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Preface
I have to confess, I'm something of a fantasy burnout.  After having been on the Dungeons and Dragons ride for almost twenty years with that damn unicorn and all those whiny kids, I'm really starting to feel the weight of it.  I hadn't honestly noticed it creeping up on me, I just stopped playing elves and dwarves some time ago, stopped playing 'basic' classes like Fighter, Rogue, or Wizard, and started going for stranger combinations like Genasi Psions and such.  There's only but so many times that you can swing a sword or toss a fireball before it all starts to blur together.

When the latest edition of Talislanta hit the shelves, I leapt at the textbook-sized tome, hungry, nay, starving for something fresh.  Unfortunately, I didn't care so much for its rule systems, especially the lack of character generation rules.  So, despite it being chock full of flavor and an immensely detailed setting, it fell by the wayside as a paperweight.

Enter Monte Cook.  He already had my attention as one of the driving forces behind Planescape, which, next to Spelljammer, was one of my favorite least-generic fantasy settings, as well as being one of the delevopers of Third Edition D&D.  When I heard that he was working on a new player's handbook, I immediately had my eye on it.  My (now lost among the server movings) review of the Third Edition PHB praised it highly as a much-needed cleaning of D&D rule mechanics that added a great elegance to the system, and if one of the guys behind those rule changes had come up with new changes, I was definitely going to read them.  And so:

Arcana Unearthed

Appearance
The book itself is of a similar size and heft to just about every other player's handbook ever printed.  Hardcover, with a primarily matte surface that looks nice but is a magnet for fingerprints.  The paper is of a heavy gloss stock, with a sturdy feel that I appreciate, but the printing is unfortunately all in black and white.  It's understandable, as smaller publishers can't affordably get color printing for thirty dollar books, but the color pages of the 3E core books have spoiled me, and the sharp contrast of black lettering on bright white pages isn't comfortable on the eyes for long readings.  The interior art is a study in contrasts: artist Sam Wood has several excellent illustrations throughout the book, but another artist, David Hendee, is also liberally used within the book, with a scribbly, sketchy style that I did not like at all.  Personal preferences may vary, but I expect that the majority of gamers would very much rather have interior art that looks worthy to be framed instead of something that looks like it was scrawled out in five minutes in a moving vehicle.  That is not a criticism of the artist's skill; he has some painted illustrations in the book that are very nice, but for some inexplicable reason the drawings that he did with ink are of that harsh, grating style.  Hendee's inks and the monochrome printing are the only reasons that the style rating for the book didn't make a five, and if all of the art in the book had been of Wood's quality, I think I could have let the five slide.

Layout
The book, while not exactly laid out in a manner that made my mind leap for joy at the ease of reading, is competently assembled.  When something is referenced that might make for a searching nightmare, such as what the Scent ability does, a page number is included for ease of looking up.  The index, despite Malhavoc's association with White Wolf, is complete and useful.  Things do have something of a compacted feel to them, I think it would have been a worthwhile investment of an extra dozen or so pages to have allowed a little more breathing room in the information.

Content
Ah, now here is where the good stuff comes in.  After I've devoted paragraphs to complaining about art and not giving praise to the layout, I'm sure some of you are wondering just what happened to those high scores I gave the book.  Well, look no further, because it is the content in which the true beauty of AU shines through.

Introduction
It's important to actually consider the introduction in this book, because it's not the usual 'What is Roleplaying?  Well, remember when your brother said you were a robber, touched you in a funny place, and locked you in the washing machine?' fare.  The themes of the game are laid out, along with some of the reasoning behind them.  AU is not a product for the beginning roleplayer, it doesn't make any attempt to hold the player's hand and teach them the basics.  The book lends itself to roleplaying, with races and classes that contain much deeper motivations for their actions than 'I hate orcs.'  Which is not to say that it can't be played with a hack 'n slash style, but a lot of the book's value will be lost if players don't make use of the depth it offers.  Just bear that in mind later on when I go over some of the changes from standard D&D.

