[OSSR] Zauberharfen und Runenschwerter (1980s MC fuckery)

[Rasumichin]

[OSSR] Zauberharfen und Runenschwerter



It's time for another OSSR with weird German crap from the 1980s. The product in question is one of the earlier publications from FanPro. It came out in 1989, waaaaay back before FanPro bought the licenses for Shadowrun and Germany's most mainstream TTRPG DSA (Das Schwarze Auge).
Back in 1989, FanPro still went by the super-imaginative name Fantasy Productions and was mostly importing and translating RPGs, running an FLGS in the city of Düsseldorf (at that time, i spent most of my pocket money in this place) and once in a while put out material of their own, such as the now-infamous first edition of SR's Germany Sourcebook.


The cover gives an appropriate estimate of the trolling contained within.

In the same year, they also made the book we're talking about here. I bought both of these at their store in Düsseldorf, but i ended up using mostly the Germany Sourcebook, in spite of my group back then being about equal parts into DSA and Shadowrun. Given the reputation of the Germany Sourcebook as an insane pile of fanwank and nonsense, that may either say a lot about the low standards of my roleplaying group or about the low usability of Zauberharfen und Runenschwerter.

Zauberharfen und Runenschwerter ("magic harps and runeswords"), which i'm just gonna call ZuR from now on, is a sourcebook about magical artifacts that's supposed to be usable with any fantasy RPG. In practice, that means it's mostly geared towards DSA players, but tries to grab cash from the player base of other RPGs such as AD&D2nd edition, RuneQuest or the almost forgotten Midgard.
It's pretty thin, only around 60 black and white pages slightly above A4 format. It's glued and the glue is just beginning to come apart now, after more than 25 years. By the standards of the time, production values could be a lot worse. I've got threadbound SR4 hardcovers that have started to come apart mere weeks after purchase.
There's no price tag left on my copy, but i sure as fuck didn't pay anywhere near as much as the 70€ that some people demand for ZuR on ebay nowadays.
On the 60 pages, we find 49 magical artifacts. Even with the generous typesetting of 80s RPGs, that means a lot of backstory for each artifact.
So let's take closer look at this thing.

Credits

The book hasn't even really begun and they are already trying to be funny. Ulrich Kiesow, back then the creative director for DSA, is credited as the book's make up artist and keyboarder. A guy called Mucho T. Loco is listed as demonology advisor. There's people listed for homeopathic supervision, animal training and stunts or potato printing.
The German Pneumatic Institute in Immekeppel is credited for "historical accuracy". Somewhere in the table of contents, compatibility to fantasy RPGs is ranked at a bold 98%. I'm fairly certain that even today, most RPGs aren't 98% compatible with themselves, but whatever.
I assume that the actual writing was done completely by Michael Johann and Thomas Römer - they where also responsible for most of the Germany Sourcebook for SR and Römer later succeeded Ulrich Kiesow as creative director for DSA, where he committed atrocities such as the Borbarad campaign aka "1001 ways to say fuck you to your players" and, of course, the ruleslawyering behemoth known as DSA4.


I just googled the pneumatic institute from the credits and found out it's an inside joke about nitrous oxide. That explains so much.

Foreword

The foreword informs us that the artifacts in this book are really unusual and super special and unique and that they purposefully did not include stuff like healing potions or girdles of giant strength or well-known mythological artifacts such as Herme's sandals or Siegfried's sword Balmung. Because the players would already know these and that would be embarassing (if you've guessed that this translates to "you couldn't use these artifacts to screw the PCs", you've guessed correctly).

We also get introduced to Mingala, a generic fantasy setting they made up for this product. The map looks conveniently similar to DSA's setting Aventuria and a lot of the fluff texts later on show that Mingala is, unsurprisingly, just a slightly wackier version of Aventuria. Because, let's face it, DSA players are what this thing was mostly aimed at. In fact, Thomas Römer made several of the artifacts from this book DSA canon after he became creative director. I only found that out when i googled the cover of this book, but it seems that yes, the Pigs of Eternal Ham are official DSA canon. More on these piggies later.


You don't want to know where that came from, but i'm gonna tell you anyway.

Gamemaster Advice

We get a two page introduction on how to use this book. As it is supposed to be generic, we don't get many stats (it's not as if anybody back then cared about balancing one way or the other).

The prices listed for the artifacts are conveniently given in a currency system that's obviously plagiarized from DSA. They also give prices for a horse or a sailboat so that people have a rough guideline for how much 10 GC (Gold Crowns) are supposed to be worth. It's surprising we don't see such guidelines more often in RPGs, because giving them isn't fucking hard and you never know when MC is gonna need them.

Mechanical effects are given in a percentile system for ease of transferrability, except when they aren't.
Each artifact has a ranking for power, reliability, how common it is, how well it is known within the setting and how expensive it is.
Power ranges from 0 (not magical at all) to 5 (world-changing). Each step in between gets a brief, comprehensive explanation. Reliability ranges from 1 (total DM fuckery at your expense) over 2 (limited amount of charges), 3 (only works on a specific group of people, such as mages) up to 5 (always usable). Seems a bit wonky, but whatevs. Commonality goes from 1 (unique) to 5 (everyday item). Fame ranges from 0 (completely unknown) to 5 (known to everybody). Price goes from 1 (up to 10GC) over 2 (up to 100GC) to 4 (10.000GC) or 5 (priceless). That pricing system wouldn't work for low-cost items, the jump from 3 to 4 is enormous and they've just introduced a currency that every GM should be able to work with, so i don't know why they introduced this stat at all.
The advice to Mister Cavern concludes with a few guidelines for how to transfer stat adjustments and the like. It's pretty intuitive to do that for DSA and works mostly for AD&D, too.
So far, this is shaping up to a bit on the silly side, but it's not poorly designed for something that came out in 1989. But what actually counts is the bread and butter of this book, the artifacts themselves.

