Adventuerer’s Vault
Adventurer’s Vault is a supplement for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition and includes a wide variety of items both mundane and magical to add to your Dungeons & Dragons game. In addition, it includes optional rules for mounts, vehicles, alchemical items, and creating unique magic items. Whether you’re a player looking for a nifty new tool to add to your arsenal or a Dungeon Master creating a list of treasure parcels for your game, this looks like the supplement for you.
To be honest, the niche that this book covers didn’t really feel necessary. I was content with all the mundane and magic items included in the Player’s Handbook (although the same cannot be said of the artifacts in the Dungeon Master’s Guide). Adventurer’s Vault is more like icing on the cake. To be fair, the book lives up to its claim of having “Arms and Equipment for All Classes.” If you want more options for gear and magic items, this is the book to get.
As you might expect, this is a big book of magic items and equipment! The pages have everything from weapons and implements to consumable items. Whatever your class from the Player’s Handbook, there’s something that’ll surely spark your interest. The trick is scouring all the material presented here, and it can get tedious – a book full of endless magic items inevitably feels formulaic and repetitive.
The section that takes the largest portion of the book is the magic armor and weapons section, probably because every class universally finds them useful. The chart for magic armor alone takes up six pages, a stark contrast to wands which occupies a page and a half. Still, those with patience can uncover some impressive gems. For example, I’m looking forward to my Barbarian wielding a Battlecrazed Weapon, which adds bonus damage whenever he’s bloodied. One of the items that quickly got errata’d is Veteran’s Armor, which originally let characters recover a daily power with the expenditure of an action point. What piqued my interest was the contrast between the staffs and wands. The former tends to be generally useful (though there are some exceptions), while wands are geared towards specific powers, giving you access to them (much like a magic item with charges from previous editions) as well as providing a minor boost.
As promised, the book contains a couple of optional rules, though their usefulness seems questionable. There’s a more detailed elaboration on mounts for example but honestly, how many PCs will be using them? The vehicles section provides some interesting rules that take into account what happens when a vehicle is out of control, but again, how many times will this pop up in a campaign – once per party? Then there’s the inclusion of alchemical items, which can be crafted via a feat (hello Tanglefoot Bag!). The first appendix is useful from a Dungeon Master’s perspective as it has some handy tips on how to create and insert unique magic items into your game.
It’s evident that there’s some forward planning on Wizards of the Coast’s part as when Adventurer’s Vault was originally released. At the time, Martial Power had yet to unveil the Ranger’s animal companion, and this book includes gear for such allies. Unfortunately, I doubt if this book takes into account some of the new classes in the upcoming Player’s Handbook II. For example, in the playtest preview, Druids use totems as implements, and there’s no mention of such items in this book. Not that I expected that this would be the case – we have to leave something for Adventurer’s Vault II – but considering the preparation that went into the book, I was curious as to how far ahead Wizards of the Coast would plan.
As far as layout is concerned, the book has a neat two-column layout, which suits the smaller 4E stat blocks. Since this is an equipment book we’re talking about, there are lots of charts and tables, as well as the occasional illustration to complement the text. What particularly caught my eye is how color is used effectively: creatures/monsters always have a green header while items have a yellow one. This becomes important when it comes to the Figurines of Wondrous Power section, which includes both.
The book has no index, but the second appendix has an exhaustive table of all the items in the book, arranged alphabetically by level, as well as indicating the slot it occupies and what page it can be found. This is probably the only 4E book (so far) that has such a detailed pseudo-index.
Adventurer’s Vault will likely cater more towards Players rather than Dungeon Masters. Again, the book exudes a certain expectation of content, and it succeeds in delivering what it promised. Fans of nostalgia will want to grab this book for iconic material not present in the Player’s Handbook such as Tanglefoot Bags, Figurines of Wondrous Power, and an Apparatus of Kwalish. Essential? Not in my opinion, but hey, if you’re looking for more equipment options, you may want to shell out the cash for this book.