The Book of Unusual Treasures

[JoeGKushner]

I'm pretty familiar with the contents of this book. I've reviewed several of the PDF versions and even bought the limited edition print run. Those interested in some of the goods here that I've reviewed can check the following:
101 Mundane Treasures
101 Arcane Spell components

This supplement is broken up into five sections and six appendices. It includes three types of books, mundane, special, and spellbooks. It includes various arcane spell components, broken up by type. For example, fire, lawful, death. It includes weapons, armor, clothing, jewelry, and miscellaneous treasure.

All of this is broken down in alphabetical order by chapter. Each item includes appearance, information, special features, and value. With some, like the spell component section, it includes the effect, as well as the specifics to using the component like casting time modifier, component type, and knowledge (arcana) DC to use.

Those not looking for treasure will want to quickly look through the appendices as they cover spells, feats, poisons, materials, unusual skills, and a master item listing by value.
There were some minor issues I had with the book. There are a ton of spells. A lot of them fall into the 0 level field and do minor things or they fall into the school of necromancy. With all of the spells, a tool like a master spell listing, broken down by class, level, and for sor/wiz, school, would've been an excellent tool.

The feats tend to be a little on the high powered side. Take Grave Claws Strike. While your giving up a feat, you get an extra 1d4 points of damage with every hit with the spell Grave Claws. Another powerful one, Enhanced Summoning, allows you to use a lower level spell slot.

The poisons add a lot of options to a GMs arsenal but they have no prices. It's great to know how Cleric's Curse is made, but how much would it cost if buying it or what would the Craft Poison DC be? Those answers are in a chart, which is a great reference, including name, type, craft, save, initial damage, secondary damage and price, but some of those elements would've been nice under the description as well.

The section on unusual materials include the value, hardness, hit points and uses, as well as any special rules. For instance, basilisk skin and hydraskin are both useful when making armor. The former provides a +1 AC bonus while the latter provides a +1 bonus to Fortitude saves against Cold Damage.

The book could've used one more round of editing. There is at least one spell not updated from the original errata of 3.0. My favorite bit has to be the value of gold pieces in the master chart. It's worth 0 gold. In addition, while it's useful to have the chapter where the item is found, the page number would've been even better. In another case, a monster, the Shadow Raven, that uses 3.0 monster block and is missing base attack bonus, grapple, squares, and other 3.5 standards. A few typos here and there. Minor things overall.

One fantastic thing about the book is the price. At $13.95 for 96 pages, there is now proof, between this and Fantasy Flight's Anthology, that companies should be able to bring us OGC that's edited without charging $35 for error laden product. At it's low price, it's hard to hold the small issues against it.

If you're looking to add details to your campaign, and the devil is in the details, then The Book of Unusual Treasures is for you. With its wide variety of material, your bound to find something of use and with its low price, not feel that you've paid too much.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Forgotten spellbooks and tomes of arcane knowledge, material components harvested from vanquished monsters, masterwork weapons, armor, and other items of fine craftsmanship await the appraising eye of the adventurer. Each of these unusual treasures is lovingly detailed with lavish description to turn even the most innocuous knick-knack into a treasured find.

The treasures herein introduce a hoard of new feats, skills, spells, materials, and poisons to surprise the discerning treasure-seeker. GMs looking for new and interesting ways to reward their players will find literally hundreds of items within the pages of this collection. A single table organizes the entries according to value, enabling the GM to substitute any of these items for an equivalent amount of random gold, gems, or artwork.

These unusual treasures, both tangible and intangible, from the worthless to the priceless, are arranged by chapter:

Mundane Books and Spellbooks
Arcane Spell Components
Armor and Weapons
Clothing and Jewelry
Miscellaneous Treasures
THE BOOK OF UNUSUAL TREASURES is an indispensable resource for gamemasters looking to spice up their campaign.

 

[Psion]

Book of Unusual Treasure

[imager]http://www.badaxegames.com/mm/images/products/book_of_unusual_treasures/photo_unusual_treasures.jpg[/imager]The Book of Unusual Treasures is a collection of detailed (mostly) minor treasure items (such as books, jewelry, and spell components) for use with d20 System fantasy games. The book is primarily composed of content for Phillip J. Reed's "101" series of PDF products from Ronin Arts, but published in print under Bad Axe Games.

A First Look

The Book of Unusual Treasures is a 96-page perfect bound softcover book priced at $13.95. In today's market of inflating game prices, this is pretty reasonable.

