Magic of Incarnum

This supplement introduces a magical substance called incarnum into the D&D game. With this book, the players characters can meld incarnum—the power of souls living, dead, and unborn—into magical items and even their own bodies, granting them special attacks, defenses, and other abilities (much as magic items and spells do). Incarnum can be shaped and reshaped into new forms, giving characters tremendous versatility in the dungeon and on any battlefield.

This book also features new classes, prestige classes, feats, and other options for characters wishing to explore the secrets of incarnum, as well as rules and advice for including incarnum in a D&D campaign.

Magic of Incarnum
Divine Wind Reviews


The newest in WotC's line of products introducing new magic rules, Magic of Incarnum follows the model of the Expanded Psionic Handbook like a Siamese twin separated at birth. It introduces a new power source, and the creatures and classes that use that power. Whereas Psionics is the power of the mind over nature and the self, the "Magic of Incarnum" is the ability to shape spiritstuff, soul energy, into physical items for the use of those who learn how to shape it.

At First Grok: A
Looking at Magic of Incarnum, it follows the type for D&D books. Hardcover, tome-like design (this time looking like rough hide, with coursing blue energy and a central vial of liquid). Filled to the brim with color artwork and high quality layout and design, WotC continues the tradition of setting the bar way too high in their average books for third parties to compete.

It's a bit thinner than the Expanded Psionics Handbook, clocking 215 pages, plus character sheets and ads. In chapter structure, it is a mirror of the XPH, with races, classes, "character options" (skills, feats, and racial substitution levels), "soulmelds" (the spells/powers/etc. of the Magic of Incarnum system), "magic" (things to add into already-ongoing systems such as magic and psionics, as well as magic items), Prestige Classes, Monsters, and campaign advice. It also has an epic appendix, and an appendix to help with bookeeping.

It looks like it has everything a fan of incarnum could really ask for in setting up their campaign for the stuff, all wrapped up in a pretty little package. If we were to take up juding a book by how nice it looks, Magic of Incarnum would rank right up there with the XPH or the Monster Manuals. It hits all the bases and it's presentation is slick. It doesn't really hold a candle to the more art-intensive WotC works like the Draconomicon, but to ask for every book to be that beautiful would be asking the impossible.

After the Surprise Round: D+

When you stop looking at the pretty pictures and start reading the words that frame them, Magic of Incarnum starts to fall apart quickly. Starting on page 4, with the first true words of the book, we are innundated with opaque terminology and awkward newspeak.The words are defined, but the definitions make little sense. We're told Incarnum is a blue mist, for instance. For starters, this means that incarnum isn't really "incarnate" at all -- it's not given flesh form, it's a gas. This jarring, counter-intuitive definition gives a particularly obscure flavor to the text. "Meldshaping" and "Essentia" continue the pattern pretty well, and are equally difficult to understand. Soulmelds are "magical objects" (a non-sequiter in a fantasy world if there ever was one), "a spell effect in physical form" (like a fireball is physical? Like a Protection from Elements is physical?), "worn almost like a physical item." Meldshapers create them. So Incarnum = gassy soulstuff, and Soulmelds = gassy soulstuff made into something physical, Shaping = making Soulmelds. And then there's Essentia, which can be "invested." Essentia is soul energy. Odly enough, Incarnum is soul energy, too. Just, you know, different soul energy. The kind you "shape," not the kind you "invest." And then you have "chakras," which are basically magic item slots, except that soulmelds are "bound" to them.

Confused yet? I was. It takes a real effort to understand the meaningless "magical substance"/"power of souls"/"wearing shapes" tongue, and it's not half as intuitive as the psionic version, especially considering that the core rules have no real definition of the nature of a soul or spirit, but MoI uses the terms casually, as if they need no real definition. Spirits are a blue mist? What happened to the Astral Travel of the Spirit to an Outer Plane? The concept raises so many unanswered questions...

The concept becomes clearer in Chapter 4, when the daily process of shaping soulmelds, assinging them to a chakra, and investing essentia is actually explained in more detail. And in that light, it's pretty stellar.