Chapter One: Abilities
Pretty standard fare here, except AU gets kudos for having the carrying limits section actually next to strength as opposed to the middle of the book, having high ability scores give extra 0th-level spell slots, and including examples of attribute checks for intelligence (to remember things) and charisma (to get on someone's good side).

Chapter Two: Races
This is where I breathed my sigh of relief at nary an elf or dwarf in sight, nor some badly-concealed clone of them with an insultingly lame attempt at being different, like 'elffe' or somesuch.  Humans are still around, of course, and there is a race similar to the 3E halflings in that they're small and fast, but that's the extent of it.  The first of the big blows come in this chapter: Alignment is gone.  Favored classes, gone.  Races now have 'racial levels' that can be taken to improve on that race's natural abilities, rather like what Savage Species did when it broke up high-ECL creatures into levels that would gradually gain powers as they went.  Some of those racial levels are more valuable than others, depending on one's class and character concept, so they are by no means mandatory, and add tons of flavor to the races.  

Humans, despite having lost their free-multiclassing perk, gained nothing, I think they could have stood to get a +2 racial bonus on a skill of their choice to make up for one of their few advantages having gone away.  
Faen are the small and light race, subdivided into the smart ones and the nimble ones.  
Spryte (okay, I did wince at this one almost as much as I would for 'elffe') are Faen who went through a ritual to be shrunk down to tiny size, gaining wings and some other goodies for their trouble.  
Giants are, well, giants, although of the calm and sturdy nature rather than the 'Hulk smash!' variety, their racial levels make them into large creatures.  They are the dominant culture in the setting, having booted out the previous evil empire to free the other races from servitude.
Litorians are tribal, lion-like creatures.
Mojh are humans who were fed up at being human and decided to use magic rituals to strive towards the half-dragon template.  You could consider Mojh to be the human racial levels.
Runechildren are...unique, sort of a template that can be given to any race by higher powers.
Sibeccai are a jackal-like race that the giants granted intelligence to, still mostly bestial but working to improve themselves.
Verrik are a fairly human-like race in appearance, but they are decidedly different when it comes to mindset and mental powers.

Between the lion-people, jackal-people, and dragon-people, I've read more than one grumbled, 'Oh god, it's some kind of furry game.'  Well, let's be honest here, there's only so many things that can be done for a fantasy race.  There are humans, humans with pointy ears, humans who've been stretched or flattened in one dimension, Star Trek aliens who're just humans with a freaky color or paper mache on their foreheads, total freakjob creatures, and furries.  The total freakjob creatures present several design challenges, as their bizarro anatomy rarely allows any kind of compatibility of equipment with anyone else in the world, which is why they're not often seen.  I didn't find the bipedal animals any more disruptive than any of the Tolkien-esque funny-shaped humans that are fantasy staples, and each race's description gave a compelling reason for them to be in the setting.  So in the end, they make AU no more of a 'furry game' than the minotaurs, centaurs, wemics, kobolds, etc. make your average D&D.

Each race had a very detailed writeup on their origins, outlooks on the world, and place in the setting.  I can't really touch on them without tripling the length of the review, but they're all very entertaining reads, and lend themselves greatly to character concepts.

Chapter Three: Classes
Pure, creamy goodness.  Monte has taken the traditional fantasy party of fighter, thief, cleric, and mage, smashed it into a zillion pieces, and lovingly reassembled it in a stunningly artful way.  The usual needs that a party will encounter are still met, but no longer in the same archetypal roles.  Rather, each role has been refined in such a way that puts it squarely into the limelight without making it a one-trick pony.  Every class that I looked at, I wanted to play.

Akashics are the ultimate skill class.  Not only are all skills class skills for them, but they get to pick thirteen class abilities from a list of twenty-six options as they level.  Their deal is that they access the universal storehouse of all memory like a hard drive, and can draw on that knowledge to perform their tricks.  Those tricks can make them very dangerous in a fight, or be useful for more peaceful pursuits, depending on which abilities are chosen.

Champions are warriors for a cause, and each cause gives a specific set of benefits to them.  This class can create paladins or blackguards, guardians or crusaders, depending on what cause is chosen to follow.  Sample causes are provided, as well as guidelines for DMs to make their own.

