A short, 7-page PDF from
Ronin Arts,
Athenaeum Arcane: Valuable Paintings provides a DM with a number of paintings for use in his game as either non-magical treasures or plot devices. The product's layout and design is clean, though it does have rather wide, textured grey margins, which seem excessive — cleaner, white margins would probably be a better call (and easier on the ink cartridge, too). The cover, a sketchy portrait of a rather dour elf by Theodore Wing III and from Ronin Arts's Character Porfolio Two, fits the texts well, and the colors worked well.
The entry for each painting includes a description of the painting, an Appraise DC (with historical information), its value (split into individual values for craftsmanship and historical importance), and any special notes there might be about potential buyers and sellers. The values of the paintings range from 1 gp for
Beautiful Creatures to 2050 gp for
Secrets. I particularly liked the inclusion of an Appraise DC, but found its coupling with the historical information odd, as succeeding at an Appraise check wouldn't give any information on the history of the item. What I would have liked to see were DCs for Knowledge (History or something else appropriate depending on the painting) or Bardic Knowledge checks to accompany the background of the painting. It's easy enough to graft this onto the work, but the fact that it wasn't there jumped out at me right away.
The actual content is fine, and I liked the inclusion, for instance, of
Beautiful Creatures, an essentially worthless painting and could see its inclusion in a campaign as a subtle, but rather amusing joke and a way to invest the world and NPCs with some meaning (the players, if they know its a worthless painting, could find it on the wall of a merchant, which tells them that he's at least got no taste in art and may be a poseur or nouveau riche). Similarly, the background notes on
The Rulers were also nice, even if I found the painting (kittens playing on the crenellations of a guard tower) strained my disbelief a little bit. Finally, I found it interesting that, of all the paintings in the product, only one, the
Duridhe Family Portrait, was a portrait, given the number of portraits that folks painted over the years and given the stylistic changes in them. Of course, I'm not suggesting that the product be filled with descriptions of portraits, but one or two more portraits (perhaps one of a noble) would have been nice.
As a product,
Athenaeum Arcane: Valuable Paintings aims at providing plot hooks, as the sidebar on the first page of the text notes, and the PDF is somewhat successful at doing so. Sometimes, the hooks are obvious (such as the sample hooks, retrieve the
Duridhe Family Portrait or collect all four paintings in Moldar Gisk's
Planes series), but, just as often, there isn't an obvious hook — the text for
Full Moon Terror, a clockwork novelty painting, mentions its rarity, but nothing else that serves as a hook. And, for me, that's a problem, as most of the implied hooks have the Fed-Ex vibe that tends to make CRPG gamers so frustrated and would make pen-and-paper gamers frustrated, too, as there's not much depth there. That said, the germ of an idea is there (Why are the gnomes painting werewolves chasing gnomes? Why clockwork? Maybe the village where it was painted has a lycanthropy problem and the painting's a clue as to why gnomes disappear into the woods in the middle of the night and the village's feeling of hopelessness at the curse), but the extrapolation is entirelty up to the DM. A few more overt suggestions for hooks and variation in those hooks would go a long way towards making the product more successful.
Score: 3 — Good content, but shy on meeting its goal of providing plot hooks for the DM.