In the end, you have a flexible magic system not based on a pool of points or slots that you spend on spells or powers, but based on a pool of points that have an opportunity cost. In order to get a cool power, all you have to do is give up a different cool power. By shifting Essentia (which can be done as a swift action) you can increase your AC, increase your ability to hit, give you a higher skill bonus, or even grant spell-like powers. What is truly interesting is when you bind a soulmeld to a chakra, negating the magic item there, but sometimes giving you a truly special kind of power. Of note is how the Totemist can bind soulmelds to her Totem chakra and shift form, gaining an ankheg's mandibles or a girallon's arms.

While the flexibilty and design of the Incarnum magic system is choice, it falls on it's face in implementation. There's something pretty cool about making a maks out of the soulstuff of liars and decievers. But then the actual effects are rather mundane: +2 to skill checks? Yippee.... With the exception of the Totemists' powers, the soulmelds don't often give you a new capability, they just give you a bonus on what you can already do. So in many ways, they're the quintessential "floating bonus," which you can apply to some skills, or some AC, or some energy resistance, depending upon what you need at the time (and where you invest essentia). While mechanically useful, it's flavorless and dull. Really, what's the point? If channeling the essences of people's souls just gives you flying sandals, that's a lot of powreful language behind a relatively mundane effect. The concept of Incarnum would have me defining the life and death aspect of the world, not just being more able to climb and jump.

This isn't the only place the high concept gets a lukewarm response. The races are amazingly dissapointing, ranging from the transparently ripped-off "new Githyanki/Githzerai" of Skarn and Rilkan (Why reinvent the wheel and make it LESS effective in the process?) to the absolutely uninspired Azurin (They are humans....BUT WITH INCARNUM! WOW!) to the re-treaded Dusklings (small forest humanoids with tribal traditions? Wow, didn't see that one comin'...). The classes are marginally better. The Incarnate is a zealot-type of any extreme alingment, who actually is rather customized by their alignment. The only pain I see in this is that it is quite obviously designed for the minis game. "If you're Good, you'll have a better armor class," and the like. It is also slightly redundant with the cleric, which it is obviousy patterned after. Soulborns are replacement-paladins who are focused on combat, which is fun, but, again, suffers from miniatures pollution, and also is pretty much just "Incarnum Paladin!", which is unnessecary since we already HAVE a paladin. It's called the paladin. Why give us more of the same, slightly different?

The totemist is the highlight of the classes and, indeed, the highlight of the book. Using animal spirits to grant powers that are not merely bonuses in most cases means that they actually have a unique and special role that makes them different from a cleric/incarnate or paladin/soulborn (and still distinct enough from the druid). The totemist's flexibility doesn't come at the expense of their style, a problem which plagues every other class in the book. The classes other than totemist are mostly defined by alignment, which is too influenced by the minis game to come off as useful for a normal D&D campaign that might involve less head-to-head challenges. Having two Incarnum-influenced characters who truly get into the role in the party will either lead to in-fighting on par with a Paladin and an Assassin in the same party if they have different alignments, or to a very redundant party starategy as both use the same style of abilities if they have the same alignment.

Finishing Move: C-

Magic of Incarnum dusts this serving with a sprinkling of feats, spells, and psionic powers designed to be useful in a campaign that uses incarnum. Some of the spells are interesting, but mostly they just re-hash the "nice concept, mundane powers" theme of the book. We're also dissapointed in the chapter on campaign structure, which could have been truly an intriguing examination of the explanation and flavor of Incarnum, but ends up being "Here's some adventure ideas and some locations, you can do the rest!" This leaves Incarnum as largely a flavorless lump defined largely as factions in the minis game. It is a system that works pretty well -- the concept of shifting essentia and bonding chakras are both solid and interesting game mechanics. However, there's no real reason to learn them. The payoff for the investment of time and effort in understanding the incarnum system isn't really worth it in the end. After all that work, you're left with one fun class (totemist) and two mini-tainted classes (soulborn, incarnate) that mirror two already-capable classes (paladin and cleric, respectively).

