The Adventurer’s Vault
A review
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The Adventurer’s Vault for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is a hardbound, 224-page book of equipment, both magical and (mostly) mundane, for use by characters in the game, and retails at $29.99(US). It’s packed full of information and the art is about the same as in the “core” books. I personally liked the image on page 94. It’s going to be difficult to make much of this review, I think, due to the nature of the book. While I do not deny its utility or value, there’s simply not much to actually be said. .jpg)
The first 30 or so pages are devoted to mundane equipment. However, this is only “mundane” in the sense that it is not actively channeling magical energies in the fashion of D&D spellcasters and magic items. Much of the armor and weapons have fantastical origins, exotic shapes or physics-defying applications as befits D&D fantasy and “alchemical items” are only “non-magical” in the strictly defined D&D milieu. The main thing this section provides is a little more customization for those who crave that sort of thing for their characters. Different weapons and armor lend a different “feel” to one’s character as well as some mechanical leverage. Of note, the new property “Brutal” lets you reroll damage dice that roll below a certain threshold and “Defensive” which grants a bonus to defense when held in the off-hand. Alchemical items essentially grant characters one-shot “powers” at the cost of some gold and some down-time, like a “ritual in a can” one might say.
The equipment section also covers mounts and vehicles. The extra mount stats are useful and are just more of what the Monster Manual offers, from Camels to Skeletal Horses to Riding Sharks, each with their own stat block. I count 11 new mounts. Vehicles are just like mounts, but with a variety of special rules for crew capacity, what happens when the driver gets knocked out and how chariots turn on a battle map. There are nine sample vehicles, and one of them is the Apparatus of Kwalish, so that’s kind of cool.
Most of the rest of the book is magic items. For those that like options, your ship has come in. There is page after page of magic items, each with its own little stat block. Again, experience has shown that these are great to find in a treasure, or create with a ritual, or use in a combat, but so help me they’re nothing to look at in a list. Each item has a line of flavor text, but in order to keep it from infringing on the creativity of your own personal campaign or setting, it is by necessity pretty generic. And the abilities, while useful and desirable, generally boil down to bonuses to movement or damage or attack or something. That, too, is fine and expected and part of what makes 4e fun, but it’s certainly not inspiring (at least compared to the excellent Warlock article that was posted a few months ago). The wondrous items are a little more interesting (like the magical flint that makes a magical campfire or the classic Onyx Dog), but there are only 15 pages of those. Potions are ok, too, I suppose. They pretty much do the same thing as Alchemical Items, but they’re “magical”. Also there’s a new magic item “slot”, which your pet can use for “companion items”, so your loyal wolf can have a Guardian Collar or your trusty steed can have a Bridal of Rapid Action.
The last little bit of the book has advice for the DM on how to make magic items seem unique and colorful as well as how to allow players to keep their “ancestral sword” or whatever that they had a 1st level and let it grow with them instead of being tossed aside for the latest +3 sword of fieriness. On a similar note, it also tells you how you can take that 1st level character’s non-magical “ancestral sword”, and allow it to become enchanted in play.
The book does have an index of all of the items in the book.
So, overall, if you’re playing, this is a valuable book to have on hand. It will add some much-needed variety to your PCs and treasure troves and it offers some sound advice for using these items in play to enhance both the PCs’ abilities and the richness of your fantasy worlds. What it isn’t is terribly interesting to read. So if you’re looking for inspiration, I’d advise instead a novel or setting book or actually playing the game with your creative friends.
- Artmonkey
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Jason did a fantastic job describing the nuts and bolts of the book, so if you want to know what’s “in” the book, what it means, what it does well, and what it doesn’t, then his portion of the review is what to read. I’m going to go at the review a bit more from a personal perspective, what I plan on using, what I think is useful, etc. I tend to bounce all over the place, but hopefully we'll make it through to the end and feel a bit more educated at the same time.