Greenbonds are mages who specialize in nature and positive energy.  The tree-hugging aspect makes them similar to druids at first brush, but they are much more shamanic than druids, dealing heavily with spirits of nature rather than animals.  They are also grade-A healers, compared to the druids' lackluster performance compared to clerics.

Mage Blades are spellcasting warriors who use a personal weapon as a focus for their magic.  Their weapon grows more powerful as they level, and they get to do very cool things with it like parrying incoming spells.  These guys are what you really wanted when you tried to multiclass a fighter-mage, and now they're in one nice, neat package.

Magisters are Gandalf.  They're the most akin to your fantasy staple wizard, but they pull it off with a fair bit more style than most generic wizard classes.  Also, they can gain a tremendous amount of flavor through AU's magical feats, as I'll explain below.

Oathsworn have links to monks, in that they fight bare-handed without armor, but that's about the extent of the relationship.  These crazy individuals are so dedicated to a promise that they get utterly superhuman to accomplish it.  Their damage reduction overcoming abilities are rather better than the monks', and they get to ignore little things like eating, sleeping, drinking, and breathing.  Breathing is for the weak!

Runethanes are just great.  They're spellcasters who, on top of their access to spells, pick magical runes that they know from a list provided.  They can learn a rune to paint on someone that boosts their armor class, and one to paint on a door that makes it electrocute the next person who touches it.  I'm sure that all of you can imagine the potential.  (cackles madly)  Guidelines for making up new runes are provided.

Totem Warriors are the nature-loving warriors.  An animal totem is chosen, an animal of that type is taken as a companion, and special abilities along that animal's themes are granted with levels.  On my 'About @#$% Time!' list, the animal companions gain hit dice with the character, so you aren't stuck with a crappy companion that does nothing and dies all the time.  Guidelines for making up new totems are provided.  (Notice this theme, I'll be getting back to it later.)

Unfettered are the warriors who are busy swinging from chandeliers, fencing with five people at once, and generally looking cheerfully suicidal in no armor whatsoever in the middle of a fight.  If you want to be a swashbuckler, musketeer, or pirate, this is your class.

Warmains are the heavy warriors in heavy armor with heavy weapons.  Anime watchers who've seen Escaflowne should remember Vargas, the old guy with the huge sword who proceeded to cut up giant robots like butter all by himself.  Warmains kick ass like a standard Fighter on a ton of steroids.

Witches are hard to define.  They're spellcasters who are focused on one particular element, who gain special abilities based around their chosen element while they level, on top of their spells.

The thing that strikes me the most about these classes is that many of them are insanely customizable.  Some, like the Champions, Totem Warriors, and Witches, vary so much depending on their particular path that they're more like six (or more) classes than one.  Others, the Akashic and Runethane, have such a huge shopping list of class abilities to choose from that they're nearly infinitely customizable.  Even the classes that seem the most hidebound and straightforward, like the Magister and Warmain, receive bonus feats that can heavily impact the character.  And I'm talking really impact here, not some minor difference like a Fighter taking Weapon Focus.  Just like the races, the classes are all positively oozing in style and good roleplaying hooks.  Oh, and one nice detail: The tyranny of the d4 is broken.  d6 is the lowest hit die of any of the classes, so there won't be any classes who will die if a stiff breeze hits them.

Chapter Four: Skills
This is pretty standard fare, largely unaltered from third edition.  Animal Empathy is gone (the Totem Warriors have supernatural abilities to deal with the animals), Pick Pockets is renamed to Sleight of Hand, Wilderness Lore is renamed to Wilderness Survival.  There are little clarifications and examples here and there, but if you know the skills well from 3E you shouldn't ever need to even glance at this section.

