Wondrous Items Of Power

[Messageboard Golem]

Wondrous Items of Power delivers 65 unique magical trinkets the likes of which no fantasy adventure has ever seen! Its 160 pages give complete background details on each item, from how and why it was made to where it has been, who owns it, and who covets it now, all presented in storyteller form ideal for the game master to plug right into his game. Then all the stats for the monsters, owners, protectors, tricks, traps, and what have you are given so the player characters can interact with the wondrous item

 

[Simon Collins]

Beware! This review contains major spoilers.
This is not a playtest review.

Wondrous Items Of Power is the third in Fast Forward's three-volume tomes on items 'of power'. This one, strangely enough, details some wondrous items.

Wondrous Items of Power comes in at $26.99 for a 160-page hardcover book (currently reduced at EN World's online store). This is fairly average pricing (cheaper than Freeport COA, about the same as Dragonstar and more expensive than FFG's Spells & Spellcraft). Space usage is also fairly average.

Apart from the interesting front cover depicting a clawed hand holding a lava-like ball, the remainder of the 'art' inside is actually a series of touched-up photos of the replica items from the book sold by Fast Forward. I don't know whether to praise them for this clever marketing idea or despise them for their commerciality. I guess I'll give them the benefit of the doubt as it's hard enough to make a buck in this life! That said, I found the pictures fairly unimpressive - use of colour might have improved the visual effect.

The book is split into two sections.

In the first section, the 65 items presented in the accessory are each given a background history and introduction using a short story using a two-page spread for each item (130 pages). No stats are given in this section, it is purely prose. The stories range in writing quality and style, from standard short story format to fairy tale-like prose to a diary. On the whole, I enjoyed most of the stories and most leant themselves well to adventure hooks that might introduce the item into a campaign. Though the introduction of the book states that the stories have attempted to keep their settings as standard as possible, I did not find this to be true - several of the stories were set in identifiably historically-influenced settings with their encumbent gods and language - I found this to enhance the atmosphere of the story where it occurred but was concerned about the changes that might need to be made to the items to integrate them into an ongoing campaign.

In the second section (16 pages), the game statistics of each item (along with NPC and monster stats where applicable) are given. In several cases, the statistics did not fully reflect the implications of the story in the first section and also had mistakes in them, or lacked full information. All the items tend to be fairly powerful, at the level of minor artifacts and lack creation pricing in line with this power level.

Some examples of the items include:
* Celtic Dragon Amulet - an amulet designed by a dragon-hating elf which enables the wearer to become immune to the attacks of dragons after being subjected to them - for instance, once the wearer has experienced (and survived!) the breath attack of a red dragon, she is then immune to all further red dragon breath attacks.
* Falcon Dagger - a dagger discovered in a tar pit by a soon-to-be paladin giving a +1 to saving throws, a single wish, and vibrates before the wielder is attacked. It is linked to a giant falcon who may become the wielder's companion.
* Dumortierite Brooch Of Reflection - a brooch worn by a sorcerer whose job it is to bring rogue spellcasters to justice. The brooch has the ability to reflect spells back at the caster.

Conclusion:
The fiction that introduces and gives the background to the wondrous items in the book is generally pretty good at stimulating the imagination, and providing lead-ins to introducing the item into a campaign. Several of the items have a definite setting (much of it Egyptian in tone) but they are not beyond integration with a little work.

The statistical side of the items in Section 2 let the book down for me - I was hoping for more detail on each item and I would have liked to see something along the lines of FFG's Personal Growth Items - where the item's powers grow or are discovered as the owner grows in power. Some of the items here such as the Celtic Dragon Amulet nearly got there but this aspect could have been put to more use, making these items more usable across levels.

Despite the proselytizing in the introduction on the benefits of fictional wonder versus statistical information, I found the book to be unbalanced on this level. I suspect that the errors in the statistical section and the focus on the fiction are a reflection of either the authors' lack of understanding, or interest in the minutiae, of the d20 rules.

