Swords Into Plowshares

[Messageboard Golem]

Swords Into Plowshares is a compilation project initiated by Sean K Reynolds Games to be a charity fundraiser for the Afghan Girls Fund, a charity created by the National Geographic Society to provide educational opportunities and medical assistance for the women and girls of Afghanistan. The project was initiated after the Society was able to track down Sharbat Gula, the Afghan refugee with the striking eyes photographed 17 years ago.

Swords Into Plowshares features 32 pages of magic weapons (each at approximately 1/2 page in length) for the D20 system, each with a description and background information. Authored, edited, and illustrated by concerned people in the RPG industry, Swords Into Plowshares was created entirely on volunteer time. The game material in the book is entirely open game content as defined by the Open Gaming License.

 

[Krug]

Swords Into Plowshares is a collaborative effort to benefit the Afghan Girls Fund. It's a 36 page PDF of magic weapons done by leading d20 designers and illustrated by some of the best d20 artists out there. All in all, it's a worthy effort.

Each of the weapons take up about half a page, though some entries are longer, and come complete with history, powers, creation requirements and costs. It's a good reference if you're doing up items of your own to know where it should be placed on the power scale. Some of these weapons are good enough to build whole campaigns around, such as the Weapons of Sin or Danivall's Starblades. Other weapons, such as the Sweet Sting - a spell storing whip, show you don't have to come up with an ultra powerful weapon to make it interesting. To top it off, there's a few new weapon properties such as lesserbane.

For $5, Swords Into Plowshares is a pretty strong effort of new weapons to spice up your campaign. I would have liked to see illustrations of every weapon, but most of them are covered. Overall, a great effort by the d20 community to show that it cares.

 

[Simon Collins]

This is not a playtest review.

Swords Into Plowshares is a resource for magical weapons for d20 fantasy, in aid of National Geographic Society's Afghan Girls Fund.

Swords Into Plowshares is a 36-page 4.08 MB .pdf file costing $5. The format is pretty good as far as printing is concerned with little in the way of graphic margin. The bookmark feature of the .pdf format is not used. The art is a mixture of colour and mono and ranges from poor to superb (note that not every weapon is illustrated). The writing style is on the whole good (unlike the art there seems to be less of a spread of quality despite the number of writers who contributed to the work) and editing is average.

The d20 community got together and many well-known names (e.g. Monte Cook, Matt Forbeck, Mike Mearls, Toren Atkinson, and Claudio Pozas) have contributed works to this charity fundraiser. The theme is magic weapons and each weapon gets a fairly detailed history along with its qualities, market price, caster level and other prerequisites, as well as the cost of creation in gp and XP.

There are a fascinating array of magic weapons presented in the work. Here are a few examples from the well over 50 offered:
* Beshero's Sling Of Thunderstones - transforms any missile fired from it into a thunderstone made from destrachan hide
* Danivall's Starblades - ten longswords designed to be wielded by paladins of the star-worshipping church of Danivall. Some of the swords have the quality of 'lesserbane' - the weapon gains the +2d6 damage of a bane weapon but not the +2 enhancement.
* Dreamblades - a +1 keen bane longsword, whose bane creature can be altered every night during a dream state with the use of a related artifact called the Dream Sphere.
* Ogrebreaker and Trollrender, a magically paired greatsword and heavy crossbow that once served two lovers who hunted giants. The lovers killed, the two weapons seek to unite once more with each other in the hands of two new lovers against the hated giantkin.
* Weapons Of Sin - seven legendary weapons that magically embody the seven sins.

Several of these weapons have the seeds of an entire campaign hidden within their descriptions, or at least a decent adventure. A brief appendix also contains a coule of special qualities - the aforementioned lesserbane, and triarc, weapons that deal 1 point of damage from each of three energy types (e.g. cold/electricity/fire).

Conclusion:
An inspirational and fascinating resource whose proceeds are donated to a worthwhile charity (for more info on the charity go to http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/09/0909_afghanfund.html). What more can you ask for for $5? If you haven't already done it, go buy this now - it'll be the best $5 for mind and soul you'll pay this year.

 

[Corporal_Cupcake]

A rather late comment, I know. I really like this book a lot. In fact, I have pulled out some of the flavor text concerning the histories of the weapons and used it in my own campaign- I put the flavor in and left the weapon out. My minor caveat would be that almost all of the weapons are quite powerful and "expensive", so for those running low-magic or low-level campaigns, you won't be able to fit most of the weapons in.