Academy Handbook: St Johns

[Messageboard Golem]

A handbook for students of the famed college of Abjuration, including many new rules for Abjuration specialists. Includes rules covering antimagic spell casting, new ritual magic and introduces the various faces of abjuration wizards.
In writing this, the first of the Academy Handbooks, we have tried to take a step away from the usual fare of spells, feats, prestige classes and the like. Its not that we didn't want them in it, after all we all like books of stuff, but the emphasis is shifted onto the setting background.

The purpose of this is to create a book that, for players is both a splat book and an interesting read that makes them think about how and where their character learned their magical abilities. For the GM, on the other hand, it is not merely a book for players that will cause them numerous headaches. Instead it is a self-contained setting that can easily be slotted into their existing campaign world.

 

[blackwolf]

I found this book to be useful to me, a DnD player who usually plays a wizard in 3rd edition. As is typical of many recent books for fantasy gaming, it has a combination of new spells, NPCs and settings that can be dropped into a campaign. Some of the material expands the powers of a wizard to be an earth shattering power when the spells are cast in unison with others. Though I never played Birthright, I suspect that some of the rules might be applicable to that game.

The cover is simple and tasteful, rather reminiscent of the covers on the 2nd edition TSR source books (the green covered ones) like A Mighty Fortress.

The font is a bit small, but legible. the sections are clearly laid out and the tables are easy to read. The new spells are formatted according to the SRD standard.

Inside the table of contents is laid out well, and breaks the book into 7 parts:

1. Houses of St John's: a guide to the college houses

2. A cosmopolitan college: the ethnic diversity of the college

3. Alumni: Famous NPCs

4. Your Studies: Classes and new spells for your spell book

5. The Library: This is where some enormously powerful spell-rituals can be found

6. The Faculty: NPCs- these characters are not fully stat blocked, but you have a name, title, ability stats, and class/level info, plus a paragraph describing the person. This is fine for my needs since I can fill in other details if needed.

7. Adventure Ideas: Three straightforward ideas with a couple paragraphs of description to get your brain working on How to Get Your PCs into this magic school mindset.

There are 2 appendices: one with all the spells for an abjurer in the PHB, and also the new spells from this book.
and the second has 14 feats from this book. The feats have a name and type (like metamagic or antimagic), the requirements and then a brief description. The format does not include a part that is becoming standard with other publishers: the Benefit descriptor that tells how this Feat exceeds the ability of a non-feated character.

To expand a bit on the chapters, I should say that the Houses in chapter one have 3 prestige classes that are nicely laid out in standard form, and have a page of descriptive material too. They are 20 levels each and have spell progression charts for each. (I guess they are essentially new classes, but I call them prestige classes here.)
They are: The Devout Abjurer (a wizard cleric cross with access to some clerical powers); The Fortamancer (a warrior mage with restricted spells but more spells per day to cast); and The Guild Scholar (a tougher combat oriented mage).

The ethnic diversity in chapter 2 covers prestige classes for elves and dwarves and gnomes, oh my!, plus half orcs too.

The chapter on courses of study actually explains how to work greater and rather unusual magics, wardings and rituals. There is a lot to digest in this chapter, and I am not sure how I will take advantage of it yet.

The group I DM doesn't spend much time around the magic academy, or finding schools to study in, so I won't use all of the materials on the St John's College here, but I figure about 60 percent will drop straight into my game world.

This book is a first rate effort, and I do not hesitate to compare it to the books I've purchased from Malhavoc Press. This is a very good value at $6.50 USD.

 

[GameWyrd]

The heads up on Malladin’s Gate doesn’t look good. At US $6.50 the 41-paged PDF Academy Handbook: St. John's College of Abjuration doesn’t seem to manage the superb value for money that many ebooks do; although it is still a good price. Opening up the PDF and scrolling down past the faux leather cover and quickly skimming pages to the bottom means that you’ll discover there are no illustrations in the product either. On screen this Academy Handbook can become a sea of text at times and it is easy to loose your place. On the other hand, this is an easy product to print off. The absence of colour, pictures or sidebars means that all you face is the simple procedure of pressing the print button (although I opted not to print the first three pages and read the rest in bed). St. John’s College of Abjuration is less of a sea of text once it escapes the screen and makes it to paper. This seems to be pretty much true for all illustration light PDFs.

