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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="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2010512" data-attributes="member: 924">Besides being the name of one of my <a href="http://www.hoojchoons.co.uk/hooj-085.htm" target="_blank">favorite songs</a> by one of my  <a href="http://www.solarstone.org.uk/" target="_blank">favorite</a><a href="http://www.solarstone.org.uk/" target="_blank">artists</a>,<a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3213.html" target="_blank">Seven</a><a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3213.html" target="_blank">Cities</a> is a sourcebook from <a href="http://www.atlas-games.com" target="_blank">Atlas Games</a> that details 7 generic cities (sort of - see below). It's softcover, 144 pages,and reasonably priced at $21.95.Seven Cities is actually a bit of a misnomer, at least the citiespart. It actually details 7 communities of different sizes, starting with a Thorp and increasing in size up to Large City (asdefined in d20 terms). They really don't have all that much in common, except each is on a river. The same river, actually.Each community has about the same number of pages devoted to it, around 20 (a bit less on average). You get a history of theplace, then some keyed entries, then lastly some plot hooks.The book actually starts off with what seems like filler material - an overview of the different size categories, info on commonservices and basics of how cities work, and common problems, like plague and fire. In an interesting move, each larger community uses the keyed entries of the earlier ones in the book. So mos to of thelocations in the smaller communities appear in it as well.I'm not really sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it lets the larger places be detailed. On the other hand, it meansthat the thorpers (? thorpies? thorpistas? thorpeans?) will be in 7 different locations. It tells you to just change the names and use the stats, but that's largely worthless, as the book is very stat light. Most entries for stats are basically just class, level, and hp. The best part of the book are the descriptions of theinhabitants. The descriptions and personalities make them almostcome alive. But this often can't be reused, because they wouldn'tmake as much sense in larger cities. For instance, in the Thorpe,this one gnome young lady doesn't want to marry the only gnomeguy in town, and is afraid her parents will pressure her to. Now,move that from the Thrope into something larger, where therewould be gnomes, and that no longer makes all that much sense.The books is full of things like this that work in one setting,but not the larger ones.This is somewhat aggravated by the fact that as the size of thecommunities get larger, the number of keyed entries (and infoabout their specific inhabitants) gets fewer and fewer, as morespace is devoted to the history of the place. The largest one inthe book, the Large City, has only 8 entries specific to it. Thesmallest communities have about 25-30 entries.So, the small communities really shine, and are very well done.But the larger ones are somewhat vague, and would require a lotof work in drop in your campaign, and in some cases, havesomewhat complex histories that likely won't fit your campaign.For instance, the Large City was founded by an elf Paladin/Wizardcalled the Sun Lord (his proper name is forgotten despite thefact he's apparently still around and living in the city), and heconstantly battles his nemsis, the Night Lady. It's verycomic-bookish in tone. Didn't fit my game, anyway.But overall, the communities are all very well done, and whilesome might require a bit of work, or altering to fit your game(for instance, in the large city, the worst offender, it is easyto drop the Sun Lord and his nemesis, since no one even knowstheir names, how popular could they be?), and all of thecommunities are pretty generic. Nothing weird like dragon men orsteam gnomes or ninja kobolds or Carribean pirates as found insome supposedly generic city supplements. It's something of a spartan looking book. There's not much art,about 13 pieces in the whole book by my count (mostly good toexcellent, though). And while there are lots of maps, they'repretty vague in style. While not quite the back of a napkin lookthat some games use ( mostly Call of Cthulhu), they're not muchmore detailed. It's actually a fairly sturdy book - it survivedan attack by 2 hyperactive labrador pups with only minor damageto the cover and title page.The layout is very crisp, and generally well done. The only thingI had trouble with is that the Open Content designation can be abit confusing. Why? Well, it's stuff in a box that has a'parchment backing'. Unfortunately, this is hard to tell in somecases, most notably the maps. They're have a parchment backing,or looks like it, though a different sort of parchment backingused in the example of what is open content. Are they opencontent or not? For most people this doesn't matter, but giventhat there are seemingly 100s of d20 companies and writers, itdoes matter a bit. Atlas's other d20 books have a much clearersort of designation - they should stick with that.It also has quite possibly the worst pun I've ever seen in agaming product (Page 107, the name of the familiar). Just a punwouldn't be so bad, except it makes a reference to a <a href="http://education.yahoo.com/search/be?lb=t&p=url%3Ac/cleopatra__vii_" target="_blank">historical</a><a href="http://education.yahoo.com/search/be?lb=t&p=url%3Ac/cleopatra__vii_" target="_blank">figure on Earth</a>. Things like that drive me crazy, becausethey completely ruin the suspension of disbelief - on the onehand, here's this very detailed city, but boom, all of a sudden,there's an in your face reminder that it's not real. Thankfully,there's only one, not dozens, like a certain other city book thatwill go unnamed (and this author also apparently worked on, nowthat I look...hmmm), but it's still annoying. It's also a reallybad pun. So all in all, worth buying. Not a must buy, but something thatis very handy for anyone running a fantasy campaign. While it isa d20 product, it's fairly light on stats, and should be usuablein almost any fantasy game, as long as it's not too weird (notalking giant ducks or something...). While I might have dwelled too much on the negative on this book,it's really hard to write about what makes this book special -the writeups of the NPCs - their personality, background, etc.It's kind of like trying to say why Pulp Fiction is such a goodmovie. It's not really the plot, or the story, but the charactersand dialogue that makes it a great movie. A-</blockquote>

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