A very crunchy, very useful supplement for D20. Like, Minions, Arms & Armor suffers from a price tag just a little too high for its content.
Review Originally Published March 13th, 2002
CONTENT
Arms & Armor is Bastion Press’ second D20 supplement. Like Minions, Bastion’s first offering, Arms & Armor is a 96-page soft-cover book featuring full-color printing on glossy pages. As the title would suggest, it focuses on weapons and armor: Simple, martial, exotic, magical, and more. There is also a short section on martial constructs: Golems and other constructs which are, essentially, forms of weapon and armor which “wield themselves” in one way or another.
GOOD STUFF
Arms & Armor is very, very crunchy, delivering exactly what it promises.
Weapons: Somewhere in the ballpark of 125 new weapons are introduced here – ranging from the mundane (claymore) to the unusual (combat hook) to the foreign (cicada wing sword) to the practical (brass knuckles) to the exotic (double-bladed sword). Combine that with roughly 70 new properties for magical weapons (my favorites are alterable weapons and pivoting arrows), roughly 50 new magical weapons (including class weapons and artifacts – my favorites are the silent dagger, which projects a 5-ft. field of silence around itself, and the arrow of seeing, which allows the user to see everything around the location where the arrow lands), and new rules and options for intelligent weapons.
Armor: Roughly 60 new types of armor are described here, approximately 70 new magical armor qualities, along with new extras and accessories for armor. Several dozen suits of magical armor are discussed, including class-based armor. Optional rules for armor (including the first published 3E system for armor as damage reduction) are also given. My favorites in this section include bone mail (chain mail made from bone), daggered plate (with daggers concealed as armor decoration), quick don armor (which cuts down the amount of time necessary to don the armor), phoenix armor (which will resurrect a character who dies in the armor once, destroying the armor in the process), and healing armor (which can be used to heal the character wearing it).
Other Stuff: Arms & Armor also includes rules for cleric domain rods, arcane school staves, racial masks, and martial constructs. The domain rods, school staves, and racial masks are all very useful. Martial constructs include amulet servitors (golems which collapse into small amulets of tightly wound metal when not in use), golem armor (your armor is alive), and the silver steeds (magical mounts). Several types of new material for weapon and armor construction are also covered.
Arms & Armor also manages to largely avoid a common pitfall of products like this: Weapons and armor so incredibly goofy that they make you want to burst out laughing. There are still some things which will likely make you wince (particularly if you value a high degree of realism in the non-magical weapons of your world), but nothing incredibly bizarre. And even if you really dislike the bizarre and exotic weapons of 3rd Edition, there’s more than enough here that you’ll happily be able to incorporate into your campaign.
BAD STUFF
I don’t like Todd Morasch’s artwork. I commented on this in my review of Minions, as well (Morasch serves as Lead Artist and Art Director on both books): It’s not that he does bad work. But he doesn’t do exceptional work, either. The term “mediocre” fits his work perfectly, I’m afraid.
Of course, that’s just my opinion: Feel free to glance through the book and form your own opinion. However, his work in Arms & Armor is objectively flawed insofar as his artwork just plain fails to match the text. For example, on the very first page of weapon descriptions he manages to draw the chained axe (described as “a double-bladed axe-head attached to a haft by a length of chain”) without a haft. His illustration of the basket-hilted broadsword, described on the same page, not only fails to possess a basket hilt, but appears to possess a double-blade for some unfathomable reason. And so forth.
It’s also regrettable that, despite space on the page, the decision was made to not illustrate all of the weapons described in the book. Almost all of the armor is also devoid of illustration.
In terms of design, I haven’t spotted anything horribly unbalancing after reading the book through and playtesting as many of the items as possible. There are, however, a couple of designs which will leave you scratching your head. For example, the axe-hammer is described like this:
An exotic weapon, the axe-hammer is a long hafted weapon with an axe blade on one side of the head and a blunt hammer on the other. Due to the strange balance of the weapon, axe or hammer wielders cannot use it proficiently; special training is required.
Which is all well and good. But the axe-hammer is statted up as a double weapon. Which doesn’t make sense. If there was an axe head on one end of the haft and a hammer head on the other, sure – that’s a double weapon. But as it stands, an axe-hammer should no more be a double weapon than a greataxe.
CONCLUSION
The only reservation I have in recommending Arms & Armor is the same reservation I had for Minions: The price. At $20 this would be a book which I would happily hype as perfect for every DM’s game shelf. At $24.95, however, I get a little bit choosier about 96 page sourcebooks.
My own mileage:
At the moment I am working on redesigning and repopulating the lower levels of Khundrukar (a dwarven city which serves as the setting for WotC’s Forge of Fury Adventure Path module). As a result, I’m looking for all sorts of nifty and unusual weapons to strew around the dungeon as treasure and/or set dressing. Thus, Arms & Armor is absolutely perfect.
So if you have a niche like this in your game you’re trying to fill, then Arms & Armor is going to fill it very well.
On the other hand, if you don’t have such a niche for the book (if it’s something you’d only dip into sparingly once or twice over the next few years, rather than seeing constant usage), then Arms & Armor will probably prove a little too pricey for you.
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Author: Greg Dent (Lead Designer)
Publisher: Bastion Press, Inc.
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0-9714392-2-2
Product Code: BAS1001
Pages: 96
Bastion Press’ D20 System supplements were mechanically sloppy and often ugly, but as a GM I got an incredible amount of value out of them. They were often the first thing I would reach for when looking to add either depth or a touch of the exotic to an adventure. I believe this is the last of their books that I wrote a review for, but their entire product line still sits on my gaming shelf.
For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.