Finally, I felt that due to the power of the items, a GM was only likely to introduce one or two of these items into his campaign. I feel it unlikely that the cost of the tome would be worth the limited use that would be made of the content for most GMs.

Note: Four additional items can be downloaded free at Fast Forward's website.

 

[Psion]

Wondrous Items of Power

Wondrous Items of Power is the third book in the items of power series of books by Fast Forward Entertainment, following Rings of Power and Swords of Power.

A First Look

Wondrous Items of Power is a 160-page hardbound book priced at $26.99. This is typical of an FFE book of this size, but a little expensive compared to other d20 books on the market of similar size.

The cover of the book depicts a claw holding a glowing sphere; the picture appears to be a photo of an amulet or sculpture touched up with filters to add a glow to the orb and give the picture an oil-painting look.

The interior is black-and-white. Most of the interior illustrations also appear as touched up photographs of jewelry and novelty weapons.

The interior text is modestly sized, apparently a little denser than Rings of Power. The interior editing does appear better than Rings of Power. A variety of authors contribute to the book, and the writing style of the text pieces varies. Some are interesting reads, while others are dry are excessively florid.

A Deeper Look

The format of Wondrous Items of Power is very similar to the previous books. The bulk of the book has stories setting forth the background of the various magic items, and the end of the book contain summary game statistics for all of the items and some of the characters mentioned earlier in the book. Fortunately, this book does not contain revamped item creation rules as Rings of Power did.

Most of the items included match those in the “wondrous item” category as described in the DMG, primarily items of jewelry, but also other items such as egyptian style canopic jars, candles, hourglasses, and figurines/statuettes. The book also has a variety of non-sword weapons, primarily daggers.

Many of the items are artifact level in power, such as the very powerful Celtic Dragon Amulet that grants the wearer immunity to the powers of a dragon once exposed to it. There are a few items that are more reasonable in power, such as the Eagle Amulet, which allows the user to project their senses in a straight line overhead of below their body, at the risk of becoming stranded from their body. However, there is no attempt to apply the standard item creation rules even to those items that warrant it.

In some cases, there are some rules problems in the translation from the item depicted in the stories to game terms. For example, the Amulet of Kith Ator is said to protect the wearer from the breath of a dragon, but in the writeup, it only grant spell resistance (useless against supernatural abilities) in the game statistics. In another example, one item grants "+2 protection", not saying exactly what this means; is this a bonus to AC, saves, or both?

The stories vary widely in writing style and inspiration. Some are a little dry. Others tell interesting stories, perhaps providing ideas for campaign events, or even for campaigns. For example, the story of the Celtic Dragon Amulet is possibly more interesting for the possible background behind “dragon towers” that GMs might want to integrate into a campaign than for the background of the item itself. Some would be harder to integrate into an ongoing campaign, such as the Amulet of Kith Ator, which is set against the backdrop of a setting in which a powerful human warlord strikes back against long dominant elf, dwarf, and dragon nations.

Conclusion

As I said in the first review of this sort, I find the inclusion of a large amount of story material of dubious value in RPG products, as usually you can find fantasy fiction cheaper and better written on the shelves of your local bookseller. That said, these stories are targeted at providing backgrounds of items that you can potentially integrate in your campaign, and might be a bit easier to digest and integrate than fantasy novels would be.

A few of the ideas are pretty good and do provide for the possibility of interesting and flavorful campaigning, though, as said, some of the ideas will be harder to integrate into an established campaign. Many of the items are Egyptian in nature, and are especially appropriate if you base parts of your campaign on Egyptian mythology.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the book is that a great many items are artifact-level power, and even those that aren't are not written up in the standard item creation format. However, the items have an flavorful feel that may make a nice change of pace from the often formulaic feel of standard d20 items.

-Alan D. Kohler

 

[Khur]

Artifacts, wondrous items, and magic power are all draws to the D&D game. Enchanted items add aspects of wonder, fear, and fun, as heroes acquire everything from trinkets to cursed baubles to items of world-shaking power. Such things are staples in fantasy literature, media, and games. In fact, the popular computer game Baldur's Gate and its descendants (Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and so on) had as one of their features brief, yet detailed, histories and stories for many magic items in the game--even minor ones. Players of those games seemed to enjoy this.

