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Fat Goblin Games Presents - Creating New Armors $5.94
Publisher: Fat Goblin Games
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by James E. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 04/14/2016 21:05:10

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this product for the purpose of writing this review.

Creating weapons and armor is... interesting. If you set aside the names of items and just look at the statistics, what you usually find is a collection of subtle adjustments showing a balance between factors like cost, weight, penalties, and actual defensive ability. It's true that some armors are generally considered the 'best' in their class because of a specific combination of factors, but what if there's nothing that quite matches what you want, or you're looking for something entirely new?

Enter this. In this 12-page supplement (8 pages of content, 4 pages of stuff like the cover and OGL), Fat Goblin Games offers a simple system for creating shields and armor. As with many other item design systems, this one uses a point-based system (with a reward for NOT using points, by the way - if you don't use all of them, you get to lower the cost by a set amount per point unused). Better armors have more points to work with.

After introducing the basic system for creating items (including weight, how many points are available for that type of item, and so on), the guide moves on to materials. Different materials offer different bonuses (or penalties, if they're a bad choice for a certain type of armor). The available materials are cloth, horn, iron, leather, steel, stone, and wood. It should be noted that this guide is largely about MUNDANE armor, not armor created from special materials that have bonus effects.

From there, the guide moves into qualities (separating between normal qualities and those exclusive to shields). The choices for qualities include things like extra design points (at a cost), adding accessories like gauntlets, or even making a set of camouflaged gear that provides bonuses to Stealth. It's a nice selection of options, and I appreciate the diversity available.

Following all of the qualities are a few sample items that show what somethign might look like by the time it's done.

I did notice one minor formatting issue - the break between pages 6 and 7 is a little awkward in layout, since the text on page 6 continues further down the page, with something else above it. I understood it easily enough, but it's not the most natural flow. It's not enough to stop me from liking the product, but it's definitely something to avoid in the future.

Overall, I think this is a very solid product. GMs can use this to make interesting gear as rewards for players, or people at the table can take the time to make and craft the sort of armor and shields they'd really like to use. It's not a must-buy for every table, but it's affordable, and I think it's well worth the price for any group that enjoys creativity and design. It's not too likely you'll be able to break the system, either - there are pretty hard caps on bonuses, and one way or another, you'll end up paying for everything you get. I'd like to rate it about 4.5 stars, but RPGNow doesn't support half-stars, so I'm rounding up to 5 because my only complaint is relatively minor and not worth a whole star drop.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Fat Goblin Games Presents - Creating New Armors
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