Both cover and interior illustrations are by Christopher Shy, one half of Ronin Arts. The cover features a somewhat blurry depiction of a man with demonic horns an a twisted face sitting on some sort of throne. Shy has done work elsewhere in the RPG hobby and some of you may already be familiar with his art; he has a somewhat abstract style with intentional blurring or soft focus.

A Deeper Look

The Book of Unusual Treasures is divided into five topic chapters and six appendices. The five chapters cover books, weapons and armor, clothing and jewelry, and miscellaneous treasure, respectively.

The books chapter is further divided into the categories of "mundane" books, spellbooks (some of which include new spells included in the indices), and special books. The mundane books just have brief descriptions of the topic and a value; there is no game benefit to them other than what you can sell it for.

The special books and some of the spellbooks have special features. These features can be a variety of things, including bonuses to specific sorts of rolls, additional skill ranks if studied, magical powers much akin to a magic item. Some books even approach artifact levels of power, though in many cases some very difficult rolls are required to obtain some benefits (e.g., one book requires a DC 30 intelligence check to gain a +2 will save to psionics.)

In addition to the new spells, some books call out things like creation techniques for new items, which are given statistics in shaded blocks after the book's descriptive text.

The spell components chapter contains possibly the largest rules variations in the book. The chapter list spells by descriptor, and under each descriptor is a list of several components that affect casting of spells of those types. Each component lists a knowledge arcana roll to know about it, additional casting time to utilize it, and most require spellcraft checks to utilize.

When used, the components add effects to the spell, which can be the "free" application of metamagic or additional spell effects, or other benefits. Some, however, have negative side effects. For example, an ankheg poison sack (sic) adds a lot of damage to an acid descriptor spell, but sprays the caster inflicting damage.

Some components listed here aren't material components at all, but conditions. For example, suffering damage from natural cold can help boost cold spells, and standing atop a barbarian's grave can give a caster of a force spell a quick boost in physical power.

Some of these the GM may want to be careful to screen. For example, the side effects of a mephit's corpse used during a fire spell is pretty destructive, and the GM may be loath to use mephits as opponents in the game after PCs wise up to this effect...

The weapon and armor section is ultimately similar to the special books section; each item has a description and appraisal information as well as special rules. None of the weapon or armors are magical, however, though it would be easy to make them so and use the descriptions just for flavor. As none of the items are magical, the special rules all pertain to the construction of the item, such as being clumsy or f Unlike the earlier book section, the gp section has a breakdown for different aspects of the item (e.g., might list artistic value as well as value for the weapon quality, etc.)

The fourth chapter provides a variety of jewelry and clothing. The layout is very similar to the weapons and armor chapter, with descriptions, appraise information, value, and special rules (the last entry is seldom used.)

The fifth chapter describes miscellaneous treasures that are not covered in any of the previous chapters. This includes such things as musical instruments, tools, banners, mugs, jars, and so forth, but it seems a few books escaped the first chapter. Again, the layout is similar to the weapon and armor section.

The first five appendices introduce game mechanical aspects associated with the items in earlier sections such as spells, feats, poisons, special materials, and skills. The six appendix is an item listing by value that provides a quick reference allowing DMs to make best use of the book by looking up the value of an item in a randomly generated (or published) treasure horde to allow substitution of items.

Conclusions

I'll be honest and say that this is not exactly the sort of book I expect to get a lot of use on. My campaign is not the sort where dwelling on the details of mundane items is all that important. However, I can see the sort of campaign, situation, or GM that would derive use from this book. To wit, I think that low magic campaigns that have more emphasis on minor items, or classic dungeon settings for those GMs that like dungeon dressing, are places where this book could see use. As well, if you are the sort who never describes anything to PCs unless its magical, the descriptions herein can throw the PCs off the scent.

If you are in the market, the book does do what it attempts well. It is very affordable, nicely laid out, and provides some nice new rules material to boot.

Overall Grade: B

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Messageboard Golem]

Are all 101 spell components in there?

 

[GameWyrd]

Don't get confused. Just sit back and enjoy the rather rare combination of a thoroughly professional, attractive and entirely practical book.

Why could it get confusing? What's so unusual about Bad Axe Games' The Book Of Unusual Treasures? It's not the usual Bad Axe Games mini-book size. That's not really what draws your attention to the front cover. It's great front cover; a bloated ogre thing with just the telltale blurring and surreal touches to make me think of Christopher Shy. Oh! It is a Christopher Shy front cover! Excellent. And the author? Philip Reed himself! The Book Of Unusual Treasures is also a Ronin Arts product. Kudos to the partnership, if I had my way it'll be a run away success. The Ronin Arts logo is on the front of the book but it just manages to hide in plain sight a bit.

