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GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 18: Power Items, Sean Punch 03 September 2016

This Dungeon Fantasy supplement deals with magical items that store spellcasting energy.

That makes it a fairly technical and specialised book; indeed, at 11 pages of content, it's at the low end of GURPS supplements in size (and price). It begins by revisiting the idea that cost determines an item's ability to store power: some aspects of an item's construction (like workmanship or expensive materials) count towards cost, others (like other magic) don't. There's also consideration of how the definition of "item" can be stretched (a vial of expensive poison works as long as the poison isn't used; a set of armour works as long as all the pieces are present), and how ornamentation can be added or removed to change an item's value.

The next section deals with different types of power items (the ones tied to the Dungeon Fantasy spell- and psi-using classes, and some new types for other characters who may need to draw on extra fatigue), and deals with some obvious ways to munchkin the rules by combining multiple talents into a single item.

Using Power Items comes next, with detailed constraints on what "carrying or touching" means, which items recharge themselves and which need to have power fed into them, and how to designate a new power item when you find something shinier than the old one. (There are obvious possibilities for signalling, here, since your old power item can be a long way away when you do this, not to mention identification, since the bond between power item and owner is foolproof.)

Some new advantages allow a user to wield multiple power items, to tweak the way they work, or to recharge items which normally require a costly ritual handled by NPCs.

The final section looks at restraining the powers of power items: restricting what can be used (perhaps requiring special costly materials), preventing ornamentation from adding value for power-storage purposes, raising the recharging cost, and so on.

This is all very well-written, as one would expect from this author, but it's very specific to Dungeon Fantasy; unlike some of the recent DF books, I'm unlikely to get much use out of this. Dungeon Fantasy 18: Power Items is available from Warehouse 23.

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