30 Unique Magical Blades review

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85872[1]By Thilo Graf

This full-color pdf is 16 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 2 pages ads, 1 page SRD, leaving 11 pages for the 30 magical blades. Enough to make them “unique” as per the premise of the book? We’ll see.

The pdf starts with a short table that lists the weapons according to their value, the cheapest being 4,312 GP, the most powerful one scoring at a whopping 175,325 GP. The book features a beautiful, full-colour, digital artwork by Sade for each and every weapon in the book, which I definitely liked. The layout is also consistent and very nice to look at. Each of the thirty blades comes not only with a short story that could serve as a hook on how to get the weapon, but also with several abilities that go beyond +2 ice-bursting sword. I.e., each of the blades (There are also spears, btw.) has some distinctive quality besides its primary characteristics.

Editing and formatting very top-notch, I didn’t notice any mistakes.

Conclusion:

Magic item books tend to have a hard standing with me. I’m a sucker for elaborate backgrounds, weapons that level up and PCs with a very limited access to magic weapons and gadgets. I’m quite old-school there, every weapon or magic item in my campaign gets its own background story.

There is obviously not too much space for background-texts for the blades in this pdf, although you get more than in almost all item-supplements I’ve read so far, which is great news – while I love the modularity of recent editions when it comes to magic items, it also made many a weapon or armor a common commodity instead of an awe-inspiring item.

The production values are top-notch, as often a picture of a blade makes it MUCH MORE memorable than it would be without it. That being said, all the blades feature the Rite Publishing style, i.e. they have something rather unusual or special about them – for the low price, that is quite is something!

However, if you’re like me, you would probably have preferred less blades and more background on the weapons presented. I can’t find any serious flaw with this product, though. Thus, for me, this is a 4 star product, probably because it didn’t utterly grip me and make me shout “Hell yeah”. If you’re into equipment books, though, this is gold. For you, this may be a 4.5 or even 5 star-file.

 

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