Psionics adds rich new creatures and evocative imagery (thanks in no small part to Dark Sun's influence from second edition, I believe). Incarnum, without the history, without the significance, and with redundancy, confusion, and blandness, simply cannot hope to compare. So this blue mist is all shiny colors and cool patterns, but ultimately, it is soulless. It's a great power, but why anyone would bother to harness it is beyond me.

Magic of Incarnum
Written by James Wyatt, Richard Baker, Frank Brunner and Stephen Schubert
Published by Wizards of the Coast
www.wizards.com/dnd
ISBN: 0-7869-3701-7
224 full color pages
$34.95
Magic of Incarnum brings a new type of magic to the D&D game. It’s not familiar like psionics, and it doesn’t use a spell or slot system. It’s unlike previous books I’ve seen before like the Psychic’s Handbook from Green Ronin, or the Warlock from the Complete Arcane.

The book uses the standard two-column layout and borders common to the D&D core books line. The art ranges tremendously. The illustrations by Mark Poole have some great colors and some good style to them, but the characters are in such awkward positions that the art looks bad as if the artist couldn’t take into account how the limbs or positions should be. The figures look stiff.

ON the other hand, we have other old favorites like Wayne Reynolds, Ron Spencer, Wayne England, and one of my favorites, David Griffith. Their styles alongside others, gives the overall book a solid appearance. David Griffith’s contribution here, are the illustrations that break the chapters up and he does a fine job of providing a peak at the upcoming bits in the chapter.

Incarnum is like the Expanded Psionic’s Handbook in that it’s part Player’s Handbook, part Dungeon Master’s Guide, and part Monster Manual.

It starts off with four new races, none of which have a ECL modifier. We have the near human azurin, a race created when an unborn human is infused with incarnum, They’re similar to humans in appearance, have the extra feat at first level, no extra skills, and have an essentia pool and a favored class of soulborn.

The rilkan and skarn are both products of the mishtai, an enigmatic race. The former are the bards and entertainers of the world, always seeking out that next story or to be part of that next adventure. The latter are a haughty race that thinks they’ve achieved the martial perfection that the they feel that mishtai were seeking to perfect.

Lastly, the fey duskling, an unusual race in that they’re blue-gray skinned fey with some initial essentia and a favored class of totemist.

Speaking of totemist and soulborn, they are two of the three new core classes introduced here. The classes use something called an essentia pool which is a point based system but it is unlike psionics. Characters can invest essentia, but can only invest so much based on their level per investment. For example, a 6th level character can invest up to two points of essentia while a 20th level one can invest four points.

The classes use a method called meldshaping. Meldshaping involves soulmelds, essentia, and chakrabinds. The soulmelds are similar to spells or special effects that the character can surround himself with and invest essentia. The chakrabind grant even more benefits to that soulmeld. Chakras take up slots, and if bound to that slot, closes it off to a magic item because you’re actually crafting soulmelds to that portion of your body.

Chakras include crown, feet, hands, arms, brow, shoulders, throat, waist, heart, and soul. Not all classes get all chakrabinds.

The classes here follow some of the newer material WoTC has been throwing out. This includes different starting ages for the classes based on its difficulty. It also includes details that usually appear in Prestige Classes such as NPC Reactions, lore with ranks from DC 10 to DC 30, how to use the class in the game and adapt it, as well as how they work in the world. This includes details on daily life, notables, and organizations, as well as NPC reactions.

Some might feel this is padding. Because Incarnum is so different than anything else, I think it’s a useful tool that GM’s can use to mold the material into the campaign.

The first class, the incarnate, is the core class of mastering soulmelds. The classes here are alignment based. The incarnates for example, much hold to one alignment, good, evil, law or chaos. They start off with two, one essentia and no chakrabinds, eventually moving up to nine soulmelds, twenty essentia, and five chakrabinds.

