Magic of Incarnum... hmm...

A new source of power for the Dungeons & Dragons® roleplaying game!
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.

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Sammael said:

I find the topic of that book... disturbing.

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Sammael said:

I find the topic of that book... disturbing.

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Andy Collins on the WoTC Boards said:

I feel pretty confident in saying that D&D has never seen a system quite like the one presented in Magic of Incarnum.

Honestly, I've never seen a system quite like this one anywhere, though I fully admit that I've not read every game or supplement ever produced.

If you're looking for a form of magic that feels like neither traditional spellcasting nor psionics, you should give the book a try.

(And note that the product page doesn't say "use souls as fuel." That'd be a mischaracterization of what's going on here...but I'll not reveal more.)

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James Wyatt later said... said:

This book is pretty much my baby, and I am more proud of it than of anything else I've done in my career so far. For a couple of years, whenever we'd talk about what products we should do, I'd always pipe up with, "We should do something totally new, something that's never been done before." I mean, I think we needed 3E versions of the stuff that's been around in D&D forever—psionics, planes, Oriental Adventures, and so on—but I really wanted us to innovate beyond the things that have always been a part of the game.

So I finally put my money where my mouth was and came up with the idea for this book—and then I got to write it, with a lot of help from some brilliant designers and developers. In a nutshell, this is the same kind of book as the Expanded Psionics Handbook: A new system of magic-like stuff. But that description is where the resemblance to psionics ends.

The magic of incarnum is a form of magic that combines persistent effects with round-by-round resource management. It's a flexible system that you can use to create a lot of different effects. There are three standard classes that use this system, and then a bunch of prestige classes that let them (and characters from other backgrounds) use it in new and interesting ways.

We also tried very hard to provide ways to integrate the system into an ongoing game. There are feats and spells that allow existing characters to learn some techniques that use incarnum. There's a chapter on campaigns that includes three different adventure arcs that you can use to introduce incarnum into your game, whether you prefer to say that these techniques have always been around and kept hidden, or they've just been discovered.

Frank Brunner and Stephen Schubert (before we hired him as a developer) were the freelance designers on the book, and both of them brought an incredible amount of creativity to it. Andy Collins led a very rigorous development process that burned off the dross and produced a refined masterpiece, with a lot of additional design from Rich Baker. It's an awesome book, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, and I'm pretty sure that when it comes out, you will be as excited about it as I am.

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Shemeska said:

Sounds fine to me

*idle gnaw on a broiled larvae sandwich*

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