Dungeons and Dragons Blog

The name pretty much speaks for itself. The Magic Item Compendium is a book chock full of magic items.  The introduction discusses the fact that only a handful of magic items from the DM’s guide are widely used and that the goal of the book is to provide useful magic items with clearly defined effects and activtation times.  Some of the magic items are from older products but there’s just as many that are brand new.

Probably the coolest part of Magic Item Compendium that I noticed when flipping through it the first time are the full color pictures.  There’s a ton of them and in my opinion, they really add a lot to the product because now you can visualize what the magic item looks like. 

Chapter One is Armor.  You get a bunch of new effects for both armor and shields as well as some specific sets of armor.  Spearblock armor helps deflect damage from ranged weapons while magic eating armor allows you to actually heal yourself when you make a save against a targeted spell.  Foxhide Armor allows you to hide a little better and an overhead shield comes in really handy against an opponent that’s in the air.  The chapter closes things out with some augment crystals, which can be attached to your armor for an extra effect.  A restful crystal allows you to get adequate rest despite wearing your armor while a crystal of aquatic adaptation allows you some bonuses when you’re in the water.

Chapter Two has the weapons and it’s set up just like the armor section.  You get magical effects, then specific weapons and then augment crystals.  This is a much bigger chapter then the armor section and you get a lot of magical effects.  If you’re into crossbows, you might like a quickloading variety which can hold up to 100 bolts and a warning weapon helps out your initiative.

Chapter Four has clothing.  Robes, boots, amulets and just about anything worn on your body is in here.  You get low end items like Armbands of Might which help you on strength based skill checks to some pretty high end items like the Amulet of Second Chances, which basically lets you restart an entire turn once per day as if it never happened.  The most powerful magic item in the book is also in this section, the Vest of the Archmagi, which comes with a 200,000 price tage and a 20th caster level.

Chapter Four is tools, which is pretty much everything else.  The portable foxhole is kind of neat and a play on the portable pit.  There also several types of psychoactive skin, which would be similar to Spiderman’s black suit that eventually became Venom.  In this section are the runestaffs, which are a pretty neat new item.  Each runestaff comes with the capability to cast three or four spells.  Then every day, you can replace one your memorized spells of equal or greater level with one of the spells the rune staff allows you to cast.  It gives your spellcaster a bit of flexibility and basically gives him a handful of spells in the bag.

Chapter Five deals with magic item sets.  Somewhat self explanatory, they’re individual magic items that give additional benefits if you complete the entire set.  Kind of neat and it’s the kind of thing you could throw in a tomb, spreading out the magic items so the party has to find them.  The Regalia of the Hero is a neat set for someone being groomed as an eventual military leader while the Wraith’s Woe is a set that is pretty impressive against undead.

Chapter Six deals with using magic items.  It starts off with the identification process and then it gets into how to activate magic items.  It then closes things out with crafting magic items.

Then there’s some interesting appendices.  Appendix one lists all of the magic items by price (from both the DM’s Guide and the Magic Item Compendium).  Appendix two is probably the most useful because it provides updated treasure tables to use and it also lists out all of the magic items by level.  Then the final table is a pretty neat random armor, shield and weapon table that allows you to creat magic weapons on the fly.

All in all, there’s a lot of useful stuff in the Magic Item Compendium although honestly, the book didn’t live up to my high expectations.  It’s not that there’s anything bad about it, I just thought this book was going to be very cool.  Instead, it’s just cool.  It’s still something I want to have on my shelf though so I recommened picking it up.

I’ve had my eyes on this pdf for a while and I finally picked it up when I purchased something else.  Treasure Chest Unlocked - Gems is a quality supplement provided by Sword’s Edge Publishing that provides a DM a detailed description of every gem in the Dungeon’s Master Guide.  For only $3.50, I picked it up on the title and description alone and after reading through it, I’m not disappointed.

Chapter One provides a good description of gemcutting.  It opens up several options for someone who’s taken a craft skill in gemcutting and it provides you with rules on how valuable your gems are after you cut them as well as an optional rule on trying to improve an already cut gem.  Good stuff here and by itself it could provide a solid source of income to a player who takes up the skill and does the job on the side.  Imagine when your players take some time off and your gemcutter increases the value of your lode just by working on the gems.

