Game: The Book Of Unusual Treasures
Publisher: Bad Axe Games
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 17th, July 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00
Don’t get confused. Just sit back and enjoy the rather rare combination of a thoroughly professional, attractive and entirely practical book.
Why could it get confusing? What’s so unusual about Bad Axe Games’ The Book Of Unusual Treasures? It’s not the usual Bad Axe Games mini-book size. That’s not really what draws your attention to the front cover. It’s great front cover; a bloated ogre thing with just the telltale blurring and surreal touches to make me think of Christopher Shy. Oh! It is a Christopher Shy front cover! Excellent. And the author? Philip Reed himself! The Book Of Unusual Treasures is also a Ronin Arts product. Kudos to the partnership, if I had my way it’ll be a run away success. The Ronin Arts logo is on the front of the book but it just manages to hide in plain sight a bit.
Philip Reed, publishing under the oft-renamed company (generally Ronin something), has published PDFs like 101 Mundane Treasures, 101 Spellbooks, Tomes of Knowledge, and Forbidden Grimoires and 101 Arcane Spell Components already. Yeah, The Book Of Unusual Treasures is a marriage of these products. Now, I have all three of those PDFs and found them handy but don’t use them often enough – sometimes I can click up a PDF and grab something from it on the fly. Sometimes that just doesn’t work. I’ve found making a quick grab for a PDF works best when you have a few minutes to find what you want – while the players are chatting. This works well for lining up the next NPC or even the next scene or plot twist in an adventure. It even works when I’ve the foresight (when winging an unexpected scene) to think ahead to an unusual treasure. There isn’t enough time to fire up a PDF even as the characters pull books from the raided library, open a chest or loot a body. If you have a book handy then you just need a few seconds to flick through out pick something at random. I’m someone who often games with a laptop. I imagine if you don’t than a paper book is a thousand times more accessible than a PDF (even if the latter has a Find function).
Unusual Treasures is 94 pages long so the price tag of less than US $14 is rather good!
Chapter one looks at books. There are mundane books such as The Shrinking Remains which tells the story of a cursed corpse, special books such as The Book of Bows which is an encyclopedia of magical bow and arrows (there are five panels on this page to detail the stats for these new arrows) and then there are magical spellbooks like Endridi’s Essential Magery which gives the holder the ability to cast eyebite as 20th caster once per day. There are 18 pages of books in all.
Arcane Spell Components are likely to be a popular chapter. Arcane Spell Components, as a game mechanic, are designed to jazz up the humdrum of spell casting. Adding one of these components to a spell adds something extra but incurs a negative effect as well. You have to match the type of component against the descriptor of the spell you want to cast – acid components can only be used with spells that have the acid descriptor [acid]. There’s about 20 pages of components and about 4 components per page. That’s – you’d never work this out – about 80 components. Pretty good going, I think.
The armor and weapons chapter doesn’t hold lots of magical weapons. The idea is that these specific pieces have so much character – unique appearance, history, quirky feature – that they’re worth about the same. Okay, they have a monetary value about equal to some minor magical stuff and also manage to have special rules to bring in the bonuses. This chapter is ideal for games set in a low or medium fantasy world – and therefore a valuable addition to any experienced GM’s collection.
Of jewelry, clothing and miscellaneous treasure there are also about 10 pages. Once again we’re looking at times which are worthwhile (and sometimes worth a lot) but not magical. I really do think it can be tough thinking up interesting but non-magical items so appreciate most of the items here. Most of the items in here – some of them, I’m afraid to say are a little too mundane and non-magical for my liking. Let’s take the “Gold pieces” described on page 61. There are 2d12 gold pieces and each one is worth… oh, one gold piece! Good heavens. Fancy that. I’ll use those in an emergency. There are also some “Iron keys” which, we’re told, are designed to fit into an item known as a “lock”. I couldn’t actually find this mysterious “lock” anywhere else in the book. Enough with the sarcasm – there is a fine line between the mundane items you’ve forgotten about or where never likely to think about and those mundane items that aren’t worth mentioning. We do cross that line now and then but not very often in The Book Of Unusual Treasures.
We’re missing about twenty pages at this point. Miscellaneous Treasures is the last section in the last chapter. The appendix is a funny creature. What turns a chapter into an appendix? The first appendix is 10 pages long and full of “unusual spells” (and some d20 players will pay $14 for 10 pages of spells of this quality). Perhaps because spells are intangible they’re relegated to the world of appendix. The next appendix keeps to this theory; three pages of unusual feats. Alas, appendix three destroys this idea as it lists pages of unusual poisons. The unusual materials and unusual skills appendixes ensures that the book is well stocked with odds and ends. The last appendix really is an appendix and lists everything in the book by value; cheapest first.
I’ve pointed out some minor things – the difference between a chapter and an appendix, that gold coins are too mundane even for a book of unusual treasures and that Ronin Arts have already published much of this book in PDF format. That short list pales into insignificance compared to the overall product. The Book Of Unusual Treasures is unusual because it’s not filled with new rules which change your campaign world or make players wish they had multi-classed to a newly introduced Prestige Class. The Book Of Unusual Treasures is one of those frightfully rare and wonderfully useful supplements which will help any GM in any d20 fantasy setting.