That’s just the first glance and first glances generally are unreliable witnesses. Rather than judging a supplement by first appearances, I much prefer to base approval or criticism for it on whether it achieves what it sets out to do. This is what we’re told of the supplement’s aims:

"The purpose of this is to create a book that, for players is both a splat book and an interesting read that makes them think about how and where their character learned their magical abilities." We’re told that it’s designed not to be a headache for GMs either and to give them something that’s self contained and easy to slot into an existing campaign world.

Rather surprisingly, St. John’s College of Abjuration manages this. You’ll rarely catch me using splat and interesting in the same sentence but I will here. There’s a trick, see, a cunning ploy. This Academy Handbook wraps it’s nicely thought out splat in an in character dressing. The book, for the most part, reads to you as if it where a college guidebook. The "Introduction to Abjuration" course has lectures in St. John’s Great Hall on Tuesday mornings and Friday afternoons. Along side this, in comment boxes, are a couple of zero and first level Abjuration spells. I found myself reading the timetable primer for something called "Deadzone Theory" and thinking . o O (Oh, that sounds interesting) and that was the point I had to admit Malladin’s Gate had managed to inject readability into splat. The balance between this dressing and the splat is right. The supplement never gets too carried away with timetables, introductions from lecturers or the running of the school. This is true even when it detours to explain how the college is divided into two competing houses and gives examples of the sort of pupil behaviour that could see their house credited or docked points.

Harry Potter? Yes, ‘fraid so. I couldn’t shake that feeling even though there have been plenty of wizard college books before the Potter boy and there will be plenty of famous wizard college books after the mania goes. These wizards aren’t cheeky school kids though, they’re grown men and women. Guilds and mercenary companies sponsor many of the students. Mercenary sponsored gradates are expected to pay back their tuition fees by performing on the field of battle. You can use the College as a self-contained drop in for your own campaign world but there’s quite clearly the world of Malladin’s Gate all around the college in the supplement. There’s some help in integrating these Malladin’s Gate inspired world features into your game. St. John, himself, is a deity and we’re told his alignment and domains, just enough to use him but we’re also told that any suitable deity with Protection as a main domain will do or perhaps St. John is an important servant of a deity that does exist in your world. There’s nothing to get hung up on here.

The splat core of the product is composed of the four primal elements; core classes, prestige classes, new spells and new feats. The core classes present themselves in an interesting (you guessed it, that word again) way but they do throw away any idea of keeping the core classes as universal and distinct as possible to the wind. These new classes are all pretty much restricted to those who attended St. Johns and there is plenty of overlapping. This isn’t a bad thing as such, it’s just something to watch, imagine how many core classes you could invent if you had one for each Fighter variant you could think of.

The two houses that make up the College of Abjuration each have a representative core class. The religious (of the Protection deity St. John) and spiritual Pendeghast House tends to produce the Devout Abjurer. This is a 20 level core class that can be multiclassed with Wizard if you so want. Actually, they’re called "subclasses" and you can only ever have one subclass. The Devout Abjurer casts spells as the wizard but can not take spells from certain schools, they receive their abjuration speciality bonus and can also cast divine domain spells from the Protection domain. Their friendly rivals in house Hardacre offer up the Fortamancer subclass; so called because these abjurers channel their defensive magics into their body. The Fortamancer has a reduced number of spellslots but is very much tougher; d8 hit points and Damage resistance appearing and then improving at high levels as a class special. The Guild Scholar abjurer subclass is similar to the Fortamancer in that they’re not quite as well rounded wizards but wouldn’t look out of place on the battlefield. It’s the class special abilities that prove to be the grumble point. The specials don’t tend to be very exciting and they’re certainly rather rare. The Devout Abjurer is the worst offender, getting only Scribe Scroll at level one and then Turn Undead at level three. Nothing else. These god-fearing wizards don’t even pluck up the courage to summon a familiar.