Chapter 2 is the meat of the book and this is the descriptions of all of the gems.  More importantly, they even provide color pictures and there’s a section on each gem on how hard it is to identify the gem. 

Chapter 3 includes some new rules for harmonizing and harnessing your gems.  Harmonizing allows a person with the harmonize gem feat to tap into the latent magical abilities of a particular gem stone.  Once done, it provides the wearer of the gem certain benefits, usually a small modifier to an ability check or a saving throw.  Harnessing a gem stone basically allows you to suck the life right out of the stone in one big blast.  In a lot of cases, the harnessing allows you to extend the life of a specific spell or increase it’s effectiveness.

Chapter 4 takes you inside the world of gems and provides some organizations you can drop into your world that have an interest in gems and gem cutting.  There’s also a cool cabal that have become obsessed with gem stones.  The cabal has even gone as far as creating a gem golem that’s described in the supplement. 

Overall, I liked the supplement and I have a new found appreciation for gems in my campaign.  I can see myself referring to this when I stock the treasure for a particular encounter and also plan on having a bad guy who can harness gems to blast the players out of the water.  If there’s one thing that I would have liked in the supplement, it would have been a list of the gems and what spells they’re components for.  This is a very minor complaint though because that’s all readily available.  For $3.50, it’s a bargain.

Alright, this is a little later then I would have liked for this.  With the holidays, Amazon.com must have been pretty busy so I didn’t get my book until earlier this week.  Then I had to get through it so I’m about a week later then I wanted.  Anyway, here’s my review of Fiendish Codex II - Tyrants of the Nine Hells.

The name says it all.  Anything and everything you want to know about devils is in the book and I’d say it’s much more of a DM’s book then a players book.  It’s light on prestige classes, feats and spells and heavy on game information.

Chapter 1 kicks things off and like it’s title “All about Devils” it gives you the ins and outs of how devils operate.  It talks about soul harvesting and the hierarchy of the devil caste and there’s a section on the Blood War between demons and devils.  There’s a small section on creating devil encounters and there’s a nice little list of ninety nine devil names you can use to liven things up.

Chapter 2 is the largest and it goes through each of the nine layers of hell.  Each section includes a discussion on the lord of that layer along with it’s dukes.  And then it goes through the important locations on each of the layers.  This is a good 44 pages of the book and there’s a ton of information in here, especially if you’re going to have your players entering the plane of hell.

Chapter 3 is more the player’s section.  There’s a new race called Hellbred and some new feats, including a new type of feat caled the Devil-touched feat.  Most of this is for evil characters so if you play a traditional campaign, this will be more useful for creating your bad guys.  There’s also a few new prestige classes.  The Hellbreaker is particularly interesting.  It’s a thief who specializes in entering infernal strongholds and stealing what’s in sight.  The Hellfire Warlock also makes for a very cool bad guy.  There’s also some new spells, most of which are investiture spells which allow the spellcaster to take on some advantage of a particular devil.

Chapter 4 is the monster section and you get some new devils.  The coolest is the Assasain Devil.  There’s also a front line Spined Devil that’s pretty cool and there’s also a summary of which hardcover books have which devils in them.

Chapter 5 talks about each of the nine lords of hell and has a stat block for their aspects in the event the players want to take them on.  So if you want to take on Asmodeus, he’s CR27 (probably by himself as I’m sure he’ll bring some friends).

Overall, I really enjoyed the book but it’s obviously not for everyone.  If you’re never going to play a devil, then Fiendish Codex II - Tyrants of the Nine Hells isn’t for you.  A large part of my campaign centers around devils though so I can see using this book to it’s max.  In that respect, I give it five stars out of five.

I hadn’t planned on picking up Cityscape this month so I won’t be a doing a formal review.  I’m going to save my money for Fiendish Codex II.  Although, this thread on Wizards.com’s message board provides you with some solid review material to help you come to a decision as to whether it’s for you.  After reading the info, I’m now leaning towards picking it up once I get some Christmas cash but then again, I don’t run a ton of urban campaigns.  My players enjoy dungeon crawls better.  Dungeonscape looks more up my alley.

You can also check out the table of contents.

