A Dozen Wooden Treasures from
Ronin Arts is a seven-page PDF detailing (wait for it) a dozen wooden treasures. I like the idea — I somehow missed it when it first came out — and, as Michael Hammes points out in his introduction, wood is a very common material in our everyday life, yet it somehow doesn't really figure into treasure in the D&D game, which centers itself on metal very heavily. It's a natural void, so the question ends up being: how well does Hammes fill that void in this PDF?
There is no art, and, like most other Ronin Arts products, the layout is clean and professional. I can't really emphasize enough how much I like the simplicity and functionality of the design here; for a short PDF, this is how things should be, in my opinion. I did, in the course of reading, notice some odd stylistic choices and minor typographical errors, but nothing there struck me as being so horrible as to impact my enjoyment of the content. Something that did strike me as odd, as far as layout and metaproduct concerns was the large side-bar on spell descriptions (under the heading of "Role-Play Alert") that seems remarkably out of place in the PDF. There's no direct connection with the text on the page it appears on, although it might have been inspired by
staff of whitefire.
On the whole, I found the PDF's content rather unremarkable and unexciting. It's not that the material is bad — it's solid and useable as written. For some reason, most of it didn't strike me as being anything that would be dropped into my games. Nothing jumped out at me as screaming "use me!" The iron-banded club and primitive shortspear are really only variant weapons, the former slightly better than its counterpart and the latter, slightly worse. The
staff of whitefire is an altered
staff of fire that combines some light effects with fire effects. A nice idea, but there's no real hook to it. The write-up mentions that they're frequently crafted by the Cabal of Orsus, but that's the only information we get — as to who and what Orsus is and why the members of the cabal make the staves isn't mentioned. That's the type of information that would make this item jump out at me. Admittedly, it's a bit of a catch-22 — too much information and the short PDF almost defeats its purpose, too little and the PDF isn't useful enough. The galoshes, the collapsing stool, and the wooden circlet all suffered from a similar blandness — nice, but unexciting items.
What did I like? I liked the bowls set, which would be a nice game to have PCs play as they visit a noble's estate — especially in a pulpy game where the hard-boiled heroes show up at the estate of the Colonel to find him, his daughters, and any number of hangers-on drinking and playing lawn games (some sort of odd D&D meets
The Great Gatsby and
The Big Sleep type thing). The skis struck me as a good idea, although they were pretty unremarkable — there wasn't a hook so much as mechanical suggestions for adjudicating them (I would suggest using Balance checks rather than making a Ski skill, though). And, that, for me, is the difference between what the product does well (like the bowls set or "Dicing with the Devil") and what it does less well (like the skis, which I really want to like, or the iron-banded club, which I didn't) — there's an opportunity to put down some specific information — make these specific skis belonging to someone or designed a particular way — that's missed completely. And this impacts the utility of these items in my opinion.
In conclusion, it's a well-done product not done well enough, if that makes any sense. Hammes is a solid writer with good ideas, and the layout and design are exceptional. But, in the end, it never got specific enough to make me want to consider using it somehow.
Score: 2.5, rounded up to 3