If the house you went to at college can so hugely effect what sort of Abjurer you turn out to be then what about your race? Sensibly the supplement looks at the effect the core rule PC races might have and it does it in two ways. The first way is a block of racial adjustments: advantages and disadvantages. There are even a few options as to where and when to apply this pair – perhaps the disadvantages apply to the whole race but the advantages only to Abjurers. The advantages and disadvantages are a bit of a stretch at times and do rely on some campaign setting racial stereotypes. Dwarves need to be naturally magically resistant (rather than, say, having their +2 bonus because they’re especially good at magic) and so their disadvantage is the loss of a whole extra magic school type due to specialisation. On the whole it seems to work. If you have a half-orc who’s managed to learn some Abjuration magic then I can quite believe its very much harder to distract him from casting spells by prodding him with an arrow than it is to distract a halfling abjurer by prodding him with the same arrow. That’s the sort of thing that this set of ads and dis-ads makes possible. The other racial approach is Life Paths. These are effectively tiny (three level) prestige classes with a special emphasis on the class’s special ability.

Prestige classes make their appearance as we look at some of St. John’s Alumni (in other words, some prestigious ex-students). In essence this chapter takes four NPCs, writes them up (stats and all) and then presents a seven level prestige class that relates to the specialised but successful path taken by each. This produces the Arcane Shieldman (again with the wizards can be warriors too), the Monk of St. John, the Paragon and the Antithaumaturgist. I know; seven level prestige classes are kind of weird. I prefer to look at them as two levels better than a skimpy five level class rather than three levels shy of a full ten level class.

It’s at this point in the short but well packed supplement that you’ll catch up with my introductory comments about timetabling. By literally dividing Abjuration into classes the Academy Handbook is able to present sets of feats and new spells bundled together by theme. It certainly works, someone like myself who doesn’t like splat much rarely entertains the thought . o O (I want!) but I do here. The flipside to that is that some of these combinations can be rather powerful. The declared goal for this product is to avoid giving the GM headaches but I think the GM will have to watch that these rules aren’t used to create characters that are either all-powerful abjurers or fish out of water as the circumstances dictate. Generally you want to be somewhere in between for the best part of the game and not always stuck at either extreme.

A bunch of True Rituals (read: powerful spells) and adventure ideas draw the Academy Handbook to a close. The appendixes are especially useful given that the supplement spreads the new feats and spells around as the flavour text divides them up. You have the full Abjuration Spell list at your fingertips and the new Abjuration Feats too.

It just goes to show that you shouldn’t rush to dismiss a book or an idea. I was surprised that Academy Handbook: St. John's College of Abjuration works so well. It does work well and the supplement does manage to reach its goals. This Academy Handbook is genuinely useful and interesting and I don’t think it will be too hard to avoid the pit falls that this level of specialism can dig up.

* This Academy Handbook: St. John's College of Abjuration review was first published by GameWyrd.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

By Glenn Dean, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine Rack

Sizing Up the Target
Academy Handbook I: St John’s College of Abjuration is a 41-page PDF designed by Ben Redmond, Matthew Sims and Nigel McClelland at Malladin’s Gate Press. Both a player’s and GM’s product covering the arcane specialty of abjuration, Academy Handbook I is available as a $6.50 download.

First Blood
Subtitled St. John’s College of Abjuration and Defence Against the Offensive Arts, Academy Handbook I is the first in a series of releases from Malladin’s Gate Press that simultaneously provide a detailed adventure setting and an embedded set of new rules, classes, and game mechanics for playing specialist wizards. Set against the backdrop of the Academy of Wizardry, Academy Handbook I is a unique product with tremendous magical flavor that details one of the colleges of magic in a great school of wizardry.

Unlike many gaming products that open with a discussion of game mechanics, St. John’s College of Abjuration immediately thrusts the reader into the setting of a magical academy where the various schools of magic compete in the training of wizards. This volume is devoted to abjurors, specialists in protective magic, and provides a great variety of new options for abjuration specialists in the form of new classes, prestige classes, feats, spells, and adventuring ideas.

