Tabletop Tuesday: The Griffin’s Saddlebag Book One and Book Two

Hey all, Sam and David here today.

It’s probably clear by now that I (Sam) have a fondness for backing Kickstarter projects related to tabletop gaming, typically TTRPGs, but sometimes I pick up other projects as well. That means that we end up with a lot of different supplements and accessories to help level our games up even more.

And even when we switch from D&D 5e to PF2e or vice versa, we can usually modify the accessories to work in different formats.

Now, when the Kickstarter came out for the first book in this series, we missed out on it, but a fellow friend and TTRPG player had backed, so we were able to see the quality of work for Book One. Of course, that meant when the Kickstarter came around for Book Two, not only were we able to back the project, but we were able to add-on Book One at the Kickstarter price.

These books arrived last week, and we’ve had a chance to peruse them a bit. We haven’t been able to utilize them in gameplay just yet, but we’re excited about the potential. You can find out more about The Griffon’s Saddlebag and other projects by visiting their web site.

All right, let’s jump into our thoughts.

This lushly printed hardcover book is filled with 365 magic items that have been designed, illustrated, and balanced for Fifth Edition by The Griffon’s Saddlebag. Fill your campaign with exciting new magical items, such as the dragon tamer’s lance or catnip amulet, and reward your players with treasure as unique as their characters. Each item has also been carefully organized into easily searchable charts and random treasure tables. These magical items have been peer-reviewed by thousands of players around the world and strike a charming balance of mechanical intrigue, memorable flavor, and exciting role-playing opportunities.

This 208-page book also includes 12 new character subclasses, 3 new settings, a setting-agnostic villain, and a uniquely customizable playable race. If you’re tired of using the same old flaming swords or worry about balancing your own magical items, this may be the book you’re looking for.

If you like handing out physical rewards to your players, consider purchasing The Griffon’s Saddlebag item cards as well! This book includes the same items as the cards from volumes 1 through 7, so you can use this compendium as your master index while handing out physical rewards to incentivize your players!

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This 416-page compendium is filled with over 500 illustrated magic items. Each one has been been peer-reviewed by thousands of passionate players from around the world, and have been further sorted into easily-usable treasure tables. Also included are 12 new character subclasses, 2 new playable races, 14 new settings, and almost 100 new creature stat blocks that can be easily integrated into any Fifth Edition campaign!

Magic items like the fool’s lamp or wind-up merchant add memorable roleplaying opportunities to your games, and strike a charming balance of mechanical intrigue, memorable flavor, and character-defining lore. Make your game’s adventures more rewarding with new and exciting magical treasure!

Book dimensions are 8.5″ x 11″.

Product Contents:

• 416 pages
• 504 illustrated magic items
• 2 new playable races
• 12 new subclasses, one for each of the 12 base classes
• 14 campaign-agnostic plug-n-play settings
• Over 100 new monster stat blocks

Our Thoughts

Overall, our first impressions of these books are that there’s a lot of options going on in both of these. Both feature hundreds of new magic items, both give one or two new playable races, both include new subclasses for the 12 base classes of D&D, and give some new setting and monster options as well. It’s a treasure trove of options to spice up your campaign.

We like books and supplements like these (you can also get the magic items in decks of cards, if you’d prefer something you can hand out at the table). When you play often or in a bunch of different groups, it’s easy to fall into the repeating cycle of the same magic items cropping up all the time. Sometimes you want to surprise your players with something they won’t immediately recognize from all those other campaigns and gaming sessions.

That’s also true when it comes to monsters and encounters. Having third-party content means that that one player who has basically memorized the official books can still be surprised by things, and of course, if you throw curveballs at them by altering monster features and abilities on the regular, then it makes it even harder for metagaming to happen.

A lot of the subclasses seem rather interesting, and I believe they are ones that both David and Sam would be okay allowing players to use in our home games. We try to make our worlds pretty big and with a lot of magic and possibility, and as long as we can look at a third-party or home-brewed subclass beforehand, we’re generally okay with someone playing them. Of course, we always reserve the right to tweak things if it seems to cause an imbalance later (and that tweak usually means giving other players feats or items to elevate them to the same level and then increasing the monsters and baddies so they are more of a challenge to the more powerful party).

We haven’t had the time to read through every page in both books, but what we’ve glanced through…we like. A majority of the magic items have artwork to go along with them, something that doesn’t happen in the WOTC official books. I (Sam) like being able to have both a text description and an artistic depiction of the items. It makes it easier to show them off during the campaign. Plus, I really like having visual aids to help with my players who sometimes have issues with theater of the mind.

It’s always fun to add supplements to our collection, and to look through the books when they arrive in the mail…but it absolutely makes us miss being able to play TTRPGs regularly. Perhaps we’ll be able to join a one-shot or two while we’re at Gen Con. That might be nice.

Anyway, we definitely like the options presented to us from this team up of The Griffon’s Saddlebag and Hit Point Press, and it’s entirely possible that we’ll end up picking up the magic items decks of cards at some point in the future.

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Well, that is all from us for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and we’ll be back soon with more geeky content.