Philip Reed, publishing under the oft-renamed company (generally Ronin something), has published PDFs like 101 Mundane Treasures, 101 Spellbooks, Tomes of Knowledge, and Forbidden Grimoires and 101 Arcane Spell Components already. Yeah, The Book Of Unusual Treasures is a marriage of these products. Now, I have all three of those PDFs and found them handy but don't use them often enough - sometimes I can click up a PDF and grab something from it on the fly. Sometimes that just doesn't work. I've found making a quick grab for a PDF works best when you have a few minutes to find what you want - while the players are chatting. This works well for lining up the next NPC or even the next scene or plot twist in an adventure. It even works when I've the foresight (when winging an unexpected scene) to think ahead to an unusual treasure. There isn't enough time to fire up a PDF even as the characters pull books from the raided library, open a chest or loot a body. If you have a book handy then you just need a few seconds to flick through out pick something at random. I'm someone who often games with a laptop. I imagine if you don't than a paper book is a thousand times more accessible than a PDF (even if the latter has a Find function).

Unusual Treasures is 94 pages long so the price tag of less than US $14 is rather good!

Chapter one looks at books. There are mundane books such as The Shrinking Remains which tells the story of a cursed corpse, special books such as The Book of Bows which is an encyclopedia of magical bow and arrows (there are five panels on this page to detail the stats for these new arrows) and then there are magical spellbooks like Endridi's Essential Magery which gives the holder the ability to cast eyebite as 20th caster once per day. There are 18 pages of books in all.

Arcane Spell Components are likely to be a popular chapter. Arcane Spell Components, as a game mechanic, are designed to jazz up the humdrum of spell casting. Adding one of these components to a spell adds something extra but incurs a negative effect as well. You have to match the type of component against the descriptor of the spell you want to cast - acid components can only be used with spells that have the acid descriptor [acid]. There's about 20 pages of components and about 4 components per page. That's - you'd never work this out - about 80 components. Pretty good going, I think.

The armor and weapons chapter doesn't hold lots of magical weapons. The idea is that these specific pieces have so much character - unique appearance, history, quirky feature - that they're worth about the same. Okay, they have a monetary value about equal to some minor magical stuff and also manage to have special rules to bring in the bonuses. This chapter is ideal for games set in a low or medium fantasy world - and therefore a valuable addition to any experienced GM's collection.

Of jewelry, clothing and miscellaneous treasure there are also about 10 pages. Once again we're looking at times which are worthwhile (and sometimes worth a lot) but not magical. I really do think it can be tough thinking up interesting but non-magical items so appreciate most of the items here. Most of the items in here - some of them, I'm afraid to say are a little too mundane and non-magical for my liking. Let's take the "Gold pieces" described on page 61. There are 2d12 gold pieces and each one is worth... oh, one gold piece! Good heavens. Fancy that. I'll use those in an emergency. There are also some "Iron keys" which, we're told, are designed to fit into an item known as a "lock". I couldn't actually find this mysterious "lock" anywhere else in the book. Enough with the sarcasm - there is a fine line between the mundane items you've forgotten about or where never likely to think about and those mundane items that aren't worth mentioning. We do cross that line now and then but not very often in The Book Of Unusual Treasures.

We're missing about twenty pages at this point. Miscellaneous Treasures is the last section in the last chapter. The appendix is a funny creature. What turns a chapter into an appendix? The first appendix is 10 pages long and full of "unusual spells" (and some d20 players will pay $14 for 10 pages of spells of this quality). Perhaps because spells are intangible they're relegated to the world of appendix. The next appendix keeps to this theory; three pages of unusual feats. Alas, appendix three destroys this idea as it lists pages of unusual poisons. The unusual materials and unusual skills appendixes ensures that the book is well stocked with odds and ends. The last appendix really is an appendix and lists everything in the book by value; cheapest first.

I've pointed out some minor things - the difference between a chapter and an appendix, that gold coins are too mundane even for a book of unusual treasures and that Ronin Arts have already published much of this book in PDF format. That short list pales into insignificance compared to the overall product. The Book Of Unusual Treasures is unusual because it's not filled with new rules which change your campaign world or make players wish they had multi-classed to a newly introduced Prestige Class. The Book Of Unusual Treasures is one of those frightfully rare and wonderfully useful supplements which will help any GM in any d20 fantasy setting.