To quote the book:

But now enough of profane statistics! Dive into the magic currents that connect space and time and let yourself be enchanted by Mingala, the world of Magic Harps and Runeswords.

It should be obvious by now that nitrous would be the appropriate drug for this review, but i'm not particularly fond of dissociative anaesthetics and will stick with beer. Which i need a new one of.

Weapons and Armor

The Berserker Blades of Shay'Eluf

The neatly named berserker blades of Shay'Eluf are a pair of curved, single-edged swords. A short sword for parrying and a one-and-a-half-handed one. Let's hope you don't do the intended thing of using this book with DSA2, because you won't be able to use these items as intended - dual-wielding isn't a thing in DSA before 3rd edition unless you're a pet NPC. Maybe Römer tried to introduce his dual-wielding house rule for DSA here.
The berserker blades are a bit meh, but at least improve your attack and defense stats by 5%. Unless the short sword breaks and you start wielding the one-and-a-half handed sword with both hands and (who would have thought) go berserk. Which means that your attack stat goes up each turn, your defense stat goes down, you don't feel pain anymore and attack everything that gets in your way unless you get dropped to as many hitpoints below zero as you normally have above zero. There's no information about what happens when the longsword breaks first, or if and how you can snap out of the berserker rage without dying, but we get some backstory about the swords being crafted in a long-forgotten magocratic city state (that's totally not DSA's Selem) and other things you don't give a fuck about. Then we get a plot hook about some guy trying to collect the remaining swords just after the PCs have found one of them and then we're off to the next artifact.

Nan Dyara - The Sword of Revenge

If you think that the next sword won't fuck with the PCs, think again. Nan Dyara is also a shortsword. In the unlikely case that a PC gives a fuck about a shortsword, it immediately triggers a plot exposition by telepathically informing him that it's called Nan Dyara, Sword of Revenge and that it will give him fame in exchange for blood and that it will lead him to eternal life. I can't think of a player who's stupid enough not to throw that thing away when it starts to give such obvious hints to MC fuckery. Therefore, you have to roll below one tenth of your willpower to discard the sword and save yourself from the blatantly obvious attempt to screw you over with a cursed magic item. If you're a DSA1-3 character with a maxed-out Courage stat, that only means you're hosed 90% of the time. Wooohoo!

After being railroaded into wielding his soul-eating shortsword (oh, did i mention that Nan Dyara is one of these soul-stealing things? Because it totally is), Nan Dyara grows in size and damage every time the wielder kills a sapient being. Because we can't have nice things, it also permanently drains one hit point from the wielder with each slain enemy.
Oh, you also have to roll under half of your willpower to not use this thing in combat and if you try to just leave it at home, you auto-fail. And there's a demon locked inside the blade and it goes free once it has collected 7777 hitpoints. Fortunately, that's irrelevant because it has only stored 7000 hitpoints right now, so you won't survive until the demon goes free unless you're using this book for your Final Fantasy campaign. The plot hook for this thing is to present it to your players as an obviously super awesome magic item. Then they have to go on a quest to find a hermit priest who can break the curse before it kills the poor idiot who called dibs on Nan Dyara.
I'm sure this will get better with the next artifact:

The Suit of the Wyrm

This suit of armor is made from the skins of the two most foul-smelling monsters in DSA lore, the basilisk and the pit wyrm.
The Suit of the Wyrm is constantly dripping with slime and makes you stink like a pile of steaming dung. It provides as much armor as full plate maill without any encumbrance, but fucks your charisma over for weeks. I think i need more beer now.

The Screaming Axes of Narnsheimr

These are barbarian axes that can be used to boost morale of your troops and demoralize the opposition. You have to spend a small amount of hit points for that, but surprisingly, these axes don't try fuck you over, turn you into a homicidal maniac or make you stink like dragon feces. They're just a nice, thematic weapon for barbarians.

The Black Daggers

Single-use assasin daggers. Most of the text is just an iteration of the myth of the hashisheen, the assassins of Alamut. It has a lot of tongue in cheek row row fight the power and is a nice read. The assassins are, of course, using drugs to take a glimpse into the paradise they're risking their life for. If an assassin equipped with the dagger uses the fictional drug of belthani, he gets a 20% boost to being sneeky and climby and stabby. Then he traditionally leaves the used dagger on the victim's doorstep, because RPG assassins are somehow required by the assassin codex to leave obvious traces. That's about as retarded as the True Black Hand in WoD, and funnily enough, an agent of the assassin order is known as "THE HAND".