Chapter Five: Feats
Fresh bomb: Truenames!  Everyone in AU has a truename, and knowledge of that name allows for both beneficial and baneful spells and effects to work on a person.  In yet another design move that screeches, 'Look at me!  I'm made for roleplaying!  Love me!' a character starts with two feats: the normal 1st level feat slot, and a second feat that can be used for the ritual that lets the character know what their truename is.  A character may choose to be Unbound, ignorant of their truename, and use that second feat for something else.  And Unbound are immune to bad things that someone could do to them if they found out the character's truename.  I'm sure the DMs in the audience are already grinning like sharks and guessing this part: Oh, by the way, one of the spells that depends on knowing someone's truename is Raise the Dead.  So, take the risk of sharing your truename with the party so they can bail you out if you get in hot water, or take the risk of your character being permanently up the creek if they die.  Muahaha.
As a nice touch, characters can blow a thousand gold at 10th and 20th level to swap one feat for another if a feat isn't working out well, offering the opportunity to change a character's direction.  Don't remove a feat if another feat you have uses it as a prerequisite, though, or you'll be unhappy.
AU feats are divided up as General, Item Creation, Talent, and Ceremony.  General and Item Creation feats are just as they've always been, nothing out of the ordinary.  Talents are feats that can only be taken at 1st level and reflect some inborn property in the character rather than something that was learned.  Ceremony feats tend to have more powerful effects than standard feats, but require time, cash, someone to perform a big ceremony for the character, and in some cases, the character's truename.  Not something that you'd just gain out of the blue in the middle of a dungeon crawl.
Many of the feats, especially the Talents and Ceremonies, are very flavorful and can have a sizable impact on a character's theme.  Of special note are the Ceremonies that give spell templates to spellcasters, which are like metamagic feats on drugs.  I'll mention more about them in the magic section.

Chapter Six: Equipment
A lot of emphasis in AU was placed on helping out the fighting classes.  To that end, the equipment section includes two new developments: weapon templates and exotic armor.  Weapon templates make a weapon notably superior to a standard weapon of its type, but make it an exotic weapon.  And exotic armors offer far better protection, but require a feat to be usable.  (The Exotic Armor feat allows use of any exotic armor, assuming the character's proficient in that armor's weight class, and Exotic Weapon feats now cover a range of weapons, heavy or light, rather than just one single weapon.)  Gone are the days where high-level Fighters sat on the sidelines while high-level Wizards nuked everything, with these new goodies the warrior classes can boast a hefty AC and very respectable attack options at the higher levels, actually going toe to toe with the big, mean monsters with some hope that they won't be used as a punching bag.

Chapter Seven: Playing the Game
A nicely laid out section that covers a whole lot of rules in a clear and concise manner.  Details such as spotting hiding people in certain light levels and just what kinds of actions provoke attacks of opportunity are included, and the whole chapter as a whole feels more clear than its 3E counterpart, benefitting from a few years of hindsight.  The big deal in this chapter is the Hero Point, a concept akin to Deadland's fate chip.  Selfless acts of heroism garner hero points, which can be spent to pull the character's bacon out of the fire later on.  The effects of hero points are clearly laid out, from the mundane (a bonus to an attack roll) to the creative (bending rules to allow a Hollywood-esque act like throwing a dagger to cut someone's bonds and hit the switch that closes the door to the acid pit below them).  Hero points are pretty clearly defined as being in the DM's purview, with the DM having the final word on what earns them, what they can do, and whether or not to use them at all, so there's no fear of them having a disrupting effect on a campaign.