* This Book of Unusual Treasures review was first published at GameWyrd.

 

[Crothian]

Book of Unusual Treasures

[imager]http://www.badaxegames.com/mm/images/products/book_of_unusual_treasures/photo_unusual_treasures.jpg[/imager]

Here’s something pretty amazing. D20 has been out for years and people always claim that everything has been done to death and there are no new areas to cover. Yet I have a book that’s been out for a few years and it seems to me to be the only book to cover the subjects inside. There are areas that still haven’t been covered in d20 but the obvious ones have for the most part. D20 is not as going as strong but with luck a few choice companies will start to cover some of the creative aspects that have been mostly ignored. Of course I hear that creativity is rarely awarded and that is a true shame. Creativity should be one of the biggest driving factors in gaming, a hobby that in theory bleeds creativity.

The Book of Unusual Treasure Is a collection of some PDFs Phil Reed has written. Phil Reed is the awesome writer behind Ronin Arts the most prolific maker of d20 related PDFs. The book is brought to print through Bad Axe Games the great guys behind such hits as Grim Tales and the Heroes of High Favor line of books. The book is soft bound and not that long with only ninety pages. The layout though is cool with nice art and good use of background images and tables.

The book is really five much smaller books in one. It is also one of the few books whose title tells everything one needs to know about it. The book is full of unusual treasures. These are the neat little things that can really spark interest from the right player. The book covers a wide range of objects starting with books then moving on to spell components and then on to weapons and armor to clothing and jewelry to a last section of miscellaneous treasures. Many of the items are non magical and have a interesting short history to them that can easy be used as a plot device or just a neat little trinket to add to the uniqueness of the campaign.

The books start out with some usually mundane books. There are not a lot of them but the ones that are here are pretty cool. Some are clever little things like the book of Unlimited Power and the Book of Drinks. Then there are special books. These are non magical but can be used to give a bonus when used. There is an atlas that can give a bonus to knowledge geography checks. Then there are the spell books. These are spell books complete with what spells are in them, special features, and the appearance of them. All in all the book section is one of the stronger sections of the book.

The next section has the possibility of some problems with balance. It covers arcane spell components. Some of the components can have pretty powerful effects. The Naga’s Jaw for instant can increase the damage of a spell by 2d6 per spell level with a successful spellcraft check. Not all of them are that bad some are really cool like using the eclipse which increases the casting time of the spell by many rounds but increases the caster level and doubles some of the spells effects. So it will up to the DM to make sure the right components are used in their games.

The armor and weapons section is an interest array of non magical items. There are some really cool and well described items here and it should frustrate the players nicely that these well described items are not magical. They are useful or worth quite a bit as some of them are more decorative then anything. There are dueling blade, elven war hammers, shurkens, lances, and many different types of items in here.

Clothing and jewelry is a lot like the weapons and armor section. Great descriptions really are the highlight her e to include as gifts or treasures, or just something cool for the rogue to steal. There are items like an elegant silver gown or a leather jerkin. Bits like the Black Scepter and the Crown of Medusa. The details and creativity of the product are really good and will serve a DM well.

All in all this is a very useful product that just has a lot of little things that can add a nice level of detail into a campaign. The items make a great addition to a low level or low magic campaign but even in something more epic in magical ability The items in here will find a lot of uses in the hands of the creative players and DMs out there.

 

[ivocaliban]

On the basis of this review I picked up The Book of Unusual Treasures in what was to be my final order from Stiggybaby.com (God bless 'em). I realize three other reviews were written last year around the time of this book's release, but I only noticed this one because it was in the recent reviews section on the main page.

As Stiggybaby is boarding the ship to Valinor I got this book at a significant discount, but I can say it's well worth the cover price for a DM looking to add spice to his treasure hoards. If you've been running the same campaign for several years as I have you get a bit tired of the rather limited list of random mundane items found in the DMG. After the fiftieth "You find a finely-crafted dagger" you long to surprise your players with something new, something that requires a bit more thought and engenders a bit more interest. This book certainly does the trick and then some.

Not only do you have a wonderful collection of mundane items, but there's a healthy dose of new spells and poisons to boot. Necromancers and assassins should definitely find something of interest here. My only complaints are really echoes of previous reviews. The lack of random tables requires a little more work than some GMs are looking for and some of the prices seem a bit unfounded, but nonetheless, this book deserves all four four-star ratings it's received here so far.

Last, but not least, my thanks to Crothian for continuing to review books that may have slipped through the cracks the first time around.