At some point in his career, every wizard finds himself needing to write magical spells. Whether creating scrolls, transcribing an ancient spellbook, or simply adding spells to his own spellbook, the use of inks and quills is time consuming and expensive. It is not surprising, then, that many wizards have sought to use magic to reduce the tediousness of the task.
This collection includes nine magical items for use in your game:
Ink of Summoning: a powerful substance that can be used to call a specific creature to you. Write the name of a specific creature onto a page with Ink of Summoning, then burn the page. As the page is consumed the creature whose name appears on the page is called before you.
Parchment of Preparedness: a boon to anyone seeking to scribe magical scrolls. Spells can be scribed to Parchment of Preparedness without the expenditure of experience points, and comes in three forms: Minor, Major and Superior.
Pen of Pain: It is often said that the pen is mightier than the sword. The Pen of Pain was created by a wizard who set out to prove it.
Quill of the Cipher: a boon to anyone wishing to conceal the true nature of a message.
Quill of Transcription: a handy item for anyone who enjoys speaking, but finds the process of writing to be a bit tedious.
Sinned’s Tattoo Ink: can be applied to skin as easily as ink to a page.
And for a fantasy twist on the old Rock-Paper-Scissors game, three Minor Artifacts are also detailed:
Knife of Paper Cutting
Paper of Stone Binding
Stone of Knife Crushing
Truly the Quill is more mighty than Steel!
Written by Dennis Mohr.
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This is a review for 'More Mighty Than Steel', a supplement by Skortched Urf Studios. I'm not a native speaker (I'm German), so I may have fumbled my language skill checks from time to time. Give me a note if I wrote something wrong and I'll try to make myself more clear.
More Mighty Than Steel has one and a half pages with no pics. It consists of 6 magical items and 3 additional minor artifacts. I didn't find out when this product was written, but since there 'expenditure of experience points' are mentioned I'm guessing at times way before Pathfinder. While there were some great products those days which are still useful in Pathfinder, this supplement sadly isn't one of those.
Out of the 6 magical items presented, two are spells in a can (Symbol of Pain and Secret Page), one is a Secretary in a can (a pen that takes notes), two are way outdated (expenditure of experience points and the tattoo ink is better covered in Inner Sea Magic) and the last one, Ink of Summoning, has a nice idea but is unbalanced.
The three minor artifacts are even worse. They make fun of the old Rock-Paper-Scissors game, but in a bad way. The Knife of Paper Cutting is able to – cut paper. And nothing else. In my mind every magical slashing weapon should be able to do that, I even have some knifes here at my home able to do that (I own artifacts in Real Life, yeah me!) and even if not one could simple tear the paper apart with ones hands instead of using a CL 16 artifact.
The Paper of Stone Bindung is unbalanced since you can use it unlimited, which enables you to destroy stone walls brick by brick of you have the time.
The Stone of Knife Crushing assumes all Weapon do have Will Saves, Nothing more to say about this.
Conclusion:
Sadly this product lacks big time, and not only for being old, some things in it are rather stupid. I give it 0.5 star out of 5, but rounding down doesn't work on this platform, so its 1 out of 5 stars.