I figured since I mentioned Complete Arcane several times in my Complete Mage review because Complete Mage builds on the information in Complete Arcane, that it would be worth taking another look at Complete Arcane.  This book is set up very similar to Complete Mage but it does have it’s differences and it’s own benefits.

Chapter one introduces three new classes.  The War Mage is an offensive minded magicuser who’s fit for the battlefield and the Wu Jen is an elemental focused mage that I believe modifies a similar class that was introduced in Oriental Adventures.  I don’t own that product so I can’t say for sure.  The most interesting new class is the Warlock.  These are supernatural beings that invoke magic through force of will.  They don’t receive spells but instead receive invocations, which also modify the Warlocks eldritch blast, which is a ranged attack that the Warlock can impart.  Warlock’s are generally evil so these make for some interesting nemises, and their eldritch blast can get quite powerful at higher levels.

Chapter two is the meat of the book and these are all of the prestige classes. There’s nineteen in all and while some aren’t too interesting, they all can be used in a magic oriented adventure.  Most of my players stick to the basic classes and rarely do they venture too much outside of the prestige classes introduced in Dungeon Master’s Guide.  What I end up using these prestige classes for are the bad guys because they’re basically ready made templates.  I thought the Blood Magus had the most interesting story behind it.  It’s a mage who has been killed, then revived and have a great appreciation for the blood running through their veins.  The Wild Mage is also introduced, although they’re handled quite differently from the old 2E wild magic.

Chapter three introduces a variety of new feats including some draconic feats that are probably built on in Dragon Magic.  Chapter four has a ton of new spells and it also includes all of the Warlocks invocations.  Fireburst is a nice offensive second level spell and I also liked Mass Fire Shield, which is fifth level.    There’s a vareity of spells of all levels and there’s a ton here.  The down side is, if you own the Spell Compendium, you’re going to have some duplication here since some of the spells in that product were originally in Complete Arcane.

Chapter five are the magic items.  There’s a ton of rods, staves and wands and there’s also some new detail on spell books.  The Staff of Mastery (hold person, dominate monster amongst other spell like affects) was cool as was the Staff of Opening. 

Chapter six introduces some new monsters.  The elemental monoliths were particularly interesting (and there was a new spell that allows you to summon them).

Chapter seven talks about arcane campaigns.  It talks about how your run of the mill city would view the appearance of a particular kind of mage and then it also goes into some detail on each of the specialist mages.  There’s a section on spell duels and even some background stuff on arcane organizations.

Complete Arcane is a solid product.  If you want an idea for a unique, magically oriented bad guy, then this is a great book to have.  I thought the spells were a little better then Complete Mage and the magic items gave me some nice ideas.  I give this a solid four out of five stars.

I just got my copy of Complete Mage a couple of days ago and I’ve had a chance to dig through it pretty deeply.  The premise of the book is that it allows players to greatly expand their options for arcane magic.  While Complete Arcane isn’t absolutely neccesary, a lot of the information in Complete Mage builds on what’s in Complete Arcane so to get the most for your money, I recommend that you also own Complete Arcane.

The first chapter of the book is on Fundamentals.  The nature of magic is explored as well as an indepth look at arcane magic.  There’s a cool section on each of the spell schools, including what the personality and philosophy of a given magic school specialist should have.  There’s some interesting stuff to really round out a character and I found myself making notes regarding some minor changes on some of the NPCs I’ve already created for my campaign so they fit better within the book’s description.  There’s also a section on arcane archetypes.  While these aren’t neccesarily different classes, they do give you ideas for pointing a magic user in a specific direction.

Chapter two provides character options.  The first section gives you arcane options for each character class to mix in a little magical variety to spice things up.  For example, one option for the Paladin is the Curse Breaker.  Instead of getting the remove disease ability at sixth level, you can opt to produce remove curse instead.  There’s a section with several new feats, including a new type of feat.  The reserve feat is unique to Complete Mage and are used to augment a spell like ability the character already has. 

Chapter three are your prestige classes.  There are eleven new ones and my favorites are the enlightened spirit and the ultimate magus.  The enlightened spirit is a warlock who’s seen the light and has turned to good.  The ultimate magus is sort of the super mage.  It’s a mix between a wizard and sorcerer so you get the best of both worlds when it comes to casting both innate and learned spells.

