War Trophies

[Messageboard Golem]

War, and conflict in general, plays a large part in most d20 fantasy campaigns. Whether it serves as a historical background for a world or is a part of an active campaign, war happens.

Now, a lot of things occur in war besides fighting, and one of those things is the collection of trophies of war. Everything from weapons to uniforms to personal possessions is taken by the victors from the defeated and brought back home, to be proudly displayed, hidden away in trunks, or even thrown away.

This 7-page PDF, written by Michael Hammes, presents a dozen trophies of war to help GMs get their players started on the fun hobby of trophy collection. Although these items are designed with the idea of actual war in mind, they can be easily adapted to be gained as the result of a typical adventure.

 

[Vanuslux]

A Dozen War Trophies was an impulse buy. My campaign setting is rather war torn so I figured that I could use a few inspiring items to mix into treasure piles to reflect that. A Dozen War Trophies delivers exactly what the title promises and I found most of them to be just as interesting as I was hoping for.

Appearances - It's a 7 page landscape formatted PDF without any art at all. The layout is good but the purple border running down the left of the page is kind of annoying from a printing perspective, but the fact that it's landscaped pretty much muddles the idea of printing it anyway.

Content - There's a brief introduction about why war trophies make cool treasure, then we get the twelve items of interest. The war trophies are pretty cool and a couple are downright brilliant. My particular favorite is the kobold war basket, something I can see getting a lot of use out of in action, not just as treasure. Most of the other items aren't quite as interesting from a perspective of actual use, but they would all contribute to the goal of adding special flavor to those often dull treasure piles.

There are also a couple of sidebars on role-playing and a new magic weapon quality, blood-bound. The blood-bound quality is interesting from a flavor standpoint but is pretty weak so it's more of a role-playing quality than a really useful one.

In Conclusion - For a little over a buck, this PDF delivers the goods. While not a must have by any means, a lot of campaigns could benefit by treasure with this much history and flavor. I give this product a solid 4-star rating. It would be a five star-product except for the fact that a fair percentage of the items, while cool, also felt kind of obvious.