By Thilo Graf
This pdf from Purple Duck Games is 28 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1/2 a page editorial, 4 pages SRD, leaving 22 1/2 pages for the new legendary weapons, so let’s check them out, shall we?
Legendary items have become a staple of my home-brew games and the concept is cool and iconic – the items improve with the level of their wielder, gaining new powers, have their own background story and requirements. I love how the iconic weapons at once offer plot hooks and combat magic item inflation. The series has come a long way from rather standard abilities to far-out, well-designed and most importantly, unique weapons and that being said, this installment of Purple Duck Games’ Legendary series focuses on uncommon, exotic weapons.
The exotic weapons herein range over kusari-gama, sickles, nodachis, katanas, war-fans, starknives, rope-darts to a net and even a meteor hammer – the coolest array of basic weapons yet to feature in an installment of the legendary series. Even better than the base weapons is the fact that EACH of the weapons has some sort of cool, unique ability that goes beyond adding quality xyz to a weapon: From the ability to use half the ability drain/damage suffered to enhance another score by half that value to the scorpion whip’s ability to inflict pain or pleasure in the foes hit by it, the weapons come with unique, cool abilities as well as aptly-written background stories.
HOWEVER, unfortunately not all is well: While the abilities of the legendary weapons are based on the wielder’s highest mental ability score, this results in rather low save-DCs. On a whole, I had the impression that scaling DCs would have been much more appropriate, especially due to the fact that several abilities are not based on spells and rather unique. While this is easily remedied by setting a fixed DC of 10 + 1/2 character level + mental attribute modifier, I still would have loved for the pdf to include this information – the unique abilities deserve as much.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good, I only noticed minor punctuation errors. Layout adheres to the printer-friendly two-column standard and the b/w-artworks for the weapons rock, especially for the very fair price. The pdf also comes with extensive bookmarks. Content-wise, I enjoyed the background stories, the signature abilities, the weapon-choices – just about everything. Were it not for the aforementioned DC-problem, I’d rate this immediately 5 stars and slap my seal of approval on it. Due to the non-scaling DCs that make some abilities rather weak, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 4.5 stars rounded up to 5 and encourage you to buy this. If you’re also feeling that the DCs are too low, feel free to try out my proposed solution and post about it.
Endzeitgeist out.
Legendary V: Eastern and Exotic Weapons is available from: