This 15-page booklet is all about magic items that are likely to be banned in at least some civilised societies. It begins with a good discussion of the sale of such items, and the kinds of black markets where they might be available - tied in to the rules on settlements from the Pathfinder GM Guide. This, in itself, seems to be well thought out and helpful, although, inevitably there might need to be adjustments for specific campaigns.

This is followed by a list of 21 magic items, including weapons, armour, rings, rods, and wondrous items. Each section includes some discussion of why and how specific jurisdictions might ban some of the standard magic items in their category. These all make perfect sense, and are worth thinking about, although some GMs may prefer to ignore such issues in order to allow PCs more freedom of action.

The items themselves are all fully described, and each includes a justification for why it might be banned. Some are obviously evil items, or so unpredictable as to be a potential menace to innocent citizens. Others are useful primarily for committing criminal acts, making them particularly useful for rogues, but clearly undesirable to the authorities. Some are banned because they encourage other activity that certain regimes might disapprove of.

It may be worth adding that this is something of an 'adult' product. There's nothing explicit in it, or anything like that, but some of the items do revolve around torture or casual sex, which might be an issue for certain campaigns. There's also some partial nudity in the illustrations, if that sort of thing worries you.

All in all, this is a very good selection of magic items, with a wide range of different powers. Some are best used by evil NPCs, while others are genuinely useful for PCs - albeit with some sort of downside, even if it's only unwanted attention from the authorities. All in all, this is one of the better booklets in the range.

A collection of 31 alchemical items (some with 'greater' and 'lesser' variants) presented in much the same style as the 'Loot for Less' line of booklets. While those focussed on cheap goods for low level games, here the range is rather broader. Part of the stated intent is to make the Alchemy craft skill more useful, and in that it certainly seems to succeed - this is quite a good variety of gear.

Many of the cheaper goods are minor healing items of various kinds, while some other items duplicate various bits of technology (flash grenades, fuse wire, and so on). But there's plenty here for all purposes, much of it useful in low to mid level campaigns without being overpowering. It's a good selection, if you're interested in giving more variety to alchemy, and of giving characters some 'magic items' that won't actually show up with most 'detect magic' abilities...

Volume 9 in the Loot for Less series covers low-level wondrous items fitting the title description - a rather random assortment obviously inspired by the phrase.

There are six magic bells, five books, and six candles in the book. The bells are, naturally enough, generally either alarms or some for of sonic magic, while the candles tend to be area effect items where the magic imbues the pool of light they create. The terms 'bell' and 'candle' are used fairly generically, giving you the variety of having, for example, magic gongs or rushlights.

The books are also varied, with some giving spell-related bonuses and others with specific powers related to writing. One of them doesn't work for me, in that it's hard to see what it achieves that a regular written book couldn't do better, but that's just one item out of seventeen in total.

There are also some suggested rules for crafting these special types of magic item, giving bonuses from appropriate mundane skills, and so on. So, overall, as useful as the rest of the series has proved, if you're after low-level magic items.

Volume 8 in the Loot for Less series deals with low-level magic belts, girdles, buckles, and similar associated items. The buckles, incidentally, don't 'stack' with belts; you can no more use both a magic buckle and a magic belt than you can wear two magic rings on the same hand. That's obviously sensible, while the fact that magic buckles exist at all gives a great variety to what might otherwise be just a list of girdles.

There's 18 different items here, which is quite a few, and they're all well described and thought out. Many are defensive in nature, or more limited versions of girdles of strength, but as always in this series, there's a wide range of different powers that would be useful to many different low-level characters.

For the relatively low price, this is a good offering in the series.

Volume 6 of Loot for Less focuses on low-level magic cloaks and daggers, items that are really only linked by the opportunity for a cool title.

The book includes ten magic cloaks. Five of these are based around racial concepts (with the obvious exception of 'elvenkind') and, frankly, do seem a bit random, although there's at least a sort of sense to the orcish and gnomish ones. The remaining five magic cloaks are rather better, conferring a range of different abilities, all of which have an obvious connection to their form. Despite the title of the book they aren't specifically - or even mainly - aimed at rogues, and can be used by a range of characters.