They gain other abilities as they advance in level. One of the bad things though, is that they have d6 hit dice and poor base attack bonus. While they have a good fort save and will save, their low hit dice combined with their low base attack, makes them suspect in terms of game balance because unlike psionics or spells, the incarnate doesn’t get the big flashy powers that effect numerous enemies with one sweep. Most of their abilities focus on the shelf, either making them harder to hit, making them hit harder, or some variation. If they had d8 hit dice and medium bab, they would at least look better on paper and after I play test some, I’ll share my findings on the old En World message boards.

Easier to judge is the soulborn. This is in essence a fighter variant that has some small meldshaping ability, not getting their first soulmeld to fourth level, and their first chakrabind at 8th level. Their high hit dice, base attack, and high fortitude save make them a good meat shield in the paladin and ranger back up character. The fact that they also get bonus incarnum feats and a smite opposition ability. Yes, they too have alignment requirements in that they can only be lawful good, chaotic good, lawful evil, or chaotic evil. It makes them perfect for heroes or villains in a campaign.

While it seems to be a good solid class, the totemist actually interests me more. With fair hit dice, d8, medium bab, good fort and ref saves, the totemist looks like the incarnate should’ve. In addition, they have souldmelds and essentia, but they also get a totem chakrabind. This allows them to mimic various beasts’ powers and fits in well with other natural variants like a shaman, barbarian, ranger, or druid.

The book doesn’t go into a lot about skills, notes how spellcraft can be used to identify soulmelds and how concentration is still a needed skill to shape a soulmeld if you’re under threat of taking damage.

The feats are where the blue madness starts. I say that because the feats are heavily colored if you will by poor wording in their names. A lot of azure, cerulean, colbalt, midnight, and sapphire used here. It’s good to keep the material separated and everything but reads a little poorly.

One of the best things about this book is that it allows incarnum to be used in parts. One way it does this is through feats. Almost every class has some type of incarnum feat that they can take. For example, if you’re a rogue and want a little something extra that you can do, Indigo Strike adds a damage bonus when making a sneak attack (and also includes skirmish and sudden strike). The damage bonus is equal to twice the amount of invested essentia and it provides the user with one point of essentia. Many of the feats in their vein provide essentia points.

A surprising feature of the book, is racial substitution levels. And it’s not just the standard levels that you’d expect. For example, it starts with aasimar incarnate levels, and includes azurin clerics, duskling barbarians, dwarf soulborns, gnome incarnates, hafling totemists, rilkan rogues, skarn monks, and tiefling incarnates. Each one has three levels they can take. This was something I would’ve loved to have seen in the Expanded Psionic’s Handbook and I’d be highly surprised if we don’t see something like that in the Complete Psion in April ’06.

Like spells, the soulmelds take up a nice chunk of change. Soulmelds are broken up by classes, with incarnates having the most, followed by totemists and then soulborn. The bad thing is I don’t think we have enough options here. One of the problems is that incarnates, those with the most soulmelds, have an alignment restriction. See, they cannot shape soulmelds with an alignment descriptor that does not match their own. Good incarnates cannot shape chaotic, lawful, or evil descriptors. Thankfully it’s not a huge issue but it does cut into your options.

Soulmelds are listed class, with Chakra, for example, crown, soulmeld name, for example, crystal helm, and basic effect, in this case, +2 on Will saves against charm and compulsion. In looking at the soulmelds, they include name, descriptors, classes, Chakra, saving throw, descriptive text, including investment of essentia, chakrabind, and other meld information.

For example, continuing to use the crystal helm, it have a descriptor of force, is on the incarnate and soulborn class list, uses the crown Chakra, and has no saving throw. It starts with descriptive text in italics, similar to how a monster is described, and details it’s use. In this case, the +2 bonus. If you invest essential into it, you get a deflection bonus on Armor Class equal to the number of points invested. If you bind it, your melee attacks gain the force descriptor so you can strike those incorporeal foes.

