Review: Game Master Item Pack One

Since the concept of 'Tactile Gaming Tools' has been discussed lately on the roleplaying blogs, I thought the following might be of interest (published in my LJ on June 26th).

Game Mastery Item Pack One is a nifty little item that I picked up at pandemoniumbooks.com 's retail store here in Cambridge MA last week. It's published by paizo.com and is designed for use with tabletop roleplaying games, especially for fantasy settings.

This is a deck of 54 cards, which retails for about $9.95. The front of each card is a well rendered piece of art showing an item that might be encountered in a roleplaying game. The back of the card has a description (ex: "Hanging from the end of a leather cord, this necklace is crafted from fine gold coils set with a large dark gemstone.") a large section of white space labeled 'Notes' and an Item Code space, with the intention that a GM fills in the details and assigns an item code.

The card then acts as a nice physical item that can be placed in front of a player or which the player can keep (if the GM so chooses) with their character sheet, acting as a tactile reminder of the item and it's capabilities. The GM can catalog each item for their own reference, and keep any secret info not on the card in their own notes.

There's been a lot of talk lately among the game designers and roleplaying game theorists about the use of 'tactile' items in game and how players react to such and how it enhances the game, and this seems like an excellent tool for this purpose.

Additional decks sets are expected from Paizo in the months to come (the next one is due out in July) and I recommend that it might be an item that folks would want to pre-order from their local gaming shop (like www.pandemoniumbooks.com) to give the stores a good idea of how much interest and demand is in the item, as it's one that could easily be missed by folks in regards to how popular or useful it would be (since it is not for a specific game system, isn't part of a collectable card game etc.).