The Complete Fool's Catalog: Inane Items

[Messageboard Golem]

Do you have a sense of humor? Do you miss the April issues of Dragon magazine? Do you want more laughs in your game?

Then buy The Complete Fool's Catalog! That's right! Give me $1.33, and I will give you not ten, not eleven, but twelve items to torture your players with!

Items like: The Board of Education, Woo Pace's Can, and even the famous Security Blanket!

Come on... You know you want it... Listen to these tesimonials:

"Please buy his stinky old book. He says I can have fluffy back if you buy it..."
Ain't that sweet? Remember: Buy the book or fluffy has an accident!

"I bought his book, and it hasn't killed me yet!"
Were working on it, pal!

"I think your book stinks! You outta go and take a flyin..."
<BLAM> <BLAM> <BLAM>
Oops... Sorry folks, but Hank here seems to have just had an accident. What he ment to say was to buy this book!

Get it at RPGNow.com!

And thanks for your support!

 

[Messageboard Golem]

The Complete Fool’s Catalog is one of those short PDF’s that have become popular recently, its covers a number of what it describes as “inane items”. These inane items are not meant to be taken too seriously, but unlike most humorous documents I could actually see a use for some of these in an actual D&D game. While it is only small in length (8 pages) it actually manages to pack quite a lot in. It is formatted link an open catalogue, so has two items per page, laid out in landscape. Unfortunately I found parts of the document nearly impossible to read on screen without using the zoom feature of acrobat. Even when printed out the smaller font used in the boxed off text was very hard to read. I think it would have been better to keep one item per page.

The Catalogue is contains twelve items, some of which are clever puns like the Board of Education, Halter Top, Woo Pace’s Can or the Armour of Amour (Hmm that pun works even better with the English spelling). Each item is written up first with the sales pitch from Mr Oberon, the owner of the Catalogue, then with its in game statistics, and often closes with a quote from a happy customer, this style together with the good writing makes it a fun and easy read. One small complaint is it doesn’t have any information about how someone else might create these items with the correct feats and spell, although it does have their cost to buy, so I guess you could work it out. I suppose Mr Oberon doesn’t want to part with his trade secrets.

Most are surprisingly useful for novelty items, Howard’s Hotplate for example would be excellent for cooking in open terrain, since it heats up without the need for a fire, thus no need to worry about finding firewood or an enemy seeing your campfire from a distance. The only problem is transporting it since the command words are a little too common, there is a good chance it could suddenly start heating up in your backpack. Many of the items have some benefit balanced by some disadvantage, the Board of Education for example will make someone smarter when it strikes a person but they also suffer damage.

While some of the ideas are effectively just single use magic items, and work almost like potions or scrolls, they are put into much more interesting and inventive packaging, Snake Oil is effectively a combined Cure Poison/Disease potion but with and interesting twist. The other items are effectively Wondrous items, although in most cases might be considered cursed.

I highly recommend this product it’s a cheap and cheerful PDF, I think it puts the fun back into magic items that has been slightly missing with the standardising of Create Item feats. Most of the items seem reasonably balanced and could be dropped into any fantasy campaign to lighten the mood; others would work even in a more serious campaign. I personally can’t wait to open a Can of Woo Pace on someone.