Adventurer's Vault 2 (4e)

Wizards of the Coast

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Make Your Wishes Come True

You've just defeated the monsters¸ and in the back of their lair you find an old wooden chest atop a pile of bones and rusty weapons. Through the keyhole spills a wondrous golden light. What magical treasures will find inside ?

This Dungeons & Dragons game supplement presents hundreds of new magical items. Including weapons¸ Armour¸ ammunition¸ tomes¸ totems¸ and wondrous items appropriate for any D&D campaign. This book also introduces item sets¸ thematically linked collections of equipment that grant additional powers when the gear is worn by a single character or multiple party members.

Product History

Adventurer's Vault 2 (2009)¸ by Rob Heinsoo¸ with Eytan Bernstein¸ Logan Bonner¸ and Stephen Radney-MacFarland¸ is the second Adventurer's Vault equipment sourcebook for D&D 4e. It was published in August 2009.

Continuing the Vaults. D&D 4e (2008) was big on continuing series of sourcebooks. However¸ when Adventurer's Vault (2008) was released in September 2008¸ it wasn't obvious that it was a part of the yearly releases¸ like the Player's Handbook (2008)¸ Dungeon Master's Guide (2008)¸ and Monster Manual (2008) were. Then a year later¸ in August 2009¸ a second Adventurer's Vault rolled out like clockwork. It would also be the final Adventurer's Vault¸ though the somewhat similar Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium (2011) would be released during 4e's waning years.

Although it was a sequel to Adventurer's Vault this new book was somewhat revamped. Most notably¸ it now featured sidebars that provided histories and other backstory for some of the items.

Expanding D&D. The biggest expansion in Adventurer's Vault 2 is its introduction of item sets. A similar idea had appeared in the Magic Item Compendium (2007)¸ late in the lifetime of D&D 3e. Now¸ Logan Bonner and Peter Schaefer revamped the concept for D&D 4e. Major design problems for the new item sets focused on how many items to include in a set and how many levels they should span. (The default answer for both questions ended up being "5".)

Though magic item sets weren't changed much from their 3e origins¸ the idea was expanded in one major way: to include group sets. Because D&D 4e was more of a "team game"¸ the designers wanted to give players the ability to collect magic items together. They made these new group sets appealing by making group items class-agnostic¸ by focusing on item types that were more likely to be used by all classes¸ and by staying away from the major item slots.

Magic items were also expanded in smaller ways through the inclusion of new categories of items such as ammunition¸ consumables¸ immurements¸ magical reagents¸ tattoos¸ and wondrous lair items.

About the Creators. Heinsoo was of course the lead designer for D&D 4e. He contributed to many of the line's important books in 2009¸ including Divine Power (2009)¸ Monster Manual 2 (2009)¸ and Primal Power (2009).

About the Product Historian

The history of this product was researched and written by Shannon Appelcline¸ the editor-in-chief of RPGnet and the author of Designers & Dragons - a history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time. Please feel free to mail corrections¸ comments¸ and additions to shannon.appelcline@gmail.com.