• Mood: bang bang!
• Music: crown me king- one gun was named MONEYMAKER, the other HEARTBREAKER

the week of magic items!

world of darkness: reliquary by white wolf.

don't judge a book by its cover! i normally would disagree with this common wisdom (in fact, cover design does often provide helpful clues) but in this case i've gotta give it up to the cliche. coming on the heels of the dnd magic item book, this really shows a vastly different design philosophy. rather than lists & lists of items, you get much more in-depth coverage of a few, & lists & lists of powers. before i get ahead of myself, let me give the book a more linear rundown. the first thing the book provides is, & a lot of white wolf books have been doing this lately, a bunch of essays. advice on using "magic items" (a term the book doesn't use-- they prefer words like "relics," which is fine) in a variety of methods: the grail quest, the maltese falcon, archeology race, that kind of thing. sample descriptive details. useful enough advice in some places, in other places kind of verging on filler. next up are the sample artifacts, most of which are "ripped from the headlines" of fortean studies & urban myths-- the lights of dendera, mayan crystal skulls, amtikythera mechanism. others are invented, which range from the oh so classy & awesome mother of vinegar to the kind of cheesy evil little black book. the back bit of the book is the real meat; dotted powers for use as merits. in other words, the building blocks you'd need to make a range of relics. that is the bit worth the price of admission-- as cute as the other parts are, the wide range of uses (& re-uses) of the generic components is what makes this great. doesn't matter what game you are playing-- straight world of darkness, or vampire, or even a homebrew fantasy setting (such as yours truly)-- this is a jumble of stuff you can find plenty of uses for.