"You are to me as nothing more than a spellslinger, a trickster - a charlatan. That will be your undoing, you ignorant god-lackey. For while you channel your power from your pitiful diety, I am power. While you serve your god, I am on my way to becoming one! All the arcane might from all the wizards who have come before me is mine to command. See if your feeble cure light wounds can cope with this..."
Since Monte Cook is now a freelancer, he has opened up his own
website. Its a vertible treasure trove of information for your D&D 3e game. Its no suprise then that he has decided to do his own electronic-only D20 publishing venture under the name of Malhavoc Press. The Book of Eldritch Magic is its first electronic release and is available for download from the website.
The Premise:
The Book is a collection of new Feats, Prestige Classes, Spells, Magic Items, and a new monster template specifically related to, as if you couldn't guess, the wizard, sorceror, druid and bard class.
What Ya Get:
The Book of Eldritch Magic is a thirty-six page document. It is only available in the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file format. You will need the Acrobat Reader software or some other program capable of rendering PDF files to view it. In addition, the file arrives zip-compressed so you will need a decompression program such as WinZip to open it.
Cost:
The Book of Eldritch Magic will set you back a whopping five bucks.
Appearance:
The Book has a professional layout and text is arranged in the common two column format with clearly defined headers. No index is given, but the size shouldn't make this too much of a bother. The artwork is where the book has some shortcomings. I very much enjoyed the various photomanipulation pieces in the book but the hand-drawn art was only mediocre. Still, there was nothing terribly distracting and it is to be expected somewhat for an initial release from a company that is "testing the waters" so to speak.
The Contents:
The first thing that will strike you about the Book is the lack of fluff. It jumps into the good stuff from the very first page. If you discount the cover page and required OGL statement, that's thirty-four pages of all game information. If having new stuff to add to your arcane casters is something you're interested in, why wait for Blood & Tome? You can use this now.
The first section provides nine new feats: Conjure Mastery, Etch Object Rune, Item Image, Lace Spell: Elemental Energies, Lace Spell: Enemy Bane, Lace Spell: Holy/Unholy, Lace Spell: Lawful/Chaotic, Manufacture Magic Poison and Mirror Sight. Conjure Mastery allows you to summon physically stronger creatures. Etch Object Rune allows you to inscribe runes into a surface and use it as a scroll. Item Image is a cool one. You can bond a magic item to the caster or another by inscribing a tattoo. The item can be stored in the tattoo and summoned and stored as a free action. The Lace Spells are an interesting concept. They allow you to "lace" spells with other types of arcane energy (think of it as supercharging). Elemental Forces allows more damage. Enemy Bane allows for more damage to a specific type of creature. Holy/Unholy makes your spells more potent against either good or evil creatures. Lawful/Chaotic makes spells more potent against either lawful or chaotic targets. Manufacture Magic Poison allows you to create magical poisons (duh!). Finally, Mirror Sight allows the caster to see and/or project their image through mirrors.
The second section details three new prestige classes: The Embermage, The Graven One and The Mirror Master. The Embermage is the ultimate fire mage because their blood is literally on fire! You get all kinds of weird special abilities with the embermage but my personal favorites are Eyes of Fire and the ultra-deadly Implosion. Graven Ones are mages that cover themselves in mystical tattoos and brandings to the point where their skin is hardened and they are, in effect, a magical item themselves. Graven Ones get either more flesh tattoos as they level or more and more powerful Graven Images that allow them to summon animals or magical beasts from their tattoos to fight for them. The Mirror Master is an expert at movement and scrying of a sort as long as they have an actual mirror to use. Depending on how common mirrors are in your campaign, this can be either a really cool idea or one that you can't use. A campaign where mirrors are expensive or arcane items is going to make a Rogue/Mirror Master one very happy (and potentially wealthy) puppy.
The third section is a massive spell list. It gives you sixty-four new spells to add to your game. I won't run up too much space by listing or discussing them all, but a goodly portion of them are seem like they are geared towards use by the three new prestige classes but should be usable by all and there are some very nice spells in here to to boost your players arcane strength or lay them low if you're feeling vengeful. Evocation, Transmutation and, to a lesser degree, Conjuration are the main players in the spell list with evocation being heavily favored. You'll want to read over the spells very carefully as some of the spells can be very high damage (over 10d6 in many cases) in the hands of an experienced mage and you might not want this in your campaign.
The fourth section details new magic items that you can introduce into your campaign. The Book of Eldritch Magic gives you four new magic weapons (all but one of them being swords), five new magic rings, eight new rods, two new staffs, fifteen new wonderous items (including the interesting Lanneath's Conjure Bomb), five magic vehicles (the war altar is especially cool), nineteen magical poisons (including rules on how to make them), six minor artifacts and two major artifacts!
The fifth section gives a new monster template to use: The Magical Construct. I really like this template. Most constructs are humanoid but what happens if you want to make one that resembles and has the effects of a griffon? Its easy to do with this template. Rules are also provided for building them and their associated costs in both XP as well as money and materials. Two example constructs (The Stone Tiger and The Eleven-Headed Brass Hydra) are given and I can't wait to spring one of those hydras on my group who seems to think they're all that.
Overall Impression:
I really don't think that I could say enough good things about The Book of Eldritch Magic but this is the kind of D20 product that I like to see. Lots of stuff all jammed together with no setting specific ties. Its even from one of the designers of D&D 3e so you know its gotta be good. This is an extremely large value for only five dollars - no maps. No adventures. Just a whole lot of game enhancing things. If you've ever had qualms about buying a PDF product, this should give you enough incentive to give it a try. I can only hope that Malhavoc Press is successful enough so that we get more things like this.
MetalMan signing off.
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