Artificers Handbook
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Artificer's Handbook
The Artificer's Handbook is a d20 System rules supplement providing a variant magic item creation system for d20 System fantasy games. The book is written primarily by Curtis Bennet, with contributions by Manus Smith, Wade Nudson, and Kenneth C. Shannon III. The book is published by Mystic Eye Games.
A First Look
The Artificer's Handbook is a 120 page perfect bound book priced at $19.99.
The cover of the book has a depiction by Rob Thomas of a wizardly figure with bolts of lightning coming from his hands and caressing a sword floating in the air, with a woman and a golem-like creature in the background.
The interior of the book is black-and-white and include illustrations attributed to Patricio Soler, Scott Purdy, Brannon Hall, and Tamara Pressman, though there is an uncredited illustration signed "Dyson." Purdy and Soler have some nice, high quality art in the book. By way of comparison, Hall's artwork seems a bit rough and amateur.
The interior body text font is a bit large to my eye, giving it a less than optimal word count per page. One aspect of the layout that bothered me is that all of the examples were inline to the text instead of italicized and/or offset. I found this distracting and it made the rules and examples harder to follow. Also, some tables are flawed, most notable the piecemeal armor tables, which have some items consistently in the incorrect column.
A Deeper Look
The back cover of the Artificer's Handbook poses the question: "Did you ever think that it makes no sense for a spellcaster to lose experience points to make a holy avenger?" The answer for me was "no, not really." At that point I considered it unlikely that this book would offer to me.
Fortunately, I took the plunge and started to explore what the book had to offer.
The basis of the book really is not solely about excising experience costs from the game. Rather, it provides an alternate technique for providing for the creation, cost, commitment, and requirements associated with item design.
The first question that you may ask (and I asked) when confronted with the notion of dropping XP cost is how are you going to limit the inclusion of magic items into the campaign. The first chapter addresses this point by providing a flurry of options for the GM, not just to make the system "like it was before", but to adapt it to the sort of campaign that the GM is interested and running. The most fundamental decision is if the campaign will be "low," "moderate," or "high" magic. From this decision, the chapter (and indeed, the rest of the book) provides a variety of options based around this initial options.
The author seems satisfied that money and time are sufficient barriers to item creation in a game. However, the other options are compelling if you are not convinced this is sufficient. Variants allow you to use XP like the standard system, incur instability in the item, limit a character's total items created, or require a character to "work their way up" to more powerful items. Much in the tradition of the Hero system, the book provides a worksheet that helps you define and keep a record of the choices that you make for the way your campaign handles magic item creation.
The heart of the book is really the second chapter. It introduces what the author calls the "spell slot system." The basic idea is that when creating an item, it requires the expenditure of spell slots for a number of days depending on the power of the item. This level-limits the creation of any item, since a caster must have the requisite number of slots of that level. Unlike the core system, the character can stop creating an item and pick it up at a later time. The catch is, the spell slots devoted to the item are lost and unusable until the item is completed or the owner abandons it.
The level of the spell slots devoted to the creation of the item are generally determined by the spell that the item most closely emulates, though much like the core system, items that provide bonuses have a different rule. The number of spell slots required depends on the type of item to be created. A single use item like a scroll takes far fewer slots than a continuous item.
So far, this is not that dissimilar from the core system. Where the spell slot system shines is that it doesn't require after-the-fact tweaking of the cost for some conditions. The spell slot system takes into account more factors when determining the number of spell slots required. For example, short duration spells are more difficult to make into continuous items than long duration spells. Further, the spell slot system opens a few avenues that aren't possible by the core system without resorting to fiat, such as rechargeable items. Other options that the character can select can modify the total spell slot cost of the item. Limitations can lower the spell slot cost and enhancements add to the spell slot cost.
You can put more than one effect into an item, but each effect past the first takes a cumulative additional spell slot. Unlike the core system, weapons and armor don't use a different method to determine costs, but the system does use the bonus equivalent of any weapon enhancements in their cost calculations.
Since more powerful items require more spell slots to create, this implicitly limits the level of caster than can create a given item. The author points out that this means that the character's casting attribute becomes important, as character's with higher casting attributes can cast more spells. What the author doesn't note is that this gives sorcerers an implicit advantage in creating powerful items, since they generally have more spells per level. This may or may not be a problem; while it is true this makes them more effective at item creation, their limited feats and spell selection sort of handicap them.
Some very powerful items may be beyond the power of even fairly powerful characters. For this purpose, the book provides the option of allowing helpers to pick up the slack for casters with the proper feat.
The final cost of the item and time to create the item is determined by the spell slot cost and the level of the spell and caster. The calculations can be daunting for those scared away by math, but the back of the book has a table tabulating the costs, a form for managing the method, and several examples taken from the core book (3.0) wondrous items. In looking over the costs and how they were made, it is obvious that the costs vary from core items. However, some of these cost alterations are compelling, such as more expensive skill bonus items and more reasonable prices on known troublesome items like the boots of striding and springing.
That is the core of the book, and it actually only consists of 23 pages. The rest of the book is supporting rules material, more options, and more ways to use the system to create magic items.
Chapter 3 introduces new feat dealing with magic items. The so called "core item creation feats" are four feats designed to replace the existing item creation feats. Instead of dividing the feats by item type, the item creation feats are replaced by a feat chain that starts with create single use item (which replaces both brew potion and scribe scroll), and create minor, moderate, and major items (which allow multi use items with spells up to 3rd, 6th, and 9th levels, respectively.) This seems like a more even-handed arrangement than the existing item creation feats.
Other optional feats provide benefits when enchanting items. Craft specialization makes it easier for the caster to enchant a certain item type, adapter allows a character to add effects to an existing item, and multi-spell allows the character to make items with more than one spell effect. The author recommends this last feat be free in medium and high magic campaigns.
