This is the first book I have seen by Eternal Knot Games. Alortun: The Crown of Skulls is written by Kenneth Norris. This is a very small PDF only being six pages long. Of those one is the cover page and the final page is Open Game License leaving only four pages for this powerful artifact to be described. While it is short for even a PDF four pages to describe one artifact is a lot of information. The PDF does not have book marks though really in a PDF of this size book marks are not needed. There is a single piece of color art in here. It is a picture of the crown that looks like it was done digitally. They use the same piece of art for the cover as they do inside the book though at a smaller scale inside. There is a border on the top and bottom of the pages so when printed it can eat some ink but at only six pages or even just printing the four that consist of the meat of the product it is not that bad on ink jets.
The book has a one page of the history of the item, one page filled with rumors and the DCs one needs on Bardic Lore or knowledge checks., Not all the rumors and legends here are true. One page is a description and abilities of the Crown and this page has the picture on it. And the final page of the four has the actual abilities of the crown. This might be one of the few four page items that I thing needs more material on it. The history starts with the discovery of the crown in an ancient dwarven temple, but I think answering the question of why the crown was created and who did the creating would be useful. It seems that in the legends page it might have been nice if Dwarven PCs could have a list of different legends then the humans or elves since it originated seemingly in their lands.
The abilities of the crown are kind of defined. It says that each user has different abilities. While powers are listed I would have liked to have seen specific group of powers that could be used for a user. The product leaves a little too much for the DM to do. A small list of say a half dozen different variations of the powers for a DM to choose from and show how the magic changes from person to person would really be interesting and creative. Also, with most artifacts of this power they almost have an agenda of their own and this one does not. That goes back to the missing part of the history I mentioned earlier.
The book has some nice ideas and gives some good descriptions and details for the artifact. But I just think even more info and useful information could be given to make this more complete. It is nice for an artifact like this to leave some questions unanswered but it just has to much answered and requires a little too much work for the DM.