"Donogood", the Sword of the Kobold Mumpitz

Mumpitz (pronounced moomm-pits) is a lovely German word for silly bullshit. And like half of the items in this chapter, this sword is total and utter Mumpitz. It's a one-and-a-half handed sword, and Donogood must be the reason why these are also called bastard swords (at least in German, i don't know if that's also a thing in English).
Being crafted by a kobold, Donogood acts totally lolrandom. You roll a dice at the start of each fight to determine what kind of Mumpitz will happen. Maybe you get nice stat boosts, maybe the sword decides that it doesn't want to fight at all and drops to the ground where it can't be lifted up at all thanks to kobold magic (like Nan Dyara, Donogood magically forces you to use it so your GM can have some fun at your expense), maybe it decides after the fight that it would be fun to fight your party members, or to only hit enemies with the blunt side of the blade, or to sunder enemy weapons instead of attacking people, or to turn every successful attack into a crit and every failed attack into a critical failure...all of this is written in a cheerful, light-hearted way that makes the author sound really, really punchable. And, of course, the kobold Mumpitz can magically locate the sword so he can always get a hearty laugh out of the mayhem caused by the weapon.

Lightning Strike - The Sword Sheaths of Ilmenos

They give you super fast quickdraw abillities and i don't really care at this point because i already need another beer after all this Mumpitz. But i guess these things are among the few items in this chapter that are not outright MC fuckery.

[Rasumichin]

Clothing and Jewelry

The Amulet of the White Wolf

White Wolf was mostly known for Ars Magica back in 1989, but it's still possible that this is a shout-out to them. Nowadays, when you image search White Wolf, there's just pics of actual white wolfs. When you image search white wolf fantasy, you get stuff like this:

Makes me wonder at which point furries finally surpassed WoD.

These amulets are used by the barbarians of Narnsheimr and allow you to harden the fuck up and endure the elements without damage. That includes lightning n stuff, although it seems likely that it doesn't extend to magical lightning bolts. The text isn't clear about that. The amulets also only work on tough guys. There's also a chance of 5%/day that the user tunrs into a wolf. Which is supposed to be kept secret from the players to fuck with them.

The Ring of Arcane Fire

Just a ring of detect magic. No nasty side effects, though. Unless you're a mage, then the ring turns to dust as soon as you put it on.

The Life Signs of the Ibrisa Nomads

Bracelets that are always made as matched pairs and only work on two people with a strong emotional bond. If one of the users is in danger, the bracelet of the other turns black. If one user dies, the other bracelet shatters. Another unimpressive item that at least doesn't ruin your character.

The Fur of the Cat King of Vilnam

A robe lined with black cat fur and adorned with four cat paws. Yes, really.



This robe allows you to turn into a big black cat. While in cat form, you can magically order cats around and they can do fuckall about it. They even have to sacrifice their life if the user demands it. It's just a matter of time before an angry mob of cats starts to form and tries to kill you as soon as you're not in cat shape. Well, if you use the robe in a way that endangers cat lifes. It's just never been used in other ways until now and the plot hooks involve NPCs getting terrorized by angry cats, mass cat uprisings and the like. The robe is actually the fur of the "animal king" of cats (a concept commonly used in DSA, where the first animal of a species is particularly huge and powerful and immortal - well, unless it gets turned into a piece of clothing).

Tharsins Rings of the Holy Oath

These rings force a geas on you if you swear an oath. They were originally used for imperial expansion ("the time of the nine-fingered nobles"), but are now suggested as a convenient tool for railroading the players.

Elassati, the Ring of Life-Giving Fire

An item used for ressurection. Stores hitpoints and revives you if the finger with the ring is cut off post mortem and burned on an oaken pyre (i don't know what's with all that finger cutting all of a sudden). If you want to use it a second time, you get magically bitchslapped and your hand gets permanently paralyzed because fuck you.

The Robe of Ten Thousand Wings

Another robe for shape shifting. This time, it's a hooded cloak adorned with thousands of dead flies. Pretty bold fashion statment, but it allows you to turn into a giant swarm of flies - for half an hour. You're obviously kinda screwed if you're in mid-air while you turn back. Every use also means that some of the flys get killed, which causes minor damage.
Oh, and there's a 5% chance (increasing by an additional 5% with every use) that you turn into an agent of the setting's BBEG, the Fleshless Horror, who's a convenient stand-in for BBEGs like Sauron, the Nameless God in DSA etc.
At least the plot hook this time isn't to fuck the players over, but to let agents of the Fleshless Horror use this item to turn important NPCs into sleeper agents. Maybe the authors are assuming that the MC has, by now, learned to do this whole player screwing thing on his own.

The Amulets of the Monster-, Weapon- and Emperor-Series

As the unwieldy name implies, these amulets either show a monster, a weapon or an emperor of the realm of Urm. They are very minor magic items - healing one hit point, reducing damage from the next hit by one, turning you invisible for 5 seconds. At least they are extremely common and stack (the damage reduction only stacks in that 5 weapon amulets substract one point of damage from the next 5 hits, though). These things where crafted by an incompetent, but highly idealistic mage who annoyed everybody with his idéé fixe that the masses should have access to cheap magic items. The plot hook is that some of them turned into colector's items and people go all gotta catch em all on them.

Imrion's Clean Cloak

An elegant cloak that always looks neat and clean. If you act classy, it raises your charisma by 20%. If you're uncultured swine, it lowers your charisma by 20% because you come off as a poseur and a braggard. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the plot hook is that this item got stolen from the wizard who crafted it and he's showing up just after the PC who took it from one of the robbers got used to it, and he obviously wants it back.