There are six magic daggers in the book, and these are also pretty good. Some of them are more accurately knives than true daggers, since they aren't much use in a fight, but they are all focussed around the general idea of what knives are for. As a result, most of them are more akin to wondrous items than to magic weapons, which is a useful extension of the general idea. The two that are most use in combat, incidentally, are both ideal for rogues, which makes sense for this type of weapon.

Another good book in the series if you're looking for a range of low level magic items.

The Loot for Less series describes a range of magic items worth less than 2,500 g.p. in the Pathfinder rules. This volume covers gloves, gauntlets, and similar handwear.

There are 15 items here, each with a clear description, and an explanation of how the price was worked out, where necessary. The general theme of the items is, as might be expected, manual tasks, although, on the whole, they're more useful for fighters and magicians than for rogues. However, there's something here for everyone, and the range of different things the items can do is quite broad.

It's another good product in the range, with some definitely useful ideas.

The Loot for Less series describes magical items worth less than 2500 g.p. in Pathfinder, and this volume covers magical rods.

There are a total of nine items here, which is significantly less than in the rings volume, although they generally require a much more detailed description of what they do. Even so, that's less pages for the same price.

Since there isn't much of a clear outline of what rods do in d20 - they're more defined by their shape than their function - the ones here are a varied bunch. Some are substitutes for mechanical devices, with the main advantage being that they're more portable. Others are more 'magical', albeit always with low level effects that would take some ingenuity to use, which is no bad thing.

This is probably slightly less value than volume 2, but the items are somewhat more original and unusual, which partly makes up for the smaller number of them.

This book provides descriptions and stats for 30 magical rings, all worth less than 2500 g.p. in the Pathfinder system. It's a useful selection of simple, relatively cheap, items for low level adventurers.

Explanations as to how the prices for some of the items were worked out are included, which would prove useful if your own game uses slightly different assumptions, or you want to use these ideas for some other version of d20. There's also a discussion of wearing rings on portions of anatomy other than fingers, and a number of illustrations of such, although the default assumption is that you still can't wear more than two at once.

Most of the rings provide small bonuses to abilities or to specific uses of attributes, although there's a good selection of other minor magical powers, too. The prices for the rings go down as low as 35 gp, although are (unsurprisingly) in the mid to upper range of the book's chosen limits.

On the whole, a nice selection of minor magical items, well laid out, albeit with quite a lot of colour on the pages.

Four pages of description for the cult of a chaotic goddess of prostitution. It's reasonably well done, and not bad for $1, although you will need to do some further work to use it fully in a campaign - whether as an adversary or a bit of local colour for a decadent society.

Intended to be the first in a series of books about fortifications in fantasy games, this volume focuses on the purpose and basic design of such buildings. It begins with a thorough analysis of the role that castles, towers, and other strongholds play, and discusses considerations such as placement, shape, use of the local geography, and so on. Taken together, this section of the book helps ensure that strongholds have a feel of living, breathing, places that could really exist, even in a fantastic realm.

What follows is a detailed design system that works, not just for strongholds, but for just about any building imaginable. Although written with d20 in mind, aside from the prices, this system could be used for any game where you want a detailed description of building construction. It's most likely to be useful if PCs want to build a castle or wizard's tower for themselves, explaining how long it takes, how much it costs, what materials it needs, and various other factors that need to be considered.

However, even if all a GM wants is a checklist for drawing floorplans of his own buildings, and some discussion as to how such things actually work, this book would be very valuable. The amount of detail and thought put into the book is remarkable, and, while focussing on what could really be achieved with medieval European technology, it does not forget more exotic building materials for magical otherworldly palaces of pure crystal, or the like.

For less than $4, this book is highly recommended. It's around 50 pages long, ignoring contents pages, etc. and well illustrated with appropriate copyright-free work, and writing and layout are both of high quality. I recommend this to anyone looking for a bit of detail and realism in their building design.

This is a relatively short book that, ostensibly, describes the use of magic to construct buildings. There is only one internal illustration, but that's fair enough for the price, although the layout of the book is extremely basic, without any apparent effort having gone into it.

Still, for $4, that's forgiveable if the book includes some good and usable information. Unfortunately, this one really doesn't. There is some general discussion of magical architecture, but it's all fairly obvious and there's no detail about, for example, how much it would cost, and only a few vague statements about it being possible to do things with magic you can't do without it - all of which is fairly obvious.