Simple enough right? It’s a little more complex because like a cleric, they know all soulmelds on their list. They can also change them on a daily basis. It’s a bit more paperwork too as you have to keep in mind if the soulmeld is bound to a Chakra, and if you have a magic item in that slot, or if you have the feat, double bind, that allows you to have a magic item and a Chakra or two chakras.

After that, we get a chapter on magic. This is another example of the authors taking a lot of the current D&D products into stock as we have a few PrC spells here for assassins and blackguards, as well as material for hexblades, and warlock invocations, and psionic/wilder powers. Some of these are conjuration spells for midnight constructs, others to detect incarnum or to disrupt essentia investment. Others like incarnum bladestorm do Wisdom damage on a round by round basis and can be invested with essentia to drain more Wisdom.

Magic items can be bound to Chakras as well and we have a listing of common magic item chakra binds. For example, a staff can be bound to the hands and provide a +1 insight bonus to caster level of spells cast by item, or a weapon can give a +1 insight bonus on melee damage rolls.

In addition, a new weapon special ability, soulbound weapon, allows you to gain extra power if bound to a chakra, the benefits depending on where it’s bound. For example, if bound to the arms, it’s a +2 insight bonus to confirm critical hits. I think they did miss a chance to put some specific weapons here, and the fact that there are no artifacts is also a missed opportunity.

For prestige classes, we have the following; incandescent champion, incarnum blade, ironsoul forgemaster, necrocarnate, sapphire hierarch, soulcaster, spinemeld warrior, totem ranger, umbral disciple, and witchborn binder. The prestige class format should be familiar to readers of WoTC products. It includes a quick quote, some reasoning of the class, how to become that class in terms of best class progression, entry requi8rements, class features, how best to play the class, including tips on combat, and advancement, as well as how the PrC fits into the world. Included there is information on daily life, notables, organizations, NPC reactions, lore, how to use them in the game, adaptation, and encounters.

Some of these classes can be entered without being one of the core classes here. For example, the incandescent champion requires a bab +6, 4 ranks of concentration, and an essentia pool of 1. Easy enough to get with one of the new feats here. It’s a ten level good alignmend warrior type class that uses incarnum to augment their medium bab with things like fast healing or incandescent ray, a ranged touch attack that inflicts 1d8 points per essentia point invested. Thankfully they gain essentia quickly.

The Incarnum blade is even simpler as they just need a +5 bab and 2 ranks of concentration. These warriors use chakra binds for their blademeld and gain access to different chakras as they gain in levels and can use their blademeld for different effects. It’s also a short 5 level class so you can enter and finish it quickly. Some of these melds are fairly simple like arms chakra giving you a +4 insight bonus to confirm a critical threat while others like the soul chakra give you weapon an alignment to overcome damage reduction and to inflict extra damage against those of opposed alignment. The example used is good, dealing extra 1d6 points of damage to creatures with the evil subtype.

While I’m not normally too fond of the various NPC examples, this time I found myself actually using one of them. The Necrocarnate pillages the soul stuff of incarnum for their own purpose. The NPC here, Igalla Pallasi, not only has full game stats, but also a mapped out lair. I snapped that up and used her as the villain necromancer hinted at in Fane of the Drow who pillaged the tombs of the queen in that adventure.

The sapphire hierarch, the cleric/incarnum user, and the soulcaster, both look like PrCs I’d love to try as they continue to advance in their primary class as well as meldshaping class in terms of number of soulmelds they can shape, the number of chakras they can bind, and their essentia pool. They do not gain new tiers of chakra binds at the same rate though so there are some limitations but it does look like some fantastic potential.

Once you’ve gotten all the player options out of the way, it’s time for the GM to have some tools. This includes new monsters. It starts off with the incarnum subtype, which in essence provides nothing and is just identifiers for spells and effects that target incarnum users.