The Morning Gown of the Empress

This gown is supposed to give you mind control powers and raise charisma, but it's actually not magical at all and the empress is just really awesome and pretty and her husband's an incompetent moron. It's mostly there for the half-assed plot hook that rests on the players siding with the empress against her incompetent husband. Well, i guess it could be worse.

Shemari's Cats Paws

The text quickly informs us that these aren't severed body parts of a dead cat king. They're just elven boots that allow you to walk without leaving a trace or making a sound. They don't reduce noises made by your weapon and armor (the text uses the example of knickerbocker plate maill).

Algurin's Headband

A silver headband that allows you to immitate voices and sounds perfectly. Well, unless that fucking thing just fails, which at least doesn't happen more often than 10% of the time.

Miriag's Wooden Crown

Allows you to talk with trees. That gets about as tedious as talking to ents in LotR, it is described explicitly as being tedious, tiresome and annoying and this is somehow also supposed to be great fun for everybody involved. I don't even.
Oh, if talking to ents doesn't piss you off enough, this item also has a tendency to cause splitting headaches. "Tendency" is an understatement, actually. The odds are 25% at the start of the conversation, and then you re-roll every ten minutes, in a conversation that can easily last hours. Well, could last hours, because the headaches are so bad that you have to take the crown off immediately. And they reduce all of your attributes and skills by 5% until you get a good night's sleep.
At least the NPC in the plot hook who wants to trade the crown in for an item that doesn't induce migraines is honest about all of this. Maybe the players will give him the railroading ring or one of the swords of fuck you in return.

[Ancient History]

TELL ME MORE

[Orca]

Sturgeon's Law applies, but I'm pretty sure I've seen worse magic item lists. Which says something about how bad some magic item lists are, I guess.

[Rasumichin]

Minerals and Elixirs

While this chapter also includes drugs, it's mostly full of rocks.



The Banestones of Numaruk

Banestone is a mineral that absorbs magic. Effects scale with weight - while 5kg only have a 10% spell failure chance in a 1m radius, a huge slab of 625kg already absorbs any magic in a 4m radius and effects can be increased by arranging the stones in a goemetrical pattern. We don't get details on that, as this material is intended mostly for NPC use - banestone columns to guard throne rooms against magical assassination, anti-wizard cell blocks, stuff like that.
After banestone has absorbed an unspecified amount of magic, it abruptly discharges the stored magical energy while vaporizing itself and possibly the bystanders as well. Details on when that happens and how much damage it does are left to the "pyrotechnical playfulness" of MC.

Soon Different

Soon Different is a potion that randomly changes your attributes - it has even chances of improving or decreasing them or leaving them unaffected.That goes on for 24 hours, but because rolling hourly for any attribute for a whole day isn't enough dice roling, this stuff is also super addictive, cause physical damage and may lead to permanent attribute modifications. Your odds of attributes permanently improving or remaining unaffected are better than your odds of them permanently decreasing, but this gets worse with every use.
The alchemist who invented this stuff also adds aromatic flowers to the recipe to make this stuff largely irresistible to ensure that the PCs will drink it. The plot hook is that said alchemist drug czar is creating an army of addict slaves.
Your odds of getting physically hooked after the first use are 80%, which fits well with late 80s/early 90s hysteria about crack, but is still completely retarded and doesn't actually apply to any drug known to man.
The addict may also use other attribute-altering potions as a substitute, but this kind of methadone treatment may lead to flashbacks that reproduce the entire spectrum of effects of Soon Different.



Dragon's Dung

It's not exactly what it says on the tin, but actual dragon feces are one of the ingredients. Well, the tin doesn't mention that, this paste is marketed as the "balm of crystal armor" and was developed to fight dragons. It makes you completely immune to any kind of fire damage for 1d20 days, but also drops your charisma to 0. There's a certain pattern here of items that offer protection for making you smell and look like a turd.

Wine of Anti-Magic

Need other ways of fucking with the wizard than building a cell of explosive anti-magic stone? Well, just offer him free drinks. Anti-magic wine is available as reds and whites and is indistinguishable from normal wine. Each glass causes a cmulative 15% spell failure chance and increases spell point cost/drain by 25% (i don't know what happens if you use Vancian magic). Large amounts may even have permanent effects - large amounts are defined as drinking a whole bottle or staying drunk for 7 days. I don't know how you're supposed to stay drunk for a whole week on one bottle of wine unless you're an elven baby, but i guess what counts here is the will to fuck your players over.

The Fundament of Mingala

A mineral that increases in weight a thousandfold when it comes in contact with light. Used in special crossbow bolts and siege engines. And, of course:


Twinstone

Two matching fragments of meteorite rock. They start glowing once they're within a 10km radius of each other. The closer they get to each other, the brighter and hotter they glow. If they get reconnected, it leads to fusion and a burst of light that blinds everyone who looks into it permanently. The plot hook is that the PCs find one fragment. Everything else is supposed to sort itself out. I somehow think that the only thing that will sort itself out is that the players get disappointed and frustrated and decide to leave the group, but that's just me.

[Rasumichin]

Other Oddities

The Silver Horseshoes of Athostex

A set of silver horseshoes and nails that double the speed of your horse, but also let it age twice as fast, fatigue twice as fast and require the double amount of food. I guess the fact that they're a divine artifact makes up for silver being way too fucking soft as a material for horseshoes. The backstory to these is that the dwarves used them to speed up their ponies and break a trade blockade. There's only five sets of these things, so i dunno how you can build up a supply chain for an entire dwarven nation with them, but RPG authors have no sense of scale by default, so that's hardly surprising. That whole blockade breaking thing didn't make a difference in the end anyway, because there was an inflation that ultimately forced the dwarves to sell their divine magic horseshoes (because Germans). How selling five sets of magical horseshoes is supposed to fix your economic crisis i don't know, but 1.) RPG authors have no sense of scale and 2.) Germans.

The Peacemakers of Urm


If peacemaker makes you think Colt, you're sadly wrong.

The peacemakers are magical golden spittoons. They are related to the ring of railroading described upthread and enforce oaths of peace. By creating a demon out of the spit of the signees. Kinda meh, but as with most artifacts in this book, it's at least an enjoyable read thanks to the snarky tone the flavor text is written in.

The Fire Bowl of Korbok

A fire bowl that's adorned with scenes of craftmanship and obviously recognizable as a lithurgical item of the dwarven god Korbok who also made the horseshoes from the start of the chapter. It's worth about 250 GC, but the text informs us that only PCs would be unscrupulous enough to sell a holy artifact like this. I guess the authors are right about that, though, because the artifact's ability to bestow the power of masterwork blacksmithing only works when it's used by clerics of fire/dwarf/craftsman gods. It seems that Korbok doesn't mind competition from other gods with similar aspects. Probably because a cleric of a blacksmith god should already be good enough at craftsmanship to make masterwork weapons without the help of a divine artifact.

Ye Grandt-Mighty Tome of Alchymia

A collection of alchemical recipes, with official quality management seals from some magocratic official we're supposed to give a fuck about. The recipes work reliably thanks to the German hard-on for quality management and industry standards. We don't get actual mechanical effects for any of the potions you can make with this tome, though. Just flavor text in faux 16th century German, which is something that Thomas Römer was always pretty good at, and a list of possible ingredients and suggestions for their effects. It's a nice read, but it all boils down to "let the players go on endless quests for something that they could just cast a spell for" and it doesn't offer anything solid.

The Pigs of Eternal Ham

These are two life pigs. They look, sound, smell and act like normal pigs, but you can't shake the feeling that they're sapient creatures. Which they totally are. The Pigs of Eternal Ham are the ancient pig kind Argronz and his vizier Nurzgurz. Back in ancient times that pigs refer to as the "pink age", they made far-flung plans to subjugate humanity and use them as slaves and a food source. They got ratted out to the gods, who cursed them with immortality and regeneration. Which means that you can take cuts of meat out of them and they just regrow the missing parts. An eternity of suffering and free bacon.


It's not as easy as this. They kick and squeal a lot when you cut your breakfast out of them.

The entire description is both very creepy and highly entertaining and obviously includes the proverb "today's pigs are tomorrow's bacon." The pigs soon became a running gag in my gaming group and, as mentioned upthread, actually became canon in DSA4.
As the pigs need their brain to regenerate, the only thing you can't make out of them is pig head jelly, one of the many infamous jellied meats found in traditional German cuisine.


We have songs about building houses out of this stuff.

There's 18 items left in this chapter, but i'm taking a break for now.

[Rasumichin]

Lengribaren's Demon Mirror

An ornate glas mirror of monstrous proportions. The frame is half a meter deep, but i guess it needs that much interior space. Looking into it triggers a saving throw vs mind control magic - if you fail, your soul gets sucked into the mirror and is replaced by a demon. The body snatching can only be reversed by forcing a possessed character in front of the mirror and smashing them against the glass, which breaks the mirror and releases 2d6 demons who are going to fuck your shit up. Souls remaining within the mirror turn into demons themselves over a 5 year period.

Lengribaren's Folio of Amnesia

Made by the same mage who crafted the Demon Mirror. Lengribaren (an apprentice of a wizard with the DSA-typical bad pun name of Khaiman Al Igator) was one of the first victims of the Robe of Tenthousand Wings that we came across earlier. The influence of the BBEG Fleshless Horror made him craft the Demon Mirror, but he later regained some self control - the description of the Robe of Tenthousand Wings doesn't mention that this is possible, but i guess pet NPCs get away with it.
So after coming to his senses again, he decided to craft another magic item that allowed him to fuck with agents of the Fleshless Horror - the Folio of Amnesia. Because writing Folio of Amnesia on your secret weapon against evil mages would be about as dumb as assassins leaving a trademark dagger on their victim's doorstep, the tome goes by the title of The Last Arcane Secrets of Mingala. Reading it and failing your saving throw means you lose knowledge skill points and spells - how that works exactly is something the MC is required to pull out of his ass, but the more you read, the more you forget. How long you read is determined by how badly you fail your saving throw, but we don't get more precise suggestions for that, either. Instead, we get shoutouts to German oldschool gaming magazines Zauberzeiten and Wunderwelten ("magic times" and "wondrous worlds", which is what a character getting lost in the book is supposed to brabble about while reading).

The Folio is explicitly described as...i'm not making this up...a "printed deus ex machina" that can be used to "regain game balance".



This reminds me that this book was in large parts written by a guy who regularly suggested taking all the PCs' stuff away in his adventures. To regain game balance. Because balance means playing as a shit farmer forever, even in campaigns where you're expressly supposed to be the biggest heroes of your era and to be the chosen ones who save the world.


Average Thomas Römer plot design.

The Vase of Life

A pretty vase for putting flowers into. The flowers stay fresh for an abnormally long amount of time. After they've withered, you can drink the water for 1d6 permanent hit points. The water also bestows longevity, but there's no rules for that. What we do have rules for, though, is that the effects of the vase take longer and require more flowers with repeated use - 1 year and 1 flower on the first use, 2 flowers and 4 years on the second, 3 flowers and 9 years on the third etc. I guess we can all do the math and assume that the next use would require 4 flowers and 16 years and then 5 flowers and 25 years, but honestly, even DSA campaigns don't last that long.

The Seven Knives of Mountain King Bromtar

A set of seven whittling knives, with handles coated in gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone, wood or leather. Each knife can cut through the respective material like butter and allow a skilled worker to create absolute masterpieces - several artifacts in this book were actually crafted with these knives. The complete set originally came in a wooden box that completely shields the knives' magic aura, or that of any object that fits within the box entirely.
The downside is that working with a knife requires a dexterity roll and that it permanently stops working for the character if they fail. They're also scattered across the continent, so we get a gonna catch em all scenario as the plot hook.

Anroya's Batzen

A Batzen is a coin that was minted in medieval Switzerland and Southern Germany. Batzen are the silver coins of this setting and Anroya's Batzen looks exactly like your average silver coin. However, this indistinguishable item is cursed (who would have expected that?) and makes you lose all your money except for this coin. You get cheated out of your money, you just drop it or leave it somewhere, you become a magnet for robbers and MC masturbates furiously to your misfortune.
You can only lose Anroya's Batzen by gambling. If you throw it away or spend it, it quickly returns to you. It is also indestructible. Even if you throw it into a volcano, you can't break the curse - you just make it permanent because you've just discarded the option of losing the Batzen in gambling.

Toldrim's Magic Bondage Ropes

Six short (50cm) pieces of thin rope that automatically bind you and are indestructible. They also come with an amulet that's engraved with a safety word of the MC's choice, which is the only way to untie the ropes (the plot hook notes that finding the amulet may involve a lengthy quest after one of the players has been tied up by the ropes, because that's such a fun idea). Boringly enough, the suggested primary use of the ropes is to secure treasure chests instead of getting kinky, but if these ropes find their way into the hands of DSA players, you can rest assured that they'll go full Oglaf with them.


I'm sure you can do lots of neat stuff with indestructible rope, but let's just hogtie the empress instead.

[Rasumichin]

The Monster Mirror

A small hand mirror that allows you to summon monsters. It contains a selection of 10 different creatures that are chosen randomly, previews the monster and you can decide to retry for another monster, but you only get 12 tries in total and can only summon 5 monsters that each fight for you for 5 combat turns. It doesn't list what kind of monsters are summonable, but suggests that they should be known in the campaign setting. Given examples are bee swarms, rat hordes, wolves, cyclopses and dragons - so retries may well be worth it, but may be a bit risky depending on the selection the MC settled for.

Mirror "Show Yourself As You Are"

Another hand mirror. This one reveals the true nature of magical creatures and magic items, but it only has 5 charges. For some reason, there's a small chance of going mad if you see the true face of a doppelganger in the mirror. The mirror's backstory is that it was comissioned by a paranoid king who was really afraid of doppelgangers infiltrating his court. With the help of these mirrors, he found out that his fear was unfounded. He took that as a clue that the wizard who made these mirrors must be a doppelganger himself and had him executed.
Fun fact: In spite of Doppelgänger being a German word, doppelgangers are just known as shapeshifters in German fantasy, while a Doppelgänger is a lookalike or double.

Magic Bridle

Looks just like normal bridle. Improves your riding skill by 20%. Nothing to get exited over, but this item is absolutely reliable and has no downsides at all. Maybe that's why half of these bridles, which were originally made for the imperial cavalry, got stolen by conscripts and sold on the black market. I'm getting the impression that this entire item is just about the time the author spent as a conscript in the German army, because stealing equipment is something German conscripts did all the fucking time.

The Hypnotic Fires of Dharod's Torus

An unbreakable glass ring that seems to contain frozen flames. When you take it into your hands, the flames start moving in mesmerizing patterns. This has a calming effect that doubles your nightly regeneration of hit points and spell points and the torus also warms you like a campfire, but the mesmerizing effect also has a 5% chance of making you go into trance habitually, becoming possessive of the torus. There's also a 1% chance per day that a torus addict just loses interest in the item and ceases his habit.

Yorani's Cheating Dice

These look like a plain, normal d6, but can, with some practice, be influenced to show the desired number with a 90% chance. Besides being the ideal dice for MCs who like to use this book, they are also perfect for cheating gamblers - and were, in fact, created by a wizard with a severe gambling problem. He's still alive and kicking, a total dick and the plot hook for this item.

The Knife of Toxin Detection

Detects magical and alchemical poisons. Doesn't work on natural toxins like botulinum toxin, alcohol or germs. I'd say that the mention of alcohol in this context opens up a whole can of worms as to what counts as a natural or alchemical toxin. Still, the plot hook is yet another paranoid ruler who hires the group to find one of these knifes. I guess would-be assassins should just use ciguatoxin on him or whatever.

