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Dragon's Hoard: Lost Treasures
One of the newer innovations in PDF products for
d20 are little mini-products, maybe 6-12 pages, priced cheaply,
around a given theme. Phil Reed pioneered the concept, and a lot
of people have followed - some good, some bad. This, "Dragon's
Hoard: Lost Treasures" from Big Finger Games is
one of the better entries.
Essentially, it presents one dragon and its treasure hoard,
including 13 new and unique magic items.
The dragon is Demrellkull, an old Red Dragon, clocking in at a
Challenge Rating of 20. You're given stats for him, as well as
suggested tactics but only a brief description of his background
and personality. And nothing on his physical appearance (though
honestly, I'm not sure how different old red dragons look from
one another). And there's no map of his lair that I can find.
So while not bad, the dragon aspect of this product could have
been better (though it's not bad, you get more than enough). But
the meat of this pdf is really the new magic items. There are 6
major ones and 7 minor. The 6 major ones have fairly extensive
descriptions and histories. 3 of them are weapons (a bastard
sword, a falchion, and a scimitar), the other 3 are miscellaneous
items (a sash, a coin, and a branding iron). The bastard sword,
"The Sorrow of Endless Winter" is a minor artifact. As
you might guess from the name, its enchantment is frost themed.
The 7 minor items get only a couple paragraphs each, and are
mostly miscellaneous items. Though now that I look closely, they
don't seem to all be new items. It reprints a couple from the SRD
- the Pearl of Power and Loadstone. There's also a single wizard
spell, "Martyr's Immolation"
There are 13 pages in the PDF, but only 9 are really of actual
content (1 for the cover, 1 for the intro, 1 for the table of
contents, 1 for the OGL). And 1 is sort of a stat sheet for the
Dragon to use in combat (which is a nice touch, actually). The
PDF is nice and clean looking, and is fully bookmarked. More
bookmark entries than pages, and the bookmarks are broken up into
categories. Kind of overkill, since how hard can something be to
find in a 13 page PDF? Like a needle in a shot of whiskey. But
another nice touch, nevertheless.
There's a handful of art, mostly clip art, but nonetheless, nice
looking. And the PDF makes good use of color, for instance, where
most things are in bold face, they are also red, which makes it
easy to jump from important bit to important bit. (It would be
nice if they had a version of the PDF for printing, I'm not sure
if they do or not).
As a PDF describing a dragon and it's hoard, it's pretty good. As
I said, I do think they could have fleshed out the dragon and his
lair more, but that's not the real draw of this PDF - the real
draw are the new magic items. Those are interesting, and unique.
So I'm giving it a B- (I was going to give it a
B, 'til I noticed that a couple of the lesser magic items were
just from the SRD). But bear in mind, that is pretty much
relative to other similarly priced/sized PDFs. You probably
aren't looking for a CR 20 Red Dragon, but the major magic items
are interesting. If you're looking to buy a PDF for $2, this
compares favorably to the competition. (And really, what else RPG
related can you buy for $2? Not much. I think Goodman games has a
print mini version of a Dungeon Crawl Classic for $2, but that's
like a promo deal)
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