A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Pages from the Lost Grimoire – Sentient Items / Asleep in Snow

Pages from the Lost Grimoire – Sentient Items / Asleep in Snow by Dan Coleman is a role playing game supplement published by Dan Coleman Productions for use with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result. This is the eighth in a series of supplements following a standard format; new rules, locations, people or items followed by a mini-adventure or short encounter featuring them.

The Pages from the Lost Grimoire series is funded through a Patreon campaign and is available as a Pay What You Want supplement from RPGNow. This edition is comprised of a ten page PDF, of which one page is the front cover, one the front matter, one page a thanks to Patrons and two pages the Open Game License, as well as a number of other files. There are four PNG files for encounter maps, which is common. These are the same area, before and after some monsters appear and with and without a grid. As well as these, there are seven jpgs of player handouts and 15 wav files.

The first two pages of content are Sentient Items. There are four items all told. There is a wondrous item, moonwrap, an intelligent cloak that does not appear to be unique. This cloak grants a bonus to AC and saving throws, resistance to radiant damage, grants feather fall, can strike an opponent or let loose a burst of blinding light. The least intelligent of the items, moonwraps are curious and should probably not be allowed near buttons, levers or anything else that can be pushed, pulled or otherwise.

Oculus is a unique rod that functions as a magical mace, grants truesight and allows the user to see in all directions, giving a perception bonus. It can be used as a spellcasting focus and allows the use of arcane eye, blindness/deafness (but only for blindness), eyebite and scrying. The rod exists to gain and share knowledge and likes to test its owner with riddles.

Shiver is a unique dagger that looks like a piece of ice. It can encase targets in a sheet of ice, as well as doing extra cold damage, prevents harm from low temperatures, confers immunity to cold damage but vulnerability to fire and allows the user to walk on ice.

Wyrmsoul is a unique suit of scale armour that gives bonuses against evil dragons, which it was forged to fight, allows the user to detect the closest metallic or chromatic dragon within 30 miles, its location, name and age category, and also confers the power of flight.

Asleep in the Snow is the mini-adventure aimed for a party of 13th-14th level, with a chart showing the encounter difficulty based on the average party level and number. This is a single encounter in a frozen dungeon, one in which the characters can recover the aforementioned Shiver. They will need to solve a puzzle and then defeat some guardian creatures.

Finally, there are the 15 wav files. These are audio comments of things that the dagger Shiver might say; these rather resemble the audio files found for intelligent weapons in some games (such as user-created Elder Scrolls mods).

Pages from the Lost Grimoire – Sentient Items / Asleep in Snow in Review

The supplement lacks bookmarks and, although it’s short, these would have been appreciated. The text maintains a two column format and no errors were noticed. There is a single item illustration, for shiver, but there are also the maps and handouts, making presentation above average. The inclusion of the audio files is an interesting novelty; admittedly, it’s one that may well wear off quite quickly.

Sentient items have often been popular in D&D but they have rarely been handled in a very interesting fashion. Usually, when found, there will only be a very brief description of the item’s alignment and stats. The four magic items in this all have decent descriptions of the items’ personalities – and they do have flaws as well, making them much more real. Essentially, more like the NPCs the magic items should be played as.

The single encounter is short but potentially dangerous, but it does have a fairly powerful magic item as a reward for success, albeit a magic item with some drawbacks.

This is a good entry in the series and the audio files are different. Pages from the Lost Grimoire: Sentient Items / Asleep in Snow can be checked out for free first by clicking here.