An invaluable resource for fun and creative magic items, at an extremely generous price.

As a newer DM, I like magic items. However, sometimes navigating official magic items and other homebrew can be difficult, as it's easy for me to underestimate a magic item's power. Something like an immovable rod, for instance, can seem relatively simple and mundane on paper, but can have huge consequences for how your players approach your world.

Enter this book. Calpurnia's 101 Lesser Magical Items is exactly what it says on the tin. I know that nothing in this book is going massively overpower my party, but still gives them practical horizontal progression in terms of fun new abilities they can apply. These items are not only fun trinkets with minor benefits, but they could easily become key items for players whose identity is tied to their items and vice-versa. Maybe the rogue can find a ring of holding, and smuggles his thieves tools into secure castles and prisons. Maybe your monk will eschew her vision entirely for limited truesight, preferring to see the true nature of things by using a cursed blindfold. Maybe your Wizard finds an enchanted orb that can act as his personal assistant, remembering things on behalf of the scatterbained scholar. My personal favorite is a sword filled with the soul of a charlatan, giving my party not only a useful weapon with a fun spell it can cast, but a potential partner-in-crime and guide on their adventures.

Most items have variants. They can scale off ability scores, have secondary effects, or even be cursed in interesting ways. So while there are 101 items, the customization options offered allows for far more variety than that. In addition, the book is filled with comments from Archmage Calpurnia Askew, the author of this book. Her dry sense of humor keeps the DM engaged, and she often gives little anecdotes for why an item in question might be more useful than meets the eye.

I will echo other reviews by saying rollable and rarity tables and would be a nice quality of life addition, but that's just a nice-to-have and not a need-to-have. I think you'll have more fun tailoring your magic items to your players rather than leaving it to chance, anyway.

Finally, and this may be silly, but I've had countless other PDFs with tons of information in them, but scrolling through the entire book to find the exact page for some specific item or character option or whatever was a pain. This book is very neatly bookmarked, making referencing an arbitrary item easy. It also has a concise table of contents, and the book comes in a printer-friendly format.

For $3.50 USD, I view this as a must-have. If you're newer and want your party to play with fun and novel magic items without accidentally spiraling your campaign out of control, get this. If you're more experienced, apply the ideas in this book by either using them as written or simply by gaining inspiration. Also, it's simply good bathroom reading. I'm getting tons of ideas for fun plotlines centering around these magic items while leafing through it. Ultimately, Calpurnia's is criminally cheap for the value you get.

I love this supplemental book for non-game breaking magic items that are fun to give out to characters. Little magical knick-knacks that one might find. Maybe these were practice items from an apprentice, the random thought of an eccentric mage. Some of them are handy, others a little annoyingly cursed.

I changed some to be not attuned.

I use this book frequently.

This is a very good and extensive selection of tier 1-2 magic items. Really like the fresh ideas in here, and the Variants (to make an item cursed, or just give you more options to tweak it). The writing in Calpurnia's voice describing most of the items is very flavorful, and funny for the GM to read. I really digg this kind of style, also popular in WoTC books like XGtE.

Some more artwork would have been nice, since I like to give those as handouts to my players when they receive the item in question.

Good buy, and at a reasonable price. Will be using these items in my campaigns.

This is a truly amazing resource. It presents a wide range of items, complete with options for customizing them to make them more or less potent, or even cursed in some cases. Most of the items are useful, but none are over-powered unless the DM chooses to make them so by adding in some of the optional upgrades. I can see including almost all of these items in a DnD campaign, and several of them inspire ideas for further homebrews of my own. I have just launched a new campaign, and I expect some of Calpurnia's items will be among the first magical items presented in the campaign.

Truly great stuff. Highly recommended.

Just well done overall. A good variety, excellent descriptions, and I greatly appreciated the notes on raising and lowering an item's rarity. Also of note, thanks to the author for a clear layout with a white background.

Full video review here: https://youtu.be/4bmkj5_xyg8

Calpurnias 101 Minor Magical Items Typos or Corrections: Page 6 Variant Channelling: Verbal not Somatic

What is it?

• A Set of a 101 Minor magical items
• Designed not to be the epic loot like the hand of Vecna but a bit more meat to it than your standard +1 longsword.
• A lot of the more unusual items contain snippets of a lore to tell you about where the item came from and what it might look like.
• There is a variant system in place that takes a base line item and modifies it slightly based on a set of parameters.
• My Favourites include:
• The urticating armor, I just like the idea of a fighter pulling a piece of their armor off and stabbing some troll in the eye.
• The Rod of Portable Cover, this sounds like a Ranger’s best friend ever it also reminds me a lot of Orihime from Bleach for some reason.
• The Ring of Holding, caught by the guards and have your thieves tools confiscated? Always store one in your handy ring of holding.

What did I like?

• I like the lore additions for items a little flavour goes a long way
• The variants are an interesting idea that allows for a lot of customisation and interest, it’s always nice to have a set of items that are visually similar but might have slightly different effects based on quality.
• There is a good breadth of items presented and the core thrust of the idea is the more common type of magical items that you can start using fairly early on in a campaign.
• Formatting is really good and the PDF navigation was a nice touch.

What didn’t I like?

• It would’ve been nice to include some random tables for the items in question so they could be rolled on for random loot.
• I would’ve liked to have seen the items in list form ordered by rarity I understand the variant system makes this a bit difficult.
• More art but then that’s always going to be a tricky proposition.
• I would of liked to see more descriptions of what the items looked like.
• $3.50 on the DM’s guild you are getting 101 magical items, some really good flavour and in at least in my case more than one idea for a good adventure.
• 5/5 for a unique look at items you can integrate quite easily in to any campaign.

Pros:

• PDF Bookmarks for every single magic item entry.
• Many items actually care about a PCs skill level or modifiers.
• Every item has several variant traits that can be added for even more options.
• Calpurnia has a fun, college professor-like voice who makes insightful comments on items throughout the compendium.

Cons:

• None!

THE VERDICT: “CALPURNIA’S 101 LESSER MAGICAL ITEMS” IS THE PERFECT SHOPPING LIST OF FUN, VARIED MAGIC ITEMS FOR YOUR LOWER LEVEL CHARACTERS.

Full Review: https://roguewatson.com/2018/09/22/dms-guild-review-calpurnias-101-lesser-magical-items/ Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ58S7awFYk

Nice item selection, nothing too silly or over-powered, will certainly add them to my campaign! Love the suggestions for variants and background on some items too. Only improvement I would suggest is the addition of a simple D101 table perhaps?....to allow players can roll randomly (apologies if I totally missed this and it's already in there!)

A very nice selection of interesting items. This will definitely help spice up low-level campaigns without the usual power imbalance inherent to most of the fun and flavourful magic items in the DMG.