Chapter Four are the new spells and there’s quite a few of them.  Although honestly, there’s nothing in this section that really sticks out.  I’m probably the last person who will tell you that you can have too many spells, but that be where we’re at.  I saw a few spells that looked interesting, but nothing that jumped out at me and made say I had to have it for an NPC or a bad guy.

Chapter Five deals with arcane items and there’s some cool stuff in here.  The Ring of Instant Escape looked interesting.  It allows the wearer to escape particularly nasty spells.  The Rod of Spell Channeling appears particularly nasty if you have someone who is linked with a familiar and this could be really useful in conjunction with the Familiar Belt detailed in the book.  This section out of all of them gave me the most ideas to test my players.

Chapter Six discusses arcane adventures.  It provides some themes and then it also has a nice list of 100 adventure ideas.  There’s also some magical locations listed, like Bigby’s Tomb, Boccob’s Reading Room, and an eternal vortex, amongst other things.

I give Complete Mage four stars out of five but I almost gave it a three because I wasn’t really impressed with the spells.  Fortunately the other areas picked it up.  It’s useful and I found some tidbits in here that can help me and got the brain turning.  If you don’t own Complete Arcane, you might want to start with that one first though to get the full effect.

I ran across this supplement at RPGnow.com’s Edge.  It was an impulse buy, but it turned out to be a good one because I really like Octavirate’s Creature Weekly.  And the product is just like it sounds.  Each week, you get a handful of unique creatures that you can drop into your campaign.  It’s a nice way to keep your campaign fresh and if you play a more free style campaign, you can pick and choose what you want to use and drop it immediately into the game you’re running.

I picked up volume one just to check out.  In volume one, you get four new creatures, along with some amazing detail and a ton of templates.  A really cool feature is that the product gives you ideas to drop the new creatures into an alternative genre.  So if you’re playing D20 Modern, you have a detailed description on how to run the creature.  I also enjoyed the artwork.

There’s four new creatures in the first volume.  You get the Erodaemon, the Deadgem, the Platypus (both common and dire) and the Quan-Ko.  If I had to pick a favorite, the Dire Platypus is something I can see using in a one of my campaigns. 

They’re now up to seven volumes and the price is very reasonable (they’re on sale for $2.40 per).  What’s nice is, you check out which new creatures are in which volume and pick and choose.  Like any supplement though, you might buy the product and find two of the four creatures are something you wouldn’t be interested in, but you can say that about any supplement.  There’s stuff you’ll use and stuff you won’t.  But for a couple of bucks, this is definitely a value.  I can see myself picking up a few more of these for sure.

I love RPGnow.com.  You can not only find old first and second edition Dungeons and Dragons products available in pdf format, but there’s a variety of various third party products that are well worth the $5-10 price tag.  One of my latest purchases was written by Philip J. Reed and it’s 101 Spellbooks, Tomes of Knowledge and Forbidden Grimoires.  I’ve written about this before, butI’m a magic junkie.  When a book like Spell Compendium or Tome of Magic come out, I consider it a must buy.  I saw 101 Spellbooks in the top five listing for d20 Spell/Magic Books and I liked the description so I picked it up.

I must say, it far exceeded my expectations.  The books are very well put together, not just for their spell listings but for some of their special affects.  As a DM, I immediately started coming up with ideas to place some of these spell books in my campaign.  I figured some of the books would make nice magical item finds by the party but then there were some very cool books that I could form a nemesis around.

In addition to the spell books, you also get a detailed listing of special books.  While these don’t contain spells, they do give the owner a particular benefit.  Sometimes it’s an increase to a skill while others contain direction to building a certain magic item.  There’s also a variety of mundane books (no special effects, but some interesting items to place throughout a campaign).

Well worth the $7 download price, right?  Well, you get even more.  You get around 75 new spells and while there’s a bit here for everyone, there’s quite a bit if you run a necromancer.  Most of the spells are lower level spells (3rd level and lower) but there are some higher level, including two ninth level spells. 

There’s also some new feats, several of which center around poison.  I particularly liked Concealed Magic, which allows a spell caster to cast a spell discretely without giving away the fact that he’s actually casting a spell.   You also get over a dozen new types of poison and four new skills.

