Mundane No More: Texts and Tomes II – The Lands Beyond

This expansion to Rich Howard’s Mundane No More-pdf on research rules and tomes clocks in at 9 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 2 pages of advertisement, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 3 pages of content, so let’s take a look!

The pdf kicks off with a minor errata of book 1 (which, in my opinion, has nothing to do in the pdf-age -why not simply update the original file?), but oh well.

So what does the book contain – well, to cut a long story short, we receive 4 different sample tomes, including background stories etc. – which would be nice. More interesting would be the massive table that breaks down just about every kind of special material, from adamantine to Wyroot and Aranea-skin as recipes, providing a significant synergy with the main book’s cool take on this alternate means of crafting material. Beyond the default, though, we are also introduced to red mithral -which is similar to adamantine, but lighter and less durable. And yes, making weapons and armor of this material has significant repercussions for their efficiency, allowing e.g. one-handed weapons to be Weapon Finesse’d. (And yes, this can be pretty bad, but exerting a restrictive control on the amount of red mithril in a campaign is pretty easy to achieve…)

Finally, we also receive a pretty powerful meditative Yumi as a new magic item.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I noticed no significant glitches. Layout adheres to a printer-friendly no-frills two-column b/w-standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience, in spite of its brevity – nice service!

This is a solid expansion to the exceedingly inexpensive and awesome first book, with an appropriate amount of content for the low price. Since I really liked the recipe-rules, I did enjoy the addition of the special materials, though in my opinion, general guidelines to price new materials yourself would have been neat to have indeed. From Viridium to fire-forged steel (of interest for Sword & Sorcery campaigns where the riddle of steel has not been made public…), this pdf offers a cool array of recipe-pricing, yes. Then again, pricing guidelines would have *really* helped. In the end, I’m going to settle for a final verdict of 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 since the pdf is very inexpensive and the materials make a great addition to the base system.

You can get this cool pdf here on OBS!

Endzeitgeist out.

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