The bulk of the book consists of a spell list for architect-wizards. Most of the spells fall into one of two categories. The first type allows you to draw architect's plans, which, presumably, could be done equally well with a quill and parchment. These spells are, to my mind, overly specialised, not very well described (I think they're putting an image from the wizard's mind onto parchment, but if so, why they only work for narrow sub-types of plan is beyond me - why can't I project an image of, say, a mountain scene?)

The second sort create invisible workers that actually do the construction, similar to an unseen servant, or make things like kilns. There are a few others, such as creating an illusion of the finished building.

The book finished out with more statements of the mostly obvious that it fails to elaborate on, and a reaction table for how annoyed non-magical masons get when they find out you're taking away their livelihood.

Well, okay, so the idea is presumably to have the construction process appear magical, and look cool in a fantasy world. But beyond that, why bother? Despite being told that it's possible to construct buildings this way that you couldn't otherwise, there's no indication as to why, and crucially, no explanation of WHAT you can do. Assuming your game doesn't focus on construction work, the finished product is surely what matters. What cool things can I have my magical building do, or even look like, that normal ones can't or don't?

I'm not going to give this a '1' because it is cheap, and it could have been worse. But it's hard to imagine what it would be useful for.

Treants are, perhaps, an unusual topic for a sourcebook. Despite the role of the ents in Lord of the Rings, they have never received much further coverage in fiction or fantasy RPGs. This book redresses the balance with a thorough look at the race, their psychology, and their magic.

Although character classes, feats, and spells are provided for treants, their distinctly inhuman nature does, to my mind, make them most suitable as NPCs. However, a GM wishing to use them as such will find much here of use, and its well written and evocative.

The treants of the MM are NG, but this book provides plenty of alternatives that make them more useful as a foe in traditional games. There are 'shadowed' treants here, that take vengeance against axe-wielding humans to an extreme, but also a couple of varieties of undead treant (both of which make perfect sense, and don't just feel like something tacked on for the sake of it), as well as three other evil or monstrous creatures based on the treant theme.

All in all, this provides rather more useful material than might be expected from its coverage of an obscure and good-aligned, but not very PC-friendly, race might suggest. Its well written, has good artwork, and gives a real opportunity to have a neglected race from one of the founding works of fantasy literature have a key role in your campaign.

A good treatment of fey that are closer to folklore than to standard D&D monster fare. There are a total of seven beings described (one of them with two variants), each fairly well written and including adventure ideas. CRs range from 2 to 18, although there is one special case somewhat debatably given a CR of 0.

The creatures have an interesting flavour, and are genuinely atmospheric. The book rounds out with a rather vague section on curses, some rules for fey marriage to mortals, and a selection of new feats. On the downside, the book has no artwork (other than the cover) and only a basic layout, so don't expect any frills.

Nothing outstanding, but not bad for the price, and the atmospheric nature of the beings elevates it to 4/5 from me.

As the title suggests, this is a thorough examination and reworking of beings with the Fey template for D&D3. For those looking for crunchy details, there are plenty here, with feats, character classes, races, spells, and monsters all provided. The races and classes are not overpowered, making them easily adaptable.

The best part, however, is the detail on the culture and nature of the fey. Some of this departs from the standard MM information (these fey, for example, do not need to eat or sleep), but that's easily adapted if you really feel the need to stay consistent. What it does provide is a feel for the fey as truly alien beings, and as something much more than the standard dryads, satyrs, nixies, and so forth - while still encompassing all of those.

The book really brings a touch of folklore to a D&D game, making the fey more than just strange monsters or a different culture, and does a good job of explaining why the fey act the way they do. It does introduce a large number of new concepts, making it of more use for a campaign that heavily features the fey than one with just a few casual encounters. But, for such a campaign, it does seem invaluable, and highly original.

With good layout and high quality artwork, this book is well worth the price.

Fantasy Commodities 2 naturally follows the same format as the first entry in the series, but this time, has 28 commodities, almost twice as many as before.

Unfortunately, the originality of the first volume is generally lacking here. Many of the items listed here are real world ones, where the strength of the first product was in its sense of fantasy and magic. Even the fantastic commodities don't seem to be terribly interesting, although there are a few exceptions.

The items are once again a mixed assortment of organic products, albeit with more small invertebrates this time (all real ones, such as fireflies and millipedes). Its something of a disappointment after the first booklet, although reasonable enough for the price as a listing of possible things merchants might be selling.