical new ways to use old skills descriptions.  As for feats, well this is where the book really shines in my opinion.  AEG has incorporated the clans into some of the feats, offering clan specific techniques, as well as offering a new feat called void use, which is tied to the inkyo class and other feats.  All of the new feats are very OA themed and fit perfectly into an OA campaign, really offering the combat style and visualization of what you would think of when watching old kung fu movies and samurai films.  Spells and Magic.This section is actually kinda of short, and to be honest I was hoping for more spells.  This is where we get back to the fact that AEG and Rokugan have not embraced the shaman or the wu jen, so you won't be finding any new spells or descriptions for them, which to me is a big downer, especially for the wu jen class.  AEG did go through the shugenja list though, and gave old spells some new OA style names, and did add new spells for the shugenja.  In this section they also describe a new type of magic called blood magic, and a short (very short) spell list for this style of magic.  In Rokugan this is forbidden magic.  I would elaborate more, but they really don't elaborate on it in their campaign book so........The Flavor TextThis is a nice area that explains the history of Rokugan and takes time to make tie references to the full color maps shown on the inside of the hard cover of the book, detailing the territories of the major clans and points of interest.  I enjoyed this area of the book as it was not only a nice read, but clearly and concisely explained what is going on in the empire to date.  Monsters SectionThe monsters section of this book is somewhat lacking and actually seems to me ( as I found out later ) that it steers clear of giving to much allowing for a later supplement.  HonorThere is an honor system described in the campaign book, and although it isn't described in detail they have it broken down into levels of honor and what actions can make it go up and down.  I was kind of disappointed in this system as it only ranks from 1 to 5, not leaving much room for adjustment.  While it is a system I feel it could have been better.  All in all I think this is a great product and for those DM's who want a good resource book to run an OA campaign I would recommend it.  I would also like to point out that the campaign setting also has many supplements unto itself, namely a creatures book, magic, and fortunes as well as individual class books.  So if you are thinking of running an OA campaign and you don't want to build it from the ground up, I would say this is the direction to go, and even if you are building, it makes for a great reference book with lots of useful information and rules.</blockquote>

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