A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Affordable Arcana – Wondrous Items

Affordable Arcana – Wondrous Items by Jeremy Clements is a role playing game supplement published by d20pfrsrd.com for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. As such, the supplement is covered by the Open Game License with some parts being considered Open Game Content as a result. This is a collection of low-cost wondrous items.

The supplement is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $1.95 but was purchased at the reduced price of $1.46. This is a 21 page PDF of which one page is the front cover, one page is the front matter, one page the Introduction and Contents, two pages are the Open Game License and one page is ads.

Next are the wondrous items. These are all intended to be under 1,000 gp, and they are. There are 34 new wondrous items, although one comes in four types with more possible, ranging from 100 gp to 1,000 gp.

With this being an assortment of low-cost wondrous items, there is no theme to the collection. The items come in many different types, from new varieties of feather tokens and ioun stones to many brand new items.

The items have a wide range of effects, from cloaks that turn into anvils to ones that do minor damage or add minor levels of protection to boots that always look good, giving a wearer a slight bonus when meeting people for the first time, and regenerate damage done to them unless both are completely destroyed.

The ioun stone, chaos, is a bit different – every time a d20 is rolled by the user, it can have a different random effect. It’s not quite at the same level as items such as the wand of wonder, and the majority of effects are positive. Such random items are often not appreciated by players, though, unless their character is a worshipper of chaos or a wild mage of some type.

Rather oddly, the last thing in the supplement is a new Bardic Archetype, the Arcane Virtuoso. This archetype looks okay, but has no connection to anything else in the supplement, so it’s unclear as to why it was included. Is it just space filler, or something left over from another project?

Affordable Arcana – Wondrous Items in Review

The PDF is well bookmarked with all the individual items linked and the Contents is to the same level of detail and hyperlinked as well. Navigation is therefore very good.

The text maintains a two column format with a colour background and no errors were noticed. There are a number of presumably stock art illustrations that roughly correspond to a handful of items, some in colour and some in black and white, with some images appearing to be digital. More illustrations would have been preferred, but having one for each item, and a custom one at that, is rarely feasible due to cost. Presentation is pretty good.

Judging a random collection of items is always a bit difficult. They appear to, in general, steer away from the “spell in a can” type which is always a plus, and they do seem to all be low value (given how crude the item pricing rules are in the Core Rulebook, the price of pretty much any item can be challenged). There are an impressive number of different new items in this supplement for the price too. Affordable Arcana – Wondrous Items is a nice collection of new wondrous items that could be used to flesh out low-level treasure and it can be found by clicking here.