Dungeon Dressing: Mundane Chest Contents

This installment of the Dungeon Dressing-series is 11 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page advertisement, 1 page editorial/ToC, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving us with 6 pages of content, so let’s take a look, shall we?

Nothing makes player’s eyes gleam like the promise of loot just out of their grasp and chests are predisposed for dumping the precious thingies inside that adventurers covet. The thing is – with mimics etc., there simply is a bit too much paranoia going on. After all, just about all chests are secured via traps – and a chest popping up equals loot, so the rogue pulls out his/her kit. We all know the routine. The thing is – routine gets boring. And people ought to use chests for things beyond magic loot, shouldn’t they?

Enter this pdf, an excellent tool of desensitizing players and characters and adding more detail to rooms in the same stroke: Herein we find chest contents galore, with the first table offering 100 entries for clothes and possessions: Moth-eaten shirts, cult robes, lace gloves and dancing shoes alongside tools, remnants of chain-shirts, shirts with more than two arms and spiked collars and manacles – there is a fascinating diversity of contents here.

Now if you’re looking for something more out of the ordinary, then wizard’s chest contents, 46 entries to be precise – blank parchment, astronomy charts, severed bird claws, gravestone etchings, incense – all the nice things one would expect from the more esoterically inclined masters of the arcane.

Now clerics also tend to hoard interesting contents and hence, the third table offers 46 entries that could also be found in the care of other devout characters – wine-cups, herbs, ceremonial garbs, slaves and ointments, polished amber blocks and even a miniature altar within the chest await your PCs to discover them while they’re snooping through the possessions of the clergy.

Of course, food and drink are also stored in chests like these and hence we get another table (with just as many entries) holding chilled meat pies, rotting mutton cheese, skinned hares and even valuable herbs (with a GP-value) to offer something for the health and sustenance of the PCs.

Finally, we get a table of 46 entries containing odds and ends – rusted keys (and locks), caltrops, an assortment of glass eyes (creepy!), mustache wax and boot polish or a lonely, cracked teacup tell their own little stories a DM can easily expand and use as a basis for further adventures/complications.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to RSP’s 2-column b/w-standard and is exceedingly crisp. The pdf comes in two versions, with one optimized for screen-use and one for print-use. The pdfs comes fully bookmarked for your convenience.

Designer Josh Vogt has delivered a rather interesting, nice supplement full of intriguing, at times, funny, at times creepy and all out interesting mundane contents to make your chests more common and thus, the treasure chests ultimately more rewarding when they do pop up. There’s not much to complain in this particular supplement – it is a thoroughly rewarding supplement that is bound to see quite some use at my table. If anything, I would have enjoyed one or two more far out contents herein, but that is no reason to rate this neat supplement down. My final verdict will clock in at 5 stars.

You can get these contents here on OBS and here on d20pfsrd.com’s shop!

Endzeitgeist out.

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