If you guess that it's not a good sign when something that huge is able to cross the blood-brain-barrier, you've guessed right.

The Harp "Moonsong"

An ornamental elven harp with strings made from pure moonlight. Moonsong is a sapient being and a master composer who forms a telepathic link with a gifted musician to produce breathtaking works of art. Moonsong is also a horrible diva and refuses to play the same song twice. She also gets jealous if you play other instruments to perform a composition and if she's pissed at you, she may ruin your next performance to publicly humiliate you. Everybody who's worked in any creative field, whether as a professional or hobbyist, knows the type and i think i'd rather get the fly cloak that turns you into an agent of chaos.
For some reason, none of the bards who have previously owned the harp have just gone Jimmy Hendrix on that thing and burned it on stage.
Maybe it's yet another item that just plothammers you by controlling your mind, but the description mentions none of that. It doesn't describe the harp as indestructible, either. I guess Mingala is just full of jazzers who don't want to play the same song twice anyway.
The plot hook suggests that the current owner may sell the harp to one of the players after a particularly breathtaking performance. I'm afraid that MCs who want to roleplay constant bitching between artists will disapprove if you just do a Paul Simonon on the damn thing and punish you by letting you find more magic items.



The Dressers of the Direct Way

An ebony dresser with a mirror, two sets of drawers and carefully etched lion legs. There's two of them and they're magically connected. As soon as you open one of the drawers, the mirror shows you the room the other dresser is standing in. An object placed in the upper drawer can be teleported to the lower drawer of the other dresser. Like the harp moonlight, these were crafted with one of the carving knifes of Bromthar.
No curses attached!

Tordoks Roots

A fresh elm root. No, really. It stays fresh forever and if you bury it in the ground, get naked and meditate over it, you turn into an elm for a day. These roots are moderately common and all used to be part of the root network of a holy elven tree that got knocked over by a storm. I guess having one of these finally gives you a use for Miriag's Wooden Crown that doesn't lead to crippling headaches. As you retain your senses in tree form, these roots are moderately useful for spying if we're talking about a place where nobody wonders where that elm just came from and if you can also meditate naked ahead of time without anybody complaining. Apparently, there's people who murdered elfs for these marginal benefits, but maybe they just wanted to kill some elfs.


I admit it, i didn't even dare to google "hot elf on tree action".

The Coffin of Necropathy

A massive sarcophagus made out of ebony and silver, adorned with symbols of death. It has six silver carrying handles because it's fucking heavy, it's lined with finest black velvet because a living person is supposed to lie in that thing and it has seven solid locks because you can't simply get out of the coffin at will. You get locked in there for 2d20 hours (and, of course, the coffin is indestructible and completely immune to lockpicking and magical tampering) and can use this time to communicate with the dead. If you fail any of the hourly willpower rolls, you panic and flip your shit. If you stay locked up and panicked for more than two hours, you suffer permantent derangements like claustrophobia, necrophobia, delusions (thinking you're a dead person), paranoia etc. If you withstand 10 or more hours without panicking, you get a permanent 5% increase to willpower and charisma.

Volmax's Puppetts

Small clay puppets that were crafted by a druid. They are alive and sapient (although they can and usually do remain motionless for long amounts of time), there's 13 of them and they all have an individual character, but are generally humble, friendly and loyal beings. I'm kinda surprised that there's a sapient item in this book that isn't a douchebag. The druid who crafted them sacrificed 13 humans to transfer their life force to the puppets and enslaved them for years. It's hinted at that the puppets finally killed their tormentor, but they've sworn an oath to remain silent on the matter. The plot hook is obviously to reunite the puppets who've been scattered across the continent, as that plot hook is kinda inevitable for a series of magic items that have been seperated.

Toldrim's Camouflage Rugs

Brought to you by the guy who also made the bondage ropes, these items are ideal for literally sweeping things under the rug. If an object fits under the rug, it gets hidden completely - the rug remains perfectly flat, magical scrying doesn't work, even the rug itself appears as non-magical. If you look under the rug, the object becomes visible immediately, though. There's four of these things, one is in the imperial palace in Urm and it hides a treasure chest full of fat loot. I guess after all the soul-stealing, cursed crap, they wanted to end the book on a happy note.


After that, we get two pages with ads for FanPro products and that's it. One is a 1/1 page ad for the Pendragon RPG that they tried to push in about every book they published, the other is 4 1/4 pages, two of them for the German translation of Grimtooth's Traps I + II.
This book clearly shows the time it was made in - while it's a lot less lethal and dickish than Grimtooth's, it's still full of ways to ruin an evening of gaming that are all portrayed as great and awesome fun times.
It's still a pleasant read and, with the exception of a few awful puns and unimaginative names, stylistically superior to a lot of the shovelware crap that gets put on the market today. And while a lot of the items could have deserved to be thought through a bit more, i don't get the impression that there's that particularly lazy idgaf attitude behind it that a lot of supplements these days show.
Both the horrible approach towards MCing and the pleasant, tongue-in-cheek writing style are fairly typical for early FanPro material. There was a lot of zany humor in the company back then and an amount of inspiration, passion for the hobby and general lightheartedness that is often sorely missed in contemporary TTRPG products. That's a part of the oldschool vibe that could really use a revival.

I hope you guys enjoyed this [OSSR] and that i'll get around to writing another one soon.

