[Review] Fetishistic Arcana by Violent Media

Fetishistic Arcana by +Edward Lockhart is a 25 pages supplement introducing magical fetishes for OSR rulesets.

Fetish is like a magical item but instead of being powerful alone it enchants or power-ups spells cast using or through the fetish. These trinkets are a nice addition for normal "plus this and that" or "get a spell or power wearing it" magic items. There are 14 of them.

All are very nice and there's plenty of variety between the fetishes. Almost every fetish has description how to create one. The creation is more like witchcraft than clean laboratory or library work. Items needed to create a fetish vary from jawbones to a crystal what needs real determination to complete.

Effects vary. Many boost or alter spells but some have different effects, even compared to a cursed item. Also many items have a flaw might make their use a little unpredictable (if you roll badly for example) or even risky.

Also after I read this the concept and template of fetishes was very inspiring. It is easy to create your own (other thing is are those good, heh).

Boring Stuff

I liked content a lot! But what about the PDF file? Decent easy to read layout, no big mistakes jumping out, was a joy to read on my mobile phone (really, no text re-flow or anything needed).

Illustration is simple, style original and colorful. Quite nice.

But everything is not perfect! There is one annoying thing I must mention. It doesn't affect the content, it just bugs me.

Page numbering. What is great is that Table of contents/Fetish chart entries are all clickable links what throw you right away to the right page. That is damn sweet (worked on my mobile phone too, extra points for that). The page numbering just is whacky. I don't know was it supposed to be in sync with chart results or not. D10 roll 1 content is on page 1. D10 roll 2 content is on page 2 etc. Until there's a full page picture what screws everything up. D10 roll 4 content is on page 5... The page number where this Table of contents/Fetish chart is on page A what indicates that ToC should be in sync with actual page numbers...

But then there are results 1-3, 4-6 etc. for Ancient fetishes and there page numbering doesn't even try to follow (MY) logic.

Anyways this is only a bug in MY mind and doesn't affect the product anyways.

Edward's answer:

"The deal with the fetish chart is this: if you roll a ten on it, roll another d10 to figure out which ancient fetish you got. The numbers are for the d10 results and don't really have anything to do with page numbers."

So...?

Very good little PDF "booklet" that introduces interesting "minor magic items" with real character. If you like interesting "minor magic items" with real character, check this out. If you are not interested in these fetishes consider twice, this is cheap you know!

I am most definitely going to check out more products from Violent Media in the future. THAT looks very interesting... oh and mutations! Hell yes for mutations. Random charts, I love random charts...
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Get it from DriveThruRPG. Current price, $2.