The fourth chapter introduces two new prestige classes, both 5-level classes. One of the most common class concepts dealing with magic items is that of the so-called artificer, and this book follows that same path. The artificer is simply a spell caster that concentrates on item creation. The artificer's class abilities allow it to more easily create magic item, but the character's caster level (though oddly, not the total spell slots) suffer.
The other magic-item related class is called the infuser. Though the infuser gets some item creation abilities, the infuser's forte is enhancing magic items. An infuser can pull tricks like apply metamagic feats to spell effects from items, or recharge a normally non-rechargeable item.
The fifth chapter introduces new spells, primarily spells that allow the character to create certain types of items. For example, borrow ability lets the character borrow the use of a feat, or to create an items that grants use of a feat.
Chapter 5 also has a variant of the identify spell based on the low/medium/high magic campaign descriptors used throughout the book. However, I think this variant goes in the wrong direction. I have long felt that as is, the identify spell too easily dispels the mystery of magic items, but as written in the book, the low magic variant is close to the core version, while the medium and high magic version are much easier to use.
Chapter 6 discusses the item instability option for creating magic items. The DM has a lot of choice in the actual likelihood of instability, but the basic concept is that the more powerful an items it, the more likely it is to suffer instability (based on a random roll.) Unstable items can gain quirks, impair character abilities, become cursed, or gain intelligence. There is even a small chance, but the tables, that such an item will become an artifact or relic.
Chapter 7 expands the DMs options for items in a campaign. The two most notable variants in this chapter are those of gestalt items and sockets and talismans.
Gestalt items are a classical fantasy schtick, often created by fiat in past versions of the game but never explicitly covered by the rules. Gestalt items are sets of multiple items that have certain powers that only express themselves when the items are together.
Sockets and talismans are a concept familiar to players of the Diablo II computer game and some console games. The basic concept is that specially enchanted items have sockets in them. These sockets can hold a variety of talismans which provide them with special powers varying dependant upon which talisman is put in. This allows the character to vary the abilities of their weapons. For example, in some situations, a keen blade may be more helpful than a flaming blade.
Talismans are primarily for armor and weapons. Some talismans have different effects dependant upon whether they are in armor or weapons. For example, a flaming burst talisman in a weapon might provide flame resistance ability while in armor.
The eight chapter covers components. The basic concept is that the cost paid to create an item is primarily for purchasing special components. For those GMs wishing additional details in this process, the component chapter introduces methods for finding such components for sale, as well as a laundry list of different types of components and what they may be useful for.
The ninth chapter is primarily composed of flavor details to add to items. Using these tables, one can quickly generate details of the history of an item as well as potion characteristic.
Appendices provide tabulated costs, costs for sample items from the DMG, and collect tables from elsewhere in the book.
Conclusion
Despite the matra on the back of the book (and expressed throughout), whether or not you like xp is hardly the biggest selling point of the system. A better mantra to find a target audience might have been "did you ever think the costs and limitations of the core book magic item system don't make sense?"
Perhaps the highest praise I can give a book, I had no intention of using the Artificer's Handbook when I picked it up, but knew I would be using it by the time I finished the second chapter. The spell slot system provides a compelling alternative to the existing system. The costs seem more appropriate than the figures provided by the core book method with less guesswork, and provide for many effects that the core system does not handle easily. Both the slot system itself and the supporting material provide a lot of interesting options for magic items.
The book is not perfect, however. The system is modestly more complicated than the one in the core book, so is not for the math-weak. Complicating this is the composition of the book. I usually don't quibble to much about the writing style of the book, but I really felt that a few changes in the layout and paragraph composition would have made the slot system (and the various subsystems) easier to understand. As it is, many examples are immediately entrained in the text where offsetting methods from examples and making clear step-by-step bulleted methods would have made the book easier to use.
Overall Grade: B
-Alan D. Kohler
The Artificer's Handbook is a d20 System rules supplement providing a variant magic item creation system for d20 System fantasy games. The book is written primarily by Curtis Bennet, with contributions by Manus Smith, Wade Nudson, and Kenneth C. Shannon III. The book is published by Mystic Eye Games.
A First Look
The Artificer's Handbook is a 120 page perfect bound book priced at $19.99.
The cover of the book has a depiction by Rob Thomas of a wizardly figure with bolts of lightning coming from his hands and caressing a sword floating in the air, with a woman and a golem-like creature in the background.
The interior of the book is black-and-white and include illustrations attributed to Patricio Soler, Scott Purdy, Brannon Hall, and Tamara Pressman, though there is an uncredited illustration signed "Dyson." Purdy and Soler have some nice, high quality art in the book. By way of comparison, Hall's artwork seems a bit rough and amateur.
The interior body text font is a bit large to my eye, giving it a less than optimal word count per page. One aspect of the layout that bothered me is that all of the examples were inline to the text instead of italicized and/or offset. I found this distracting and it made the rules and examples harder to follow. Also, some tables are flawed, most notable the piecemeal armor tables, which have some items consistently in the incorrect column.
A Deeper Look
The back cover of the Artificer's Handbook poses the question: "Did you ever think that it makes no sense for a spellcaster to lose experience points to make a holy avenger?" The answer for me was "no, not really." At that point I considered it unlikely that this book would offer to me.
Fortunately, I took the plunge and started to explore what the book had to offer.
The basis of the book really is not solely about excising experience costs from the game. Rather, it provides an alternate technique for providing for the creation, cost, commitment, and requirements associated with item design.
The first question that you may ask (and I asked) when confronted with the notion of dropping XP cost is how are you going to limit the inclