Magic is everywhere in the world of Soulbound: Age of Sigmar. The characters are traveling through the Mortal Realms, each one suffused by one of the Winds of Magic. Many of these characters have been created by magic, such as the Fyreslayers or the Stormcast Eternals. The title of the newest Soulbound book, Artefacts of Power, implies the book is going to be chock full of magic items for the players to seek, use and destroy. Artefacts of Power designers Emmet Byrne, Michael Duxbury, Jordan Goldfarb, Elaine Lithgow, Martin Lloyd, Sarah Madsen, Dave Rudden and KC Shi put together a book that looks at how magic works in the Mortal Realms. After reading the review copy sent by Cubicle 7, I can report it’s a bit more complicated than that. Does Artefacts of Power light up the imagination? Let’s play to find out.
The first chapter of the book digs into realmstones. Most Warhammer players are familiar with warpstone, the Chaos-cursed material that powers all sorts of nasty devices for the bad guys of the Warhammer universe. Each of the eight Mortal Realms gets their own version in the Age of Sigmar setting and their properties are discussed here. In addition to the realmstones, two more stones are detailed that offer an additional power source for chaos and one that’s a void-flavored stone that cancels out the others. Some discussion is had about what constructing weapons with these stones can do to change their effectiveness or how players might hunt these rare ores to make a killing in the magic stone mining business. While this chapter was informative and inspirational, it also tips to the main weakness of the book. The rules for constructing weapons and armor are in Steel & Steam, so Soulbound groups who want to make a dagger infused with the Grand-Sand of the realm of Death will need that book for detailed rules on how to make these items themselves..
Next we move on to minor artifacts and how to acquire them. The book details several realmstone powered artifacts for inspiration with a discussion how one such item ends up in a player’s inventory. It could be as simple as finding out a market that sells these things, but the book encourages other options, like prying them out of enemy hands or seeking them out in the unexplored regions of the Mortal Realms. The descriptions are flavorful, even for items that could be reskinned as different things. A Lightning Battery, for example, could be a dragon heart, a talisman devoted to Sigmar or even an electric eel found in the Deep. Game masters seeking inspiration can use the collection of random charts to roll on for inspiration for the next strange magic item the players must seek out. The book ends with a short discussion on Realmgates, which makes sense given the discussion on Realmstone, but seems like it might be a better fit for a book on jumping through the different realms.
The best chapter in the book focuses on Ancient Relics, which are Soulbound’s most powerful magic items. Each item gets a full page write-up and illustration explaining the history and powers of each item. Then there’s a short adventure provided to let Game Masters drop the item into an existing campaign. These relics are full of the high fantasy flavor that I love in Soulbound, ranging from a cursed painting with a link to a realm of living shadow to a sword that can blast a Chaos champion with the wrath of Sigmar himself. It ends up at 20 relics which seems like a solid relic hunting campaign on its own. Collecting them for Sigmar and putting these items in his version of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark for the next time Chaos tries to destroy the universe sounds like an epic story to tell. The relics are framed with the idea that they are of limited use.: Once the threat they are needed to defeat is dead, they are meant to go back to their native realm. Giving them to Sigmar at the end of the story seems like an easy way to do this. There’s a short sidebar that discusses how to take the relics out of play but I would have liked to see more discussion from the designers on how to take these toys away without making the players feel like all their hard work was for nought.
The last sections really tip Artefacts of Power into feeling like its more of a GM book. There’s a bestiary with new monsters and a section that goes into one of the most flavorful threats in the setting. Endless Spells are spells that, for whatever reason, got out of control of the original caster and now roam the realms by feeding off all the nascent magical power in the setting. The one Endless Spell in the core book, Purple Sun of Shyish, is explored in more detail along with a dozen others. Players have access to these spells should they want them and, admittedly, casting them does give that feeling of the big cutscene spell in a computer RPG where an angel plucks a meteorite out of the sky to smash down on the bad guys or something like that. But these spells also are hard to cast and, if the roll fails, can become something the players need to gain control of again. It’s an interesting bit of risk and reward, but I can see tables swearing off these spells just to be sure they don’t get out into the wild. It also offers some discussion of a campaign frame featuring players hunting down these spells that have gone on long after the original caster has perished.
Artefacts of Power offers Age of Sigmar: Soulbound Game Masters some insight into how magic works in this high powered setting along with several great options for antagonists and plot hooks.
