Fantastic Treasures (1984) is a great Role Aids book! It’s got that hot dog cart trade dress and a Boris Vallejo painting on the cover (pretty sure Boris’s wife and super talented painter in her own right, Julie Bell, modeled for this). The scope and thesis of the project is perfect for Role Aids: a collection of magic items drawn from myth, legend and folklore.

This book covers letters A through J. I wonder if there is a volume two? Of course there is! Thank goodness Mayfair didn’t put “Volume One” on the cover, though, or they’d have gone bankrupt the second it hit shelves.

Coverage is exhaustive to the point that I, a buff of myth, legend and folklore, am both surprised and impressed. Granted, my attention tends to hone in on the monsters, but I would have been hard pressed to guess there were so many magic items that aren’t weapons to collect in two hundred pages across two volumes. And, honestly, I think Allen Hammack had a special talent for tying the non-rational events of myth stories to physical items in unusual ways. I don’t think I would assume Friar Tuck’s staff was magic, you know? But I appreciate its inclusion, and the general variety of odd items.

Just about everything is illustrated. They might be shoddy, but they are there, which is more than D&D until…is 5E the first time we have a exhaustive illustrations of all the standard magic items? That’s my head canon now, anyway. The organization leaves a little to be desired. Sometimes, items are listed as what they are, sometimes they are listed under their owner, thus Loki’s Shoes appear under Loki rather in Volume Two under “S.” It isn’t the best, but it could also be much worse.