The Book of Marvelous Magic

Game Review

Review by Kerry Lloyd


Designed by Frank Mentzer and E. Gary Gygax
TSR PO. Box 5987, Chicago, IL 60608
Released- February, 1985
Catalog No. 9116
Price: $10
Complexity: Intermediate
Solitaire Suitability: None
** 1/2

If you have a taste for interesting magic items and are a fan of D&D (or of AD&D, for that matter), you'll most likely be pleased by The Book of Marvelous Magic, a new offering from TSR.

Marvelous Magic is a soft cover book, with a cover illustration by Clyde Caldwell, and contains 80 pages, all of which are printed with a background of vaguely medieval leaves and lotuses. It also contains well over 500 different and mostly new magic items for use with the Dungeons and Dragons gaming system-most of these can be adapted for use with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons as well. (Instructions covering adjustments for AD&D are included.) All of the written material on each page is presented in a heavily outlined section.

Of the many items described only 46 refer the reader to definitions in the three D&D sets: Basic, Expert, and Companion. The half-a-thousand plus magic items are arranged in alphabetical order in an encyclopedic format. A set of tables using percentiles in 15 major categories, with assorted subcategories at the beginning of the book allows game masters (GMs) to select magic items randomly with relative ease. Many GMs will wish to read through and select rather than roll, but there are plenty of good ideas and new items to choose from and the very diversity of forms will encourage both GMs and players to pay more attention to the general contents of a room. Each of the new items not referred to other books are thoroughly described.

Frank Mentzer and Gary Gygax have loaded their list of arcanities with a monstrous number of puns horrible to read and worse to contemplate as magic items (sealing wax and ceiling wax, draw poker, half mast, chain gong, ether oar, or x-tent, for instance). Piers (X)Anthony, of Xanth fame would be proud of them--others might wish to have them shot. Many of the items presented are, of course, crocked or cursed, and are impossible to distinguish from the good items of the same description. This tends to bring players to a screeching halt before grabbing magic -- and they may never grab again if they're not careful.

D&D GMs, and even AD&D GMs, should find Marvelous Magic quite useful. For D&D particularly, Marvelous Magic is valuable since few magic items other than weapons are available.

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