Wondrous Items of Power tries to take to heart the approach of giving a magic item context and history. The preface of the book states that the story is at least as important as the mechanics. The "philosophy" of the book is to give the items unique flavor, pasts, and abilities through a focus on the background of the item and secondary focus on the item's statistics. Where an item demands it, it becomes more like a minor artifact than a typical item.

Average in design, the book is serviceable, but no better than could be done in a word-processing program. The font choice is large and leads me to believe it was chosen to make the page-count higher. Most of the "art" is digitally manipulated photography of actual items, and most of it is too dark and uninspiring. Interestingly, the items used for the photography can be purchased from Fast Forward. Whether this is tacky, overt cross marketing or brilliant salesmanship, I leave to the reader to decide.

The book certainly has an emphasis on story and background, as 126 of the book's pages are devoted to item histories at the rate of two pages per item. This would be a lot of fluff even if it were good--and the design choices in the book actually bloat these stories into taking up more space than they need. Further, what you really get here is not so much each item's context and background as just a story related to the item (which is sometimes historic) or in which the item appears. The writing in these stories ranges from absolutely abysmal to somewhat entertaining and well crafted, but the bad outweighs the good.

Far from being "standard" and "easily blended into any standard fantasy role-playing game setting" (to directly quote the book's introduction), many of these stories have very specific elements. Some of those specifics focus on what must be Fast Forward's Dragon Elves setting (from an online collectible card game), while other stuff is pseudo-Egyptian. As shown above, these latter stories have no real relation to actual Egyptian culture, myth, or history except in the evocation of certain names and cultural stereotypes. Many more of the stories are so flat as to have nothing very useful for expanding a campaign at all. There's very little here that a creative adjudicator couldn't create for himself in a short time, and there's nothing for which the money wouldn't have been better spent on a few fantasy paperback novels.

To show you what I mean by abysmal and pseudo-Egyptian, here's a quoted passage:

ZonShuun is a little known two-headed deity of the Egyptians. Having two heads doesn't seem to have caused the deity any problems, but it caused no end of difficulties for the humans who tried to worship the being. For a short time, early in the religion, Ettins were well thought of and brought in to try and help the faith along. This didn't work out as the giant creatures were constantly eating the worshippers and ignoring the shouted requests of the clerics of the faith. All manner of two-headed cattle, two-headed snakes, two-headed turtles and other two-headed creatures of all types were constantly being brought into the temples with disastrous results. These creatures always died quickly and didn't seem very divinely inspired at all. Always, when the two-headed monsters were brought in there was way too much eating of worshipers and the temple was always left a mess. While it is true that the devotees of the deity became awesome fighters, it cut down way too much on the number of worshipers and good fighters don't seem inclined to donate much to their faith.
[end excerpt]

The mechanics don't redeem Wondrous Items of Power. While Fast Forward has thoughtfully included relevant statistics for some characters depicted in the stories, the execution here is not good. None of the statistics are in standard statistics blocks, characters and creatures tend to have statistics well beyond heroic average, and the stats are rife with mistakes such as AC without Dexterity modifiers and so on. The items don't comply with item rules found in the DMG, even when they obviously should, and mortals (that can still be encountered) constructed many of them. A great number of the objects have abilities in the artifact range, while a few have abilities that are just absurd in power.

One amulet offers +15 to AC--+5 armor, +5 shield, +5 ring of protection according to the text--and an SR of 19-85 (depending on the opponent casters race) that allows the wearer of the amulet to cast a spell that fails against him. All this created by those who would take orders from a 17th-level fighter (unless we are to assume the fighter created the amulet himself). Does this seem strange?

Admittedly, some of these items are interesting and even useful, but there are no references for a player to recreate any of them. Further, there are only 16-pages of game statistics. All of the rest of the book is (largely bad) story, a few pages of prose on types of magic items, the introduction, the table of contents, an index (for 3 books, not just this one), or the OGL.