The monsters include write-ups for all the races. At first, I wasn’t thrilled with this because it includes multiple write-ups. For example, the azurin has a sample warrior, cleric, and soulborn. It comes into focus though when looking at potential encounters that use those write ups. Other things include a incarnum dragon, complete with lair, totem giants, incarnum golems, midnight constructs, and soulfused constructs among others. It’s a nice selection of material and includes a few templates and more importantly, a few mapped areas that the GM can quickly throw into his own campaign for ease of use.

While brief, chapter eight, incarnum campaigns, bears repeated readings. One of the problems with new material such as incarnum is that the GM now has to explain where it’s come from and why it wasn’t there beforehand. This rarely comes up in actual game play though unless you have an annoying player. How many new spells, magic items, or other PrCs crop up every month? Introducing something like incarnum can be as easy or as hard as the GM wants to make it.

Having said that, the book provides some great campaign ideas. My favorite is the last mishtai. It gives the campaign a reason for why all of these things are happening all of a sudden that feels like a snowball falling from a mountain and becoming a huge avalanche by the time it reaches it’s conclusion. It starts off with skarns looking for the last mishtai. Other elements are suggested that make sense, such as the use of stray incarnum, using the lost template to showcase the strange magics being brought into play, having rilkans who want to be the heroes of any search for the mishtai come into play, as well as those merchants looking to make money off the search.

With the newfound pool of incarnum in one spot, it attracts others like dusklings, and as more incarnum is used, newborns are born as azurins. All of these elements lend themselves slowly but surely to a campaign where the players themselves may never partake of the material in this book, but are surrounded by it and get to experience it for the first time as if they were strangers in a strange land.

Other useful bits in this chapter include incarnum locations, including some that can be used as one-shot bits like the midnight grove that leaches life force and spawns midnight constructs from it, or the ever-famous bastion of souls. One nice touch here is that they include an option that can benefit from the Planar Touchstone feat.

For those looking to give the players patrons and long lasting campaign guidance, the Pentifex Order is included. They act as a perfect tool to get players fighting against the lost or hunting down minions of the dragon Ashardalon, in addition to various necrocarnates.

The appendix covers epic-level meldshapers, including increased essentia capacity, epic feats, and advancement for the core classes. Also included is an essentia tracker that can be copied, as well as a Magic of Incarnum character sheet, with it’s own essentia tracker and spot for chakras and body slots.

In looking at the range of material accommodated in the book, there are only a few spots that might’ve been a little more polished. For example, how about an incarnum weapon of legacy? How about some vile and exalted feats? Considering that psionics was covered in several areas, including feats and powers, and that hexblades weren’t forgotten though, it’s a very minor complaint.

Magic of Incarnum is not for everyone. I’ve heard issues on the old message boards with the flavor text, as well as concerns over the utility of soulmelds. For me, I can tell right away that I’ll be using several of the pregenerated PrCs in my own campaign, because I love the idea of the Warriors Eternal, as well as the maps for the “evil” NPCs included, as well as the locations included, and the various feats that can be used in part without using the book as a whole.

If you want something other than spell slots or power points, Magic of Incarnum is for you.

Magic of Incarnum is another of Wizards of the Coasts' 'option' books.

It is an odd duck, to be sure. In many ways, it is similar to the Expanded Psionics Handbook. The book consists of several sections, consisting of player options, campaign options, customs monsters and roleplaying suggestions and locations. However, exactly what Incarnum IS requires some explanation.

The opening chapter describes Incarnum as Soul Energy. The book also takes great pains to describe how it is not a consumed resource and some other language which is essentially there to make it clear that its use is not inherently evil. The chapter then discusses some terminology and core concepts of Incarnum...and this is one of the book's weaknesses. The language here is somewhat unclear and may require reading two or three times to fully abosrb the ideas being put forward.

