I purchased Volume 1 of the Tome of the Ancients series yesterday along with the new weapons accessory. I'm just tired of the B-Flat items in the DMG and wanted something new and the solid reviews on RPGNow encouraged me to purchase this product. I wanted to review the new accessory, but I don't see it on here, so I'm reviewing the Artifacts volume instead.
If you just want a summary or general impression, I'll give it up here so you don't have to read the entire review. I thought this product was generally very good. The large volume of sample items are nearly worth the purchase price on their own and I've already used their item building system to make two items that I plan to use in my D&D session tomorrow. The format may be a little outdated and there's a very small amount of flourish, but the font is large enough to be easy on the eyes and I've never had a problem with the single-column setup.
Since I came here originally to review the weapons accessory, that has to weigh in to my review of this product as well. I paid $7 for about 45 pages of general "fluff" material having to do mostly with background, physical description, and all that jazz and 25 pages of pure "crunch" (in the accessory) about weapons and their magical abilities. The accessory adds very little to the history, but it adds a lot of detail on the metamagic side as well as a boat load of new magical abilities for weapons, which I liked a lot.
But I digress. I only mention the accessory because it's an important aspect of how I feel about the artifacts book. The biggest downside to the artifacts book its self is that they only have the one accessory. I would prefer to have that level of detail on every artifact category. That would make one heck of a book.
So I deducted a single star because the product under review (I'll give the accessory 5 stars when I have the chance) doesn't add quite enough detail for me as a stand alone product. I will buy the rest of the accessories if they complete the set, assuming they plan to make an accessory for each of the five item categories they use in the book.
45 PAGES (+25 for the accessory)
$5 ($4 on sale; $3 for the accessory)
4 STARS OUT OF 5 (Would be better if it were larger and more detailed)