The first chapter, “Houses of St John’s”, introduces the three college houses that give rise to three new abjuror variants: the Devout Abjuror, Fortamancer, and Guild Scholar. Each is a fully developed 20-level variant subclass with its own unique flavor that balances well with existing core classes and specialist wizard rules. The Devout Abjuror, for example, is a divine protectionist, a specialist wizard who sacrifices the familiar and bonus feat special abilities of the standard wizard class in return for access to the divine Protection domain and the ability to turn undead.

The next two chapters introduce eight prestige classes. “A cosmopolitan college” introduces some variant rules for playing demi-human abjurors, and describes “Life Path” prestige classes that may be taken by elven, dwarven, gnome, and half-orc characters – though oddly, the dwarven Life Path is a 15-level prestige class, while the others are three-level classes. “St. John’s Alumni” provides four additional prestige classes that tie well to the variant subclasses introduced in the first chapter: the Arcane Shieldman, Monk of St. John, Paragon, and Anti-thaumaturgist. Each of these classes has an iconic character and organization associated with it that explains its relationship to the Academy of Wizardry.

“Your studies at St. John’s” (chapter 4) is a catalog of the various magical courses of study at the college. Each course of study has specific new spells and feats tied to it, a total of 15 new feats and 29 new abjuration spells in all. Many of these courses provide an interesting take on subjects such as spellcasting in armor, or the use of anti-magic in protection spells.

The last three chapters introduce a bit more flavor and some ideas about how to put the Academy of Wizardry to use in the campaign. “The College Library” introduces powerful magical rituals using abjuration – some of which, like Arcane Sundering that robs an entire nation or arcane casters forever, could provide some truly interesting adventure ideas. “The College Faculty” gives some basic statistics and personalities of the various wizards of St. Johns, which would be useful in running adventures there, and ties in with the last chapter, which provides the GM with a number of ideas about how to run adventures in the college.

As a bonus, the appendices to Academy Handbook I provide complete summaries of the spells and feats introduced in the product. There is also a complete character sheet designed specifically for abjuror characters.

Critical Hits
The great success of Academy Handbook I is its ability to completely immerse the game mechanics in the setting. The background and history of the college of abjuration are tightly interwoven with the great variety of abjuration material – it becomes quite easy to imagine running a number of exciting adventures that never leave the Academy of Wizardry itself. While the setting might be overly-reminiscent of “Harry Potter” to some – student houses, house points, a college cup, unique courses and faculty – I found it made the entire product much more enjoyable than just reading a stale listing of game mechanics. It’s one thing to create a new class or list of new feats, it’s quite another to make it part of a coherent whole. I find myself quite looking forward to the next release in the Academy Handbook series.

Critical Misses
Like any product that has a high percentage of new game mechanics, there are some that tip the balance scales. Luckily, in this product they are in the relative minority. The variant classes balance quite well, though the Monk of St. John’s prestige class is an absolute no-brainer for a character of the Devout Abjuror class. A couple of feats raise the eyebrows – notably the ones that allow spellcasting in an anti-magic field – and a few of the spells are probably better suited to higher levels (like Absorb Blow, a 1st level spell that provides an albeit temporary damage reduction of 10/+5).

The product could also stand for another trip past the editor. There are enough typographical errors to be mildly distracting. Of greater concern is the fact that two of the four iconic prestige class characters don’t qualify for the appropriate prestige class! Hopefully this is just a typographical problem rather than a misunderstanding of skill ranks versus skill modifiers on the part of the authors. The example Paragon couldn’t have taken the class, since as a 5th level Wizard the character would have a maximum of 8 skill ranks in Concentration when the prestige class requires 10; the example Anti-thaumaturgist has all of 7 ranks in Spellcraft when the prestige class requires 12 for entry.

Coup de Grace
Malladin’s Gate Press has quite generously labeled the entire Academy Handbook I as Open Game content, which is a tremendous boon for anyone who wants a fresh new take on specialist wizards, or who is interested in running an adventure or campaign set around a school of magic. Though the product suffers slightly for a few poorly balanced game mechanics and some improperly statted NPCs, both players and GMs should find enough to their liking to get quite a bit of value out of this supplement. The great integration of roleplaying flavor with appropriate game mechanics is this product’s strength – keep an eye out for future releases in this line!

To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to Fast Tracks at www.d20zines.com.