In brief summary, the system works like this: Incarnum is the power of souls, both born and unborn. Incarnum has two distinct ways of being tapped: Essentia and Soulmelds. Essentia is basically a resource (measured in points, not unlike Psionics) that powers various feats, abilities and even Soulmelds. Soulmelds are the physical manifestation of soul energy into virtual objects that you attach to body locations called Chakras (which are the functional equivalent of magic item slots). Now here's the thing that makes Incarnum different from simply psionics, an alternate magic system or alternate magic item system: it is never consumed. Because of this, your Incarnum (if you posses the ability to wield it) is movable from essentia powered ability to essentia powered ability....granting you flexibility the other systems don't provide. For example, you may enter battle with your essentia devoted to making you move faster...but as soon as you get there, you realize you need to empower your defenses, and move your essentia to power that ability for the moment. This provides amazing flexibilty which is the cornerstone of Incarnum.

Still with me? Now the next chapter features new races. There are several new races put forth, of varying interest levels. The Azurin are basically humans how were born with the ability to tap into Incarnum, for various reasons. They sacrifice normal human flexibility for the power to wield Incarnum....they also are polarized to one of the four non-neutral alignments, being a race given to extremes. This is a theme that is associated with several aspects of the Incarnum system. Some may find it very irritating, most likely on the same par as with their opinion of the D&D alignment system in general. It is fairly easy to discard these restrictions, if so desired. Other races include the dusklings, a Fey race that can use Essentia to make themselves slightly faster and two 'Star Trek' alien races. By this I mean a pair of races that are essentially humans with minor cosmetic differences...namely arm-blade extensions and scales. Both races are not terribly exciting, but they also aren't poorly executed.

Classes follow, of course, introducing three new core classes: the Incarnate, the Soulborn and the Totemist. Each class is a specialist at a particular aspect of Incarnum, as you might expect. One gets more essentia and access to abilities and feats to maximize their use, while another gets access to more soulmelds and another gets more benefit from the soulmelds he uses. In general, all three classes offer some interesting possiblities; the totemist, for example, gains powers from his soulmelds not unlike a tribal shaman...he binds a soulmeld from an animal spirit and gains it's powers. All of them are well developed and their roles in a game are laid out.

Successive chapters introduce the requisite new feats, spells, monsters and prestige classes to enhance a game. Of note here is that support is provided for artificers and warlocks, a welcome addition to support previous books without taking a large amount of space. A nice point about the prestige classes is that besides being well developed using WotC's new prestige class format (first appearing in the Races Of... series), but that the entry point for several is noticably low...allowing a fighter, for example to enter a prestige class to allow him to create his own soulblade with new found Incarnum abilities.

The all important list of Incarnum soulmelds follows and are somewhat predictable at points, but entirely useful and serviceable. Some are quite fun and others just feel like classic magic items or spells in a new context. These are necessary, however, to give the incarnum users any chance of staying in the same power-level as other classes. In general, some feel moderately under-powered...but the knowledge that they can be used much more than say spells, and that their power level can be altered by moving essentia around and specific feats brings that expectation back up. They should be somewhat less powerful at their base, because of how they can be modified later.

A large section of the book goes into ways to use Incarnum in a campaign. While some might view this as needless fluff, I thought it was a good use of space. Suggestions are made for an Incarnum campaign or how to integrate it simply for one adventure. This kind of material is often overlooked, and in my opinion proves very useful.

Earlier I mentioned there being a few weaknesses in the book. The unclear language at the beginning was the first. This is suprising, given the normal clarity of WotC's work, but it's worth going through. I think this mostly suffers from too little discussion on the matter...a couple of extra pages of detail probably would have made things clearer. The second weakness is the insistence that all Incarnum is colored blue, and that virtually every Incarnum effect be blue and that every feat, spell or whatsit have a blue word in it's name. This gets old. FAST. It's purely cosmetic, but comes off as cheesy. Finally, the enforcement of the alignment issues seems somewhat under-exposed, as if they forgot what they were up to when they specified it. I think they had a germ of an idea, but it feels somewhat forced. Luckily, this is easily ignored, if desired.

Overall, I'd highly recommend Magic of Incarnum. It's a creative and different system that feels different from the existing options of magic items, spells and psionics and approaches the effects from a different angle. It may not appeal to everyone, but it's an interesting options for anyone's game.