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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="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2008779" data-attributes="member: 9860">Beware! This review contains major spoilers.This is not a playtest review.Price: $12.95Pages: 48Price Per Page: 27 cents per page, a bit higher than average for this type of product.Designed for character level: 1st-3rdFormat: SoftcoverExternal Artwork: A good piece of artwork inset into a core rulebook-style boxed effect.Additional Page Use: The back page gives an introduction and overview of the module, including a reference to the region, period, levels and companies(?) that the adventure is designed for in the Sun & Scale campaign world. Both inside covers contain maps, a nice touch which I wish more publishers would make use of. The first page contains credits and contents. Half of the last page contains the OGL. This makes very good use of the pages available.Internal Artwork: The black and white internal artwork is sparse, relevant to the text, and ranges from poor to good, most being good.Maps: The maps are good, with 1 square to 5 foot scale, clearly keyed and easy on the eye.Page Layout: The text makes very good use of the space. Though the font size is average, there are little or no chunks of white space and the margins are narrow. My only concern was that the shaded boxes used for giving rules-related information are very similar to the shaded boxes indicating text to be read to the players.Style: Concise, clearly written, and well edited.The Adventure:Three pages at the beginning give a guide to the information in the module that is Open Game Content, and some background to the Sun & Scale campaign world. OGC is also clearly marked throughout the adventure.The next section gives an adventure background - approximately 800 years ago, a famous warrior called the Gryphon built a castle. The castle was eventually abandoned and currently serves as a bandit lair, led by a half-hobgoblin bent on revenge against humans and his partner in crime, a half-drow necromancer. The necromancer has enchanted the bandits armour so that they appear ghostly and they ride undead horses - indeed, the bandits have become known as the Ghost Riders. Three plot hooks are given as to why the PCs should want to destroy the Ghost Riders, with preference given to the hook that grants the PCs land rights for any territory cleared of bandits. This section also includes a new deity - Mordet, Goddess of Death, Prophecy and Transformation, whose priests gain the ability to turn sacrifices into undead beings.At the beginning of the adventure the PCs travel to a human village in the bandit-controlled lands where they experience a raid by the bandits. The party must track the escaping bandits back to their lair in Gryphon Castle. They travel through the mountains experiencing a few encounters which can help or hinder them, until they find the castle.The castle itself is designed to be what Gaslight have termed a 'living castle' - that is, the inhabitants can be found in different places doing different things dependent on the time of day or night. In addition, there is information on how to deal with the bandits if they are alerted to the PCs presence, or if they are in retreat from the PCs. This is in some ways similar to the 'Alert Factor' in FFGs 'The Giants Skull' adventure, though more complex. A chart outlines the NPCs whereabouts, cross-referenced to a time scale. This chart can be photocopied and used for tracking purposes. Advice is also given on the types of actions that may raise the castle to 'On Alert', and enemy actions when 'In Retreat'. In addition, each location of the castle has a summary table of the NPCs that are likely to be there at different times of the day, and if 'On Alert' or 'In Retreat', along with the relevant EL rating for each time/situation.The rest of the adventure describes the various locations around the castle, and the bandits (and their allies) who reside there, as well as some puzzles and traps. A point of note is a sidebar containing information on a new skill: Creature Knowledge, which is essentially a Knowledge check regarding Creature Types, but has some detailed rules for skill checks. There is also a new creature, Rust Mold, presented. The PCs may explore the crypts below the castle which was once a Na'ssith (ancient lizardfolk) temple, and now houses the undead soul of the Gryphon, tortured to death centuries before in his own castle by the priests of Mordet. In addition, there is an evil pool which could act as a nasty surprise to the party. Various clues to the ancient Na'ssith culture remain and PCs may discover these through investigation.The adventure concludes with some ideas and advice for extrapolation of some of the ideas presented in the adventure, including rebuilding the castle, or taming and training a griffon which the PCs encounter early on (including rules for this). The remainder of the module contains statistics for the creatures and NPCs in the adventure, new monsters (Animated Object (Guardian Door), Ghost Horse, Hookraven, and Tomb Defender), new magic items (earring of spiders, helm of daylight, and skull of ancient knowledge), and a new spell (ghost armor).The High Points: This well-organised and -presented adventure is the thinking person's dungeon crawl. The rules for the 'living castle' idea seem very workable, and the way they are presented throughout the text decreases the amount of housework that the idea could represent. The actual adventure itself continues this theme, with logical explanations of situations, and innovative concepts (such as the Rust Mold Pit Trap and the ghost armor). I also liked the rules for the Creature Knowledge skill, and will include them as a standard part of my gaming. The notation regarding OGC throughout the text is clear and will be of great benefit to other d20 writers.The Low Points: This adventure is low on plot and role-playing opportunities, though not without them. There is no information on scaling or modifying the encounters to suit parties of different levels, or those not playing the Sun & Scale campaign (that said, this adventure is fairly generic). I found the section on the Sun & Scale campaign at the beginning to be more of an advert than directly useful to running the adventure, though there are a few relevant pieces of information.Conclusion: The strengths of The Gryphon's Legacy lie in gameplay, tactics and dungeon-crawling. There are a couple of usable concepts outside the adventure itself - the 'Living Castle' feature and the Creature Knowledge skill rules - which bring it a cut above the standard dungeon crawl, but it still lacks complexity of plot and has limited roleplaying opportunities. It should be relatively easy to use outside the Sun & Scale campaign, with some minor modifiers, though the module would have benefited from some direct advice on these issues.</blockquote>

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