Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: Hoards & Other Treasures aka All About Huge Treasure Hauls

Hoards & Other Treasures aka All About Huge Treasure Hauls by John Josten is a free role playing game supplement published by Board Enterprises. This is part of their Small Bites range and is a free sampler, or World Walker Edition, for the longer, Player and GameMaster edition.

This is an eighteen page bookmarked PDF that is available from RPGNow. One page is the cover page and one page is an advert for the publisher’s Patreon programme.

It starts with a single page Introduction, Table of Contents and explanation of what the World Walker Edition is. According to the Introduction, this isn’t about the actual individual items of treasure but about treasure in general.

Two pages are the Flentern Wiki. This is a list of sites and legends for the publisher’s world of Fletnern, all of which are connected to treasure in some way.

Hoards & Other Treasures aka All About Huge Treasure HaulsThe Sounding Board is a seven page article on treasure and currency, both fantasy and real, collecting it up and what things are actually worth – even a moderate house can be looted for steel and other items.

Lifestyles of the Mundane and Magical is essentially a four page piece of fiction about a character who enters the publisher’s city of Rhum in order to dispose of his treasure and turn it into cash, including mundane items such as boots.

News of Fletnern and The Good Life take up a page. The news article is again from the game world and considers a wealthy shrine that was looted and what happened to the contents. The Good Life is about hope chests, which a girl will use to stock linens for her marriage in later life, and which has a fair amount of value to its contents.

What’s Missing and In Conclusion take up the final page. The first explains what’s in the full version of this supplement and the last is a simple summing up.

The PDF is decently bookmarked for its brevity, although it could be better. The text maintains a two column format and seemed largely error-free. There are a number of black and white stock illustrations, all related to treasure.

There are references to the expanded edition in the supplement. This isn’t made explicitly clear, but it would appear that the full version is only available to those who support the publisher through Patreon.

This isn’t so much a list of treasure as it is a theoretical essay on the subject of treasure; obtaining it, selling it, shifting it and what things are worth. The bits related to Fletnern are interesting, and could possibly be adapted to another setting, but seem a bit of an odd inclusion. It could be due to this being a shortened version of a longer supplement, but it does feel a bit of a hodge podge. Clearly some detailed research has gone into the theoretical thoughts on treasure.

Hoards & Other Treasures aka All About Huge Treasure Hauls is a bit of an odd collection of essays and world info, but it’s free and can be found by clicking here.

 

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