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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: 2010444" data-attributes="member: 924">The Book of Taverns is a 112 page softcover sourcebook from<a href="http://www.necromancergames.com" target="_blank"> Necromancer Games</a>, priced at $19.95. (The price is a bit high for my personal taste, and why I didn't pick it up until recently, but as there are $25 96 page sourcebooks, I guess it's not too bad.)Rather than being about Taverns, it contains 10 detailed taverns that you can easily drop into your campaign. So, something of a location book.  Some are taverns, some are more like inns-tavern combinations.This book to me fills a huge niche.  Taverns (and Inns) are very common in D&D games, but something that can be time consuming to create. And tricky to come up with original ones. Much like how I base my NPCs on people I know or from fiction, I tend to base taverns on places I've been. In that case, it's mostly a couple different pool halls and the occasional sports bar. The latter is usually full of yuppies, so that's not a very good basis for a fantasy tavern.  Each tavern is presented in a fairly standard format:  Intro, Background, Important People (generally the people who work there), a room by room description of the place, a menu/listing of services and goods/drinks available, and lastly some adventure hooks. The 10 Taverns are:The Trireme - A Greek themed bar, with a history out of a greek tragedy. (And a curse). Since it's very Greek, this might be a bit tricky to use.The Witch's Teat - Bar with gladiatorial fights (with a twist - sort of has a reverse stargate in it). I found this to have the most interesting staff of any bar in the book.Quintain's Tower - This is a place operated by ogres & goblins, in the ruins of an old castle. Neat idea, but gets a bit weird, because there's also this ghost tree and rangers that protect it.The Horse Lord - This is essentially a cowboy bar. You learn a little too much about the owner's love life. (The "Horse's Mistress" would have been a better name for the place. Ick). This is another one of those a bit hard to use.The Lion Rampant - A tavern catering to rich people and aristocrats. Vain Robert's Gibbet - This is a pub for sailors and privateers/pirates. Very suitable for Freeport. Very very suitable.Death & Taxes - sort of a secret, members's only place. This is hard to use I think because the players are unlikely to be invited to join, or ever visit.  Malachai's Public House - Relatively generic inn, run by a halfling bard. Probably the most obviously useful. It is very high powered though, and is perhaps most suitable for a setting like the Forgotten RealmsDagger & Rose - Sort of a roadhouse, a inn/tavern on a major highway between two cities. The Four Winds - This is an interdimensional tavern.  It's probably more suited for somewhat nonsensical and high powered settings like the Forgotten Realms (in fact, that has something similar, the World Serpent Inn. And Blackmoor may or may not have had something like it too. The 1986 D&D module "Adventures in Blackmoor" did, but I don't know if it was in the original. But I digress). I love the idea of this, but it's a bit too high powered for my tastes (It's run by a god, and an ex-god makes the beer). And not entirely serious, it seems. It's also full of flying monkeys, which scare me. (Seriously.)The writing is excellent, full of tiny details and is a joy to read. There are also a lot of puns and hidden references (at least I hope so, maybe I'm reading too much into some things). But nothing overly obnoxious or just plain silly, like found in some products. There are some spelling problems. Including one of my pet peeves, "loosing" instead of "losing". Also at couple instances of a sentence missing a word. But pretty minor. The interior art is excellent. It's all by Brian LeBlanc. If there's a better artist working in the d20 field today (or the RPG industry, for that matter), I haven't see them (and I probably have a 100 d20 books). Each tavern is fully mapped, and the maps are very well done. Some parts of some maps are quite blurry, though. That's a common problem of color maps being converted to greyscale and printed, but this is very rare in this product, happening on only 3 of the maps (and some of the smaller ones). But it's another pet peeve of mine, and so worth mentioning.The first, is while the taverns all have very interesting and detailed backgrounds, this detracts somewhat from their genericness. In most cases, this is no big deal, but in a couple, it's hard to get around. For instance, the "Horse Lord" needs to be placed someplace where there are cowboys and herds of horses. One has a time traveller from the distant future. Malachai (of Public House fame) had a huge fight with the local wizards guild and ended up enslaving the 4 leaders of it. A couple of the Tavern Owners/Operators have deals with local thieves guild. So, it's unlikely that most will be easily dropped into your game as it, without ignoring the background. But as I said, that's generally easy to do.Another downside, is that while the taverns are described completely when it comes to physical layout and staff, in most cases, it's somewhat skimpy when it comes to customers. What would Cheers have been without Norm, Cliff, Frasier, and the occasional guest star, like Harry? ( Or Moe's without Lenny, Carl, and Homer? In most cases, you do get some generic customers, and in a couple cases, there are prominant people who live in the in for some weird reason (like the time traveller guy), but I would have liked to have seen more. And more normal ones, not things like well, time travellers.While it doesn't really matter to most people, also on the downside, the names of the taverns and NPCs are all product identity. Which is something of a shame, and something I don't understand the point of. It would have been neat to see one of these taverns inserted into an product from another company. Especially as they seem to have borrowed a city from another company in the name/background of an NPC in the Four Winds bar ("Jelka Swag of Freeport", an ex-pirate. Though Freeport is a common name, even in d20, as there is a Freeport in the Everquest.)Still, to sum up, this is an excellent product for a DM. While all the prominent NPCs do have stats, and there are some new magic items, it's fairly stat-free, so can be useful for most fantasy RPGs, not just D&D/d20A-</blockquote>

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