To round things out, you not only get a nice landscape colored version of the book, but you get a black and white profile version that is great for printing (which I did, it looks great).  I enjoyed this product so much that I also plan on checking out the other 101 products.  101 Feats looks particularly interesting.

The Stronghold Builders Guidebook is an older supplement, but it’s still worth looking at.  The name says it all.  The book basically walks you through the steps of building a stronghold.  Whether it’s your players who want to build a fortress for themselves or a dungeon master who wants to build that floating castle while also coming with an idea as to how much it would cost, this is the book that gets you there.

Chapter 1 takes you through the basic steps of building a stronghold.  The stronghold’s location, size and basic components are chosen and then extras and wondrous architecture are touched on.  It also talks about mapping your stronghold and finishing things up.

Chapter 2 is the largest chapter and it starts with an extensive menu of room options and components.  Do you want a basic library or a luxury library?  If you choose the latter, don’t forget you need to hire a librarian.  If you’re a wizard who dabbles in potions, do you go with the basic alchemical laboratory or do you go with the fancy one?  You also get six different choices for bedrooms and you can even throw a tavern in for good measure.  Costs are provided for each, along with how much space each component takes up.

There’s also a detailed section on the walls that make up your stronghold.  Do you want mithral walls?  Then expect to pay through the teeth.  You can also add augmentations to your walls.  You can add magical blades or a fog veil if you’d like.  Along with walls comes some description on the door, windows and locks located through the stronghold.  Like the components, everything has a price.

There’s also an extensive section on extras.  These are basically magical items that don’t take up space in your stronghold but most are fixtures of some sort.  If you want a Decanter of Endless Water, expect to pay up 9,000 gold pieces.  Also discussed are moats and trenches and if neither of those provide the security you want, there’s a discussion on mobile strongholds.  There’s a section on permanent spells and if you don’t want magic to guard your treasure hoard, good old fashioned traps are also discussed.

The final section of this chapter talks about wondrous architecture.  These are basically spell like effects attached to components.  If you don’t think prison bars will keep your prisoners locked up, you can spend 14,000 gold pieces to turn it into a prison of fire.  And if you don’t want to pay for help by the month, you can drop 1,500 gold pieces for an invisible helper to make the bed.

Chapter 3 discusses how to bring strongholds into your campaign.  If discusses the construction of strongholds and how they’re run.  And then there’s sections on protecting and assaulting strongholds.

Chapter 4 provides some sample strongholds and I thought this was the worst part of the book.  The cheap keep is very generic and I wouldn’t find myself using the underwater coral castle.  There’s a floating tower and then the one I could see myself using is the Dwarven Redoubt. 

Outside of chapter four, which is basically just a throw in, I thought the Stronghold Builders Guidebook is a quality supplement.  It’s probably not completely neccesary, but I think it provides a good foundation for players and DMs that want to design their own dungeons and fortresses.  And it also gave me some great ideas that I know I’ll be throwing into my campaign.

I know I promised you the Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook, but I have a personal reason for changing gears.  Instead, we’re going to look at a quality product from Goodman Games called Idylls of the Rat King.  This is the first in a series of adventures called Dungeon Crawl Classics.

When I was a kid, we never really role played well.  We didn’t know what it was called it at the time, but we dungeon crawled.  We went from room to room, clearing things out.  Several of the old Greyhawk modules catered to this and while most had a plot behind the module, we ignored it.  Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics do the same thing.  They’re heavy on combat with less emphasis on NPC interaction and things always end up going down in a dungeon.

Not there isn’t a plot because there’s a good one.  The characters start up in a mining town (Silverton) where the silver caravans have been held up due to goblin raids.  Some aren’t your standard goblins because they’ve been infected by a wererat.  The goblins have taken up residence in an old abandoned silver mine.  Seems the leader has a grudge against the town, which adds an extra dimension to the whole thing. 

The module offers a few different hooks to get things started and you even get a solid history of the town.  The silver mine has four solid levels full of monsters and a handful of some interesting traps.  There’s also a ton of my favorite, secret doors.  And then of course at the end, you square off against the main bad guy.

All in all, this is a great adventure for both seasoned players and new players.  New players will like it because they’ll be able to get their tactics down without having to role play too much and seasoned players will recognize the old schoolness of the module and have pleasant flashbacks of their early days of Dungeons and Dragons.

Great stuff.