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Title: Cugel's Compendium of Indispensable Advantages by Aaron Allston, Robin D Laws, Phil Masters, James Maliszewski ISBN: 0-9539980-4-5 Publisher: Pelgrane Press Ltd. Pub. Date: 01 February, 2001 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautifully written sourcebook suitible for any RPG
Comment: I use this book for my D20 campaign to flesh out our group's two rogues and as a general source of mischievious, elegant ideas to torment my players with. Full of wit, subterfuge, and delicious confidence games. Way more bang for the buck than Songs and Silence. Stylish and funny.
Rating: 5
Summary: A sourcebook for the discerning rogue, suitible for any RPG
Comment: Cugel's Compendium is one of a whole spate of new Dying Earth Game releases by Englands Pelgrane Press in the last several months. Their profile has been fairly low by American Marketing standards, but don't let the lack of Taco Bell action figure tie-ins dissuade you from having a look.
Written for the Dying Earth Role Playing Game, Cugels' Compendium for example is excellent source material for any rpg campaign for characters of low to medium power (say levels 1-8 in a D20 game). The DERPG rules are simple and do not emphasise complex combat stats or comic book like powers, therefore conversion to D20 is easy. The items, spells, and special abilities in this book are written in such a way as to emphasize wit, sardonic humor, intrigue, and a certain otherworldy magical strangenees which too often is missing from many modern rpgs.
Consider "Grasphotels Obdurate Curmudgeon", a magical statuette of a small Imp which springs to life when the command word is uttered. "Like an animate doorstop, this grotesque holds entryways against intruders, allowing its summoner to (for instance) make a clean getaway. It has tremendous strength, a gruff voice of a surprising baritone pitch, and a stubborn, humorless nature. It knows nothing of use to humans except highly particular expertise on the subject of blocking doors."
I used this item / creature in the last session of my 3E Dunegons and Dragons campaign and the party had a hilarious, tragicomic experience attempting to outwit the thing in a nick of time with Bluff and Diplomacy checks and a series of spurious arguments (they finally convinced it to open the door so they could help it install iron bars and extra locks...)
Other sections in this beautifully illustrated, professionally laid out 70 page booklet outline several amusing confidence games, (as well as twists and sneaky variations of confidence games) special abilities, a treatise on negotiation (especially interesting with monsters) a random costume generator, and an amusing assortment of spells and cantrips. Some of the con games in particular are priceless especially if you are running a campaign involving thieves (rogues, to the polically correct)
or bards.
Jack Vance, the Author of the Dying Earth books upon which DERPG is based, was one of the original influences on Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps one of the most important as Gary Gygax himself attests in many recent interviews. If you miss some of the old flavor of mystery and dark humor, if you always prefered spells like tensors disk, otilukes sphere, and mordenkainens hound to lightning bolts and teleports, you might find this book is a great resource which you can use to help bring a little culture and sophistication to any fantasy rpg campaign, whether DERPG, D20, Gurps, or something else you are playing (anyone out there still trying to run Rollmaster or Runequest campaigns?).
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Title: Jack Vance's The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game by Robin D. Laws, Robin' D Laws ISBN: 0953998002 Publisher: Pelgrane Press Ltd. Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Jack Vance's The Excellent Prismatic Spray II by Jim Webster, Gary Gygax, Robin D Laws, Steve Long, Phil Masters ISBN: 0953998029 Publisher: Pelgrane Press Ltd. Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Book of Exalted Deeds (Dungeons & Dragons Supplement) by James Wyatt, Darrin Drader, Christopher Perkins ISBN: 0786931361 Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Pub. Date: 29 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0380977427 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Urban Arcana Campaign Setting (d20 Modern) by Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Dave Noonan ISBN: 0786926597 Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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