Paizo’s GameMastery-brand item cards are a great accessory. They used to come in boosters, which are fun for random treasure hoards.Now and again, we said we’d throw some praise around to products we personally dig. Considering the number of them I’ve got floating around the house, accumulating after every Gen Con, I should really drop a link to Paizo’s GameMastery collection of products.
Specifically, I want to draw some more attention to the underwhelmingly named but otherwise excellent Item Cards. I’ve used these things like crazy, and I haven’t played D&D in something like 20 months. Any time I get a chance to run a short fantasy-RPG campaign, though, (lately using systems like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, or the SAGA System I loved, or a heavily retrofitted version of the Coda-System edition of Lord of the Rings, always with my own settings, ’cause I’m an egomaniac), I pull out a stack of these cards to use. Each one is pretty, thanks to Vincent Dutrait and the cunning art department at Paizo.
Besides being pretty, these allow for nice and easy MMO-style equipment-lugging mechanics and just enough “grind simulation” (uh, in the MMO sense) to make the acquisition of items feel like winning on a slot machine. (Every monster in WoW is a slot machine, don’t you know.) Not into that kind of tomfoolery? Me neither, sometimes. So, again, you can just fall back on the pretty.