Chapter Eight: Magic
I like spellcasters, and this section had me absolutely drooling.  AU's magic system is the model against which other magic systems will need to be measured in the future.  Here's how it works: Spellcasting characters have spell slots per day and spells known, sort of like D&D sorcerors.  Except they 'memorize' their spells known list every day, so they can swap spells in and out of that list, as long as they are familiar with the spells they want to be able to cast, and then cast those known spells freely with their spell slots.  Now for the fun stuff: Spell slots can be played with through 'weaving', letting the character exchange three slots of one level for one slot of the next level, or exchange one slot of a level for two slots of the previous level.  So even if a caster has used up all their 4th-level slots, they can burn three 3rd-level slots to get another, or burn a 5th-level slot to get two.  And most of the spells can be cast in a diminished or heightened state, so that 4th-level spell could be cast at 3rd level for a weaker effect, or at 5th level for a stronger effect.  Some spells have totally different effects when cast as diminished or heightened, it's not just a matter of more/less damage.  And there are the spell templates, metamagic-like effects that can be applied to spells on the fly.  For instance, by paying a 20gp gem for a material component, a caster could add the Fire template onto a spell to make it do +1d6 fire damage, or +2d6 if it was already a fire spell.
See what I mean about the magic system?  It is flexible beyond anything I've seen before, allowing casters to play with their spell slots, spell levels, and just about anything else they want to mess with to come up with an effect that's precisely customized to their desires.
Spells are broken up into three categories, Simple, Complex, and Exotic.  All casters can use the Simple spells.  Magisters and Greenbonds have access to the Complex, or a feat can be taken to get access to a level of Complex spells.  Nobody has access to Exotic spells unless they spend a feat to learn a single Exotic spell.  As could be anticipated, the more difficult a spell is to learn, the more powerful it is.  But, as a really great touch, the feats that give spell templates also give access to that type of complex spell.  So a Mage Blade who takes the feat to get the Fire template also receives the ability to cast Complex spells of the Fire type.  Every character's spell list can be totally unique to that character, depending on what feats they've taken.
There is a price, however.  The spells tend to be of a lower power than their D&D counterparts, which is only reasonable considering just how crazy casters can get while shuffling spell power levels and templates around, they would utterly dominate the game if they could do that with something like Disintegrate.  It's a small price to pay, in my opinion, unlike certain other d20 player handbooks released in 2003 which rampaged through the spell list without giving the casters one penny in exchange.  On the other hand, high-level Exotic spells are plenty powerful, so a Magister with enough time and dedication on their hands can still learn how to blow up small towns with a single spell, it will just be more difficult to acquire that kind of power.  (And when I say blow up small towns, I mean that literally, 100ft/level radius, 1mile/level range, the spell is pretty much solely useful as a city-killer.  So a dungeon-crawling caster might not find it all that useful, after all.  Especially since it destroys the caster if used more than once a year.)

Chapter Nine: Spells
Most things to say about the spells were covered already, but a nice touch about this chapter is that spells that can be made into magic items will list how much they cost to be put into a magic item.  No more guesswork involved about whether a certain spell is appropriate for a magic item, or how much it should cost for it, it's conveniently included in the spell description.


Conclusions
I have only good feelings about Arcana Unearthed.  It is a product that is geared entirely for the experienced gaming groups, giving tremendous amounts of control to DMs to custom-tailor things to the needs of their game.  For things that a DM would likely want to customize (totems, runes, spells, Champion causes) the book gives good guidelines to help remove headaches.  Removing alignments and having excellent motivations for races and classes puts the product firmly into the advanced roleplaying category; a party can't just go around using Detect Evil on everything and merrily hacking down anyone who happens by in a top hat and curly moustache.  There is no evil absolute to use as an excuse to work violence on another living creature without guilt.  Characters no longer have to hold to any moral absolute beyond those that they choose for themselves (such as a Champion's cause, or an Oathbound's oath).

One of my friends, upon glancing through the book, commented that it wasn't possible to integrate into a non-AU campaign.  I disagree.  Things should not be yanked piecemeal from AU to put into another campaign, yes.  The classes, feats, spells, and equipment were made to work together, and taking one part without the whole just makes a big mess of things.  However, you could do something like bring a Runethane into your Forgotten Realms game, as long as the Runethane uses feats and spells from AU.  It's just like using the Psionics Handbook in a campaign; characters from the book will draw from the resources in the book, and characters not from the book, won't.  As long as people don't try to mix and match and 'borrow' feats and spells, things should work very smoothly.

So, at the end of my review, I feel a little bad about not having anything detrimental to say about Arcana Unearthed beyond some of the artwork and lack of color.  I'm always suspicious of reviews that are entirely glowing praise, with the sneaking suspicion that the writer has some sort of bias.  But after having read the thing cover to cover, I honestly can't find anything that I disapproved of or found confusing.  It all works, it works well, and I'm eager to play it.  Maybe when the setting book Diamond Throne comes out, it'll suck and I can tear into it with glee, but for now the Arcana Unearthed line is batting .1000 in my book.

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