Behind the Spells Compendium
Magic has been part of the Dungeons and Dragons game since the beginning. As editions change magic changes with it to fit the new rules and the new philosophy of the game. These changes have seen some spells come and new spells take their place but the interesting ones are the ones that have changed and been seen in many editions. It is some of these spells that this books tackles. It creates a fictional history for those spells and tries to explain how some of the spells have changed and why.
Behind the Spells Compendium is a collection of spells that were each released individually. The series was created and written by Bret Boyd. There have been a lot of product lines that have come out through the
OGL and this is one of the most creative. Each spell is given a history and told how it came into creation. The PDFs are each very small and cheap so one can just buy them and get the ones one wants. Or they can do like I have and get the full compendium. I went through Lulu to get the book in print as a hardbound. It is a little over a hundred pages so softbound or as a PDF should work very well for people, too.
This is one of the most creative series I have ever read. Once the idea comes it can be taken to other things and a line that does a similar aspect with monster. It seems like a simple idea but many times it is those that are the most difficult to come up with. This series takes a look at a single spell per issue with all of them in the compendium and gives the spell context and a history. I will admit that in the average game of Dungeons and Dragons the history of the spell Fireshield will bear little to no meaning. The book has other things to offer players and DMs but it is mainly for the ones that want the creative writings of how these spells came to be. There is a lot of creativity and adventure ideas in here. It would be a very interesting campaign to have the player characters search out the histories of spells for some reason. Or perhaps better yet is this is the perfect way to have a Magical History course in mage school style campaign.
The book goes into the history of thirty six classic spells. There is a wide range of spells here from both the arcane to the divine. Not only is there a history for the spells though. Many of them also include variant spells, new spells, magical items, or other player or DM oriented information. One cool thing is spell secrets. This is a way for the caster to alter the spell as it is being cast to make the spell do more or different things. The idea for Spell Secrets is the type of little idea that comes from a book that could easily be expanded on to become its own series giving spell secrets to many or all the available spells.
There is a lot of information packed into this book. It is not a book that is going to be useful to everyone but I do encourage anyone that thinks this sounds interesting to at least get one of the small PDFs and see for themselves exactly what the Behind the Spells series is all about.
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