Magic Item Compendium Review (D&D)

[Cynical Cat]

I have a small confession to make: I love magical goodies. I love them in Warhammer, I love them in D&D, and I especially love them in Earthdawn. On the other hand, I don't like the high priced barely useful items that sometimes crop up in D&D land with no other purpose than to seemingly bulk up a magic items listing without making the players much more powerful. So with that in mind, here's my review.

Title: Uninspired, but it does clearly convey what the book is about.

Cover: Generic adventurer guy with a bunch of magic items and an action pose. Bland but on topic.

Overall Contents: We've seem some of these before, but most of the goodies are new and they're all useful. A lot of the items are quite appropriate to low and mid level adventurers and retain a degree of utility even for higher level ones. So overall utility of the book is good no matter how high or low powered your campaign is.

Interior Art: Good. Not all of it new, although a lot of it is.

Specifics: The book lists new weapon and armour properties and then new specific weapons and armour. It then goes on to deal with magical augment crystals, magical gear you wear, and magical tools. It then deals with sets of magic items, something D&D has generally done only with artifacts, where the whole is more powerful than the sum of the component pieces. Magic item descriptions are organized in a new way that is clear and concise.

The Good Stuff:

Augment crystals are a new kind of magic item. They modify weapons and armour, giving them additional magical properties. They come in least (needs a masterwork weapon), lesser (must have +1 enhancement bonus), and greater (+3 enhancement). Each type of armour giving item (so yes it will work with your bracers of armour or your magic plate) or weapon can have one active at a time and you can switch them out easily. There's a whole bunch, they're quite nifty, and the Rogue gets some love with two weapon enhancements that will help him with his undead/construct problem.

Relics are divinely connected magic items. They have a good kick, but they require the user to make some kind of sacrifice and be a follower of the same deity. They aren't a new concept, but there is a whole bunch in the book.

Next on the new gear list are runestaves. They are like standard staves, except they don't have charges. Instead they're functions are powered by burning a spell or spell slot of equal or higher level than the runestaff spell you want to cast. Essentially, they broaden the spell selection of any caster who is using one. They are comparatively cheap to create and there is a whole bunch in the book. Your pyromaniac sorcerer is no longer the red dragon's bitch.

Lastly, there are a pair of themes running through the wonderous item lists. One is augmenting skills/and or class abilities that haven't gotten a lot of attention previously. If you class has a nifty power, odds are there is now an item that makes you better at it. The other is items that do X, where X is a useful power or boost to another power. They have three charges, renewed daily, and you can spend the charges individually or sometimes all at once. These items are comparatively cheap, not overly powerful, but handy in a critical moment.

The charts at the back: There are new magic item charts at the back so you can throw these things in as random loot and there an alternate method of generating magic items is presented. Finally, there is a page with a placement diagram about what slot what type of magic item takes up, so if you're even unsure about what goes where from a previous publication a glance will solve your problems (the new format has that info already).

Overall: You like magical toys and D&D, this is definitely a good one to have. There's a lot of goodies and many of them are novel or interesting and almost all of them will have at least one member of the party really interested in acquiring them.

[Rogue 9]

I picked up the MIC soon after release and have not been disappointed. It unfortunately proliferates the potentially game-breaking idiocy of metamagic rods, but since that was introduced in 3.5 core, it can hardly be helped. Other than that, I have few complaints.