Basically, the Adventurer’s Vault is an expansion on the equipment chapter of the 4e Player’s Handbook. As you probably know at this point, the magic items have been moved from the DMG to the PHB in 4e, taking the 3.5 trend to its next logical conclusion of making magic items something players want and plan for more than just items given out by the DM, the same as armor and weapons used to be. Many will say that the game is cheapened by this change, that the game was a more wondrous place with mystery and the fantastic when the players didn’t know how the world worked, what new item they’d discover next. Some people may have left the game to play xbox, online bingo or Playstation because of this change. However this is the way things have gone, not just in D&D, but in probably all aspects of life, in the Information Age we just expect to have all the information laid out in front of us. I like it personally, I do find it’s harder as the DM to make the world seem mysterious and wondrous, but I think the benefits outweigh the costs.
So what we have is essentially a resource book, while there are some new rules, new systems, etc, the vast majority of the book is simply lists of options. Even being generous with what I consider a page of readable material, I counted 10 total pages out of 223 as having actual informative text as opposed to lists of new stuff. That means if you ignore lists of character options, you’ll be done with the book after you’ve read essentially 10 pages.
Now I’m not bitter about the 10 pages, I feel the purchase of the book is entirely justified, more for players than DMs, though there is, as Jason mentioned, that bit of information in the back about making magic items more flavorful, which can be helpful in a game that has been made so detailed but yet so generic. I do kinda feel like this book is definitely one of the books you can get away with only having 1 book per group, sharing it as needed.
As Jason mentioned, there are a few new rule systems in the book; notably alchemy, vehicles, and the Unique Item rules. The alchemy rules are an extension of the rituals rules mechanic, basically a set of recipes a character can learn and perform as often as they want, with the cost being a fixed gold cost representating the materials needed. The vehicle rules are fairly straight forward, a couple pages only and probably really belongs in the Player’s Handbook. The unique item rules are interesting, and I think apply to all 4e campaigns, and even useful in a 3.5 campaign if you are still running 3.5. I’m not really going to talk about the unique item rules or the vehicles, but I am going to expand on the alchemy a bit because I think it is an essential addition to the rules.
Some people don’t like alchemy in D&D, some people love it, and I’m definitely in the latter camp. I often would load up my scholar characters with stacks of alchemical items, even if my level 10+ character would never get a chance to use them because their effects didn’t scale with level. I’m glad to say that in 4e that isn’t really an issue.
Alchemy in 4e has been returned to what I think it is meant to be, amazing effects produced from combinations of esoteric elements. There is no real science in D&D; the combination of completely non-magical items can cause fantastical results. Now there are standard things such as Alchemist’s Fire, Acid, Frost (all of which are more effective in the hands of a higher level character, meaning if you want to focus on alchemy you can use it from level 1 to level 30), but there are also now pourable traps (elements that when stepped on release bursts of fire, electricity, etc), chalk that expands when pushed into holes like locks (destroying the lock with a successful check), tracking dust, universal solvent (for getting out of that ettercap’s webbing), and few other things that can useful outside of combat.
I like the alchemy rules a lot, and I’m hoping they keep expanding the alchemy, maybe making a multiclass feat tree for alchemists, include a few new alchemy recipes in modules and books. One of my favorite alchemical items are thunderstones, which are pretty cool now compared to their 3e counterpart, not only deafening targets but also causing everything to be pushed away from the center of effect. I’d love to knock someone off a wall with a thunderstone, heh.
Example Play
DM: The black knight comes charging on his horse towards you from the castle gate. Meanwhile, four archers on the ramparts are taking aim with their bows. You’ve won initiative, what do you do?
Snargus the Halfling rogue: I toss a thunderstone up on the wall, trying to orient to hit as many of the archers as you can.
DM: You can hit two of the archers, roll the 1d4 thunder damage, and then roll to see if you hit any of them.
Snargus: I got a 22 and a 16 against their Fortitude Defense. I’m sure I hit the 22, they’re just archers, what about the 16?
DM: Sigh, you hit two of them causing both of them to fly over the wall, they’re totally surprised by this, their screams being cut short as they land in the dry moat filled with stakes down below.
