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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Khur" data-source="post: 2010358" data-attributes="member: 5583">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 <a href="http://www.unitedplaytest.com/gamingfrontiers/index.html" target="_blank">Gaming Frontiers</a> on 03/28/03.</blockquote>

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