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Book of the Lost Verbal Artificers

This is the official book of verbal items, armor, and other trinkets which heavily modified the Verbal Attack system. Heralding these "Exciting Changes" in the system, Black Fox Games heavily marketed this addendum to "Change the way you insult, cajole, and harassing both NPCs and PCs alike".

Brief Synopsis:

The Book of the Lost Verbal Artificers contains a short section on some new Verbal-based Advantages and Disadvantages as well as several Xtra Classes which rely upon their Verbal Attack or Defense in some form. The meat and potatoes of the book was the middle section on Magical Items, which contained no less than five hundred variants of magical shields, weapons, necklaces, rings, boots, gloves, gauntlets, greaves, helms, hats, tobogans, robes, tunics, halters, cut-offs, slippers, toe rings, earrings, bracers, vambracers, cuirasses, belts, girdles, bracelets, handwraps, fistwraps, footwraps, chestwraps, facewraps, skirts, mini-skirts, and underwear.

The inclusion of magical modifications to verbal scores resulted in dramatic inflation of both verbal offense and defense, meaning that while most GMs were able to balance against the inflation, many beginners had trouble with tripped out Verbal Wizards bringing entire cities to their knees with a barrage of insults that would make Char Reyarteb shed a small tear.

The last section of the book dealt with several alternate mechanics systems that had become popular because of their simplicity compared to the official ruleset. Among these was the popular "Shielding" stat. The alternate mechanics systems greatly complicated and ambiguified each of these alternate systems into being even worse than the original system in an effort to discredit them for future players.

Verbal Dice

Along with the issuing of this book came the issuing of special "verbal" dice. These were identical in every way to previous dice, right down to the color and the bag they came in (which still said "Return to Underpants" on it). Originally they were slated to include a small speaker inside, that would play a "boing" noise when the dice were rolled. This was deemed witty, because the book focused on verbal skills and the dice themselves would be verbal. Unfortunately, test runs of these dice showed them to be badly weighted as a result of the speaker, causing certain numbers to come up much more often. Also, it was impossible to hear any sound, as the speaker was locked within the plastic tomb of the die, never to emerge.

So they just repackaged the old dice. This was still wildly popular, as not enough of them were sold in the first place. These new dice cost almost twice as much, for little discernable reason.