Snargus: Alright!!!
Or at least something like what I’d love to see happen in a game.
After the alchemy section is a bunch of stuff I honestly only think is useful at the moment I’m trying to outfit a character, whether as a player or a DM. Magic items, armors, weapons, mounts, vehicles, etc. Magic items are the majority of the book, so thats what I'm going to focus on for the rest of this review.
For those who haven't gotten up to speed on 4e magic items, virtually every magic item in D&D has a special power. Now I said Power, not special trait. It used to be that wondrous items would do weird stuff, a few rings, many rods, but for the most part, everything else was either a flat bonus to some character trait or duplicated some spell. I highly recommend item cards to manage the sheer number of powers you can have for your character. I'll talk about that later.
The designers of D&D decided that kind of generic magic item wasn’t good enough anymore. They've made every magic item unique now, and though there are so many magic items that you can start kind of grouping magic items together, They're not really close enough to put many of them in a solid category in terms of what they do. In fact, I think there are so many magic items now with so many different powers that I think it seems generic at first, until you really start looking at them and seeing how they’re different and what their powers symbolize in roleplaying terms.
I’m going to describe a few of the armors, just to give a taste of what I mean by unique powers for each item, and how even armor, something that for the most part always had passive abilities, now is distinctive and interesting.
Illithid Robes: These robes (remember, in 4e cloth is considered a type of armor, normally give 0 defense then a +1, +2, +3, etc based on the level of the magic item) give resistance to psychic damage and as a daily power you can push half the damage from an attack off to some poor sap... er, ally nearby. Hopefully the fighter doesn't mind when my wizard gets attacked. ;)
Irrefutable Armor: This armor can be found as medium or heavier armor, and as a daily power allows you to reroll an attack that targets the will of the enemy. I think it’s very easy to ignore this armor, but I think the flavor of it is pretty cool, to appreciate it you have to think of it not as simply a reroll of an attack, but rather that the armor pushes your will upon your enemies. Who is going to use this? Not fighters, probably clerics, they wear armor and have spell-like powers so probably will have some will attacks that can benefit from this type of power.
Meliorating armor: This is supposed to befairly plain looking armor, old and well used, it‘s special power is that it increase its defense bonus by 1 for every milestone you reach in a day (a milestone is every 2 encounters, traps, etc). At first glance it seems like every magic item is going to have some daily power, but the designers really aren't afraid to have each item do whatever they feel it needs to do, something I really like in 4e, you "design" what you want to design, not what the rules let you design. I really like this armor, its armor that makes that fighter want to keep going, keep fighting. When I read this I imagined a gruff dwarven tank that keeps argues for the party to keep going, keep pushing, because fighting just doesn’t slow him down, instead it makes him tougher and better at his job.
That was just a few from the armor section. Every single item, over 150 pages worth, has interesting powers, and even flipping the book open to read 1 or 2 armors is interesting and makes the imagination go, or at least mine does. Unfortunately reading more than a few at a time starts to put me to sleep. Maybe I’m old, or maybe I never could flip through page after page of spells, powers, etc. But when I’m looking for something to give to an NPC or something I’d like to get for my character, the Adventurer’s Vault more than does what it’s supposed to.
Personally I love this book, but I love it in the way that an engineer might love a particularly useful reference manual. I think that’s what it should be classified, a reference manual for D&D equipment, which is important if you're hoping to get this book home and spend hours reading this book in your giant chair in front of the fire drinking cognac. Better make it a small glass, this book just isn't going to keep you going like some of the heftier books like the Forgotten Realms 4e stuff.
So those who are satisfied with letting the other members of their group managing the complexity of the game, choosing equipment, etc, who probably enjoy reading the book as much as using the book in the game, I recommend passing on this book, as it won’t satisfy. Those who want more “parts” to build their characters with (whether player characters or NPCs), I think this is an essential part of the 4e toolkit.
-Richard Mathis