One has to ask oneself if a book that costs $27, but contains only 63 magic items, is worth it even if the items are great. The DMG itself is only a few dollars more and it contains hundreds of items. Compound the dubious value with many instances of poor writing and bad mechanics, and the value of this tome becomes even more uncertain. As stated, Wondrous Items of Power would be a questionable purchase if it were perfectly executed. That it's such a mixed bag of shoddy, average, and the rare spark of good, makes it one to leave on the shelf should you come across it. Failing even according to its own stated aim, Wondrous Items of Power is far from extraordinary--it's worse than mundane.

This review was originally written for Gaming Frontiers on 03/28/03.

 

[ASEO]

I have to ask...

How does this company stay in business putting tripe like this out?

Is Jim Ward just burning his retirement fund to keep the company afloat despite the horrible D20 (although you can barely call them D20 since the author's grasp of the D20 rules evidently is very limited) products that this company continually dumps on the market?

ASEO out

 

[JoeGKushner]

I personally think that we reviewers tend to be harder on them then the people who enjoy them.

Look at Friday the 13th or some other movie/t.v. series that you know is of dubious quality but remains on the air.

They have a wide number of products that appeal to a wide number of people. To the common person, is it really important to get game mechanics right as long as they're getting what they want?

 

[trancejeremy]

Actually, the Friday the 13th TV show was pretty good. Though I think it went off the air about 10 years ago.

As near as I can figure, Mr. Ward must have made decent money from designing the DBZ CCG, and put a lot of that money into the company.

Some of their products have sold, I think (they have nice ideas, I just wish they'd learn the d20 rules). The Demons & Devils cyclopedias sold well. And Dungeonworld did okay, though the pulping of it had to hurt.

 

[Vanuslux]

Well, by the nature of review a reviewer is going to look at something with a more critical eye. Most casual users of these products aren't going to notice a lot of the problems with a product. And ultimately those problems may not matter much to the casual user, especially those who buy things for ideas rather than for total utility. That doesn't mean companies like Fast Forward Games shouldn't be called out on their mechanical ineptitude. Personally, I have plenty of ideas. What I lack is the time to invest in fleshing out and playtesting mechanics to go along with them. Therefore poor mechanics is a major turn-off in a product from me...since I mostly buy for those mechanics.

If Fast Forward Games paid attention to blatant problems in their product line they might not have ended up with so many pulped books...and apparently they've not even learned their lesson from that. Companies like that deserve to be singled out and mocked as examples of how not to do things. The fact that there exist people who like their work does not change the fact that there exist more people who huff paint thinner than there are those that feel good about their purchase of these products. That's not saying that their work is completely without merit...their ideas are pretty good and God knows that I'd merrily buy many of their products if I didn't have the luxury of being able to look through books pretty thoroughly before buying them...but substance has far more value to me than style and I think reviewers should always concentrate on the former since style is much more subjective to personal taste (yes, substance is also subjective, but not nearly so much so).

This is just my 3:40am ramblings on the subject...don't mind me.

 

[Khur]

To be honest, it really bothers me to give anything a low rating. This product just didn't measure up to quality or quantity standards I have. Overpriced and low quality are bad bedfellows.

On the subject of mechanics, they do indeed matter to the casual user--bad mechanics means that something can break down in the game, spoiling the fun. The casual user (by nature of being casual) has less time to scrutinize mechanics to make sure they work in the game. It's the hardcore gamer who tweaks everything and makes sure it works beforehand. To this latter character, it seems to me, there's less importance in the solidity of actual mechanics and more importance in ideas.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

One of the biggest drawbacks of the book is that a great many items are artifact-level power, and even those that aren't are not written up in the standard item creation format. However, the items have an flavorful feel that may make a nice change of pace from the often formulaic feel of standard d20 items.


I can nod to that. What really bothers me is the formula for save DC's on poison. It just doesn't feel right that they're all the same.