[Rawbeard]

Now that you have mentioned it why not do an OSSR for Deutschland in den Schatten, or any of the other Germany Sourcebooks that happened... back... in those days.

[Stahlseele]

*coughs*Querxe*coughs*

[Rasumichin]

I think Querxe showed up later. Maybe in one of the novels. The Germany Sourcebook is crazy enough even without also including a smurf metavariant. Metavariants weren't even a thing in SR1 (not that it would have stopped them).

I'd really like to do a review of that even without the smurfs, but my copy of the Germany Sourcebook got lost ages ago, along with loads of other old SR stuff like Awakenings, Virtual Realities 2.0, Biotech and Cybertechnology. I had this big pile of SR material that i left at a friend's place when we played SR and then his apartment got burglarized while he was in the hospital. I still don't know what kind of burglar steals SR sourcebooks, but that's what happened.
Most of the SR1-2 stuff i still own already got an OSSR. Maybe i'll cover Sprawl Sites or the Denver Box Set next, though. I've also got the Seattle Sourcebook for SR1 and the Neo-Anarchist's Guide to Real Life, but they're kinda meh.

As far as DSA goes, i was looking into Land der ersten Sonne and Rashtul's Atem, the 4th edition sourcebooks for Tulamidia and the Khôm desert (which means 1001 Nights, Mythos-expy lizardfolks and mountain barbarians on weed playing murder polo with captive PCs). Not as oldschool as the other stuff, but they're both OOP, from a previous edition and they've both turned 10 years old this year, so they qualify for an OSSR.

[Rawbeard]

I dare you to do DSA4. the core "book". People need to know.

[Rasumichin]

I wouldn't dare to do more than the DSA4 core book anyway. I don't own the full DSA4 rules and i value my sanity too much to even get close to any rulebook whose title starts with "Wege der/des..." again.

You know the common Cthulhu trope that books are written to contain the knowledge therein, to lock it up and save the feeble minds of men from it? The full DSA4 rules are just like that. I'd rather direct a performance of The King in Yellow than review the complete DSA4 arcane magic rules with all their endless modifier lists for how to make chimeras and golems that no PC will ever use because being seen with those things makes you kill on sight in 90% of the setting. Or the endless modifier lists for summoning that take into account if you're nude underneath that conjurer's robe and make you roll for arcane knowledge and drawing and astronomy and find books worth a fully trained war horse in full plate maille and go questing for weird items that please the demon you want to summon just to get the -47 modifier to your roll down to something manageable (i wish this was hyperbole, but it isn't. Not in the slightest).

But the abridged version is something i could stand to look at again.
And while it's OOP, there even was an English translation of that one, so it may be more relevant to most users on this site.

Ok, i'll take this dare. I'm sure i won't find the time for it in the next week or two, as it's still 288 pages and recovering from the hangover the review will inevitably cause will take a couple days off work, but i'll do this.

[Rawbeard]

sounds like a reasonable compromise and thanks to the english translation someone might get a laught out if it if they ever stumble upon it in some abandoned FLGS

[DrPraetor]

The Berserker Blades of Shay'Eluf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0u4M6vppCI ???

[Rasumichin]

That guy was still shitting his pants when this book came out, but i still cannot unsee this now.

[Windjammer]

The Fur of the Cat King of Vilnam

A robe lined with black cat fur and adorned with four cat paws. Yes, really.
...

Shemari's Cats Paws

The text quickly informs us that these aren't severed body parts of a dead cat king.

That brings to mind Black Adder, Season 3 (from minute 24:00):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JkL5ZxyX_8

[Prak]

I'm actually really curious as to how much of a market there is for books of magic items like this (format, I mean, not quality) these days. It occurs to me Magic Item Compendium was literally the exact same sort of book, and various "here are a bunch of new guns!" books for, like, Shadowrun, are pretty similar.

The industry is notoriously close-chested about sales, but does anyone know how well these books do?

[Zaranthan]

All I know is all my friends buy them like popcorn and I have to account for the slipshoddery in my game.

[Rasumichin]

I'm actually really curious as to how much of a market there is for books of magic items like this (format, I mean, not quality) these days. It occurs to me Magic Item Compendium was literally the exact same sort of book, and various "here are a bunch of new guns!" books for, like, Shadowrun, are pretty similar.

The industry is notoriously close-chested about sales, but does anyone know how well these books do?

If they're shoveling them out all the time, they probably do pretty well. And let's be honest, players are all over shiny crap to buy for their character.
Back in my first SR group, two guys bought half of the guns in the Street Samurai Catalog. They didn't even use all these LMGs and SMGs and shit. They used a silenced pistols for when they had to be sneaky and a Panther Assault Canon for when they didn't. But they loved to spend Nuyen on cool-looking things. One of them got a helicopter in spite of his character not even having a piloting skill.

One of the best-selling FanPro books was a third-party supplement for DSA that was just an armor and weapons compendium. That was shortly after DSA3 came out. Almost all of the stuff in there wasn't new. The DSA3 box set had two pages that listed 99% of the weapons in the FanPro armory and out of the new items, only two were worth buying - the barbarian sword that's like a longsword but better and the elven ivory harness that's like a hardwood harness but better. And maybe people bought the book because of these two items - but it sure as hell also had to do with the fact that unlike the box set, the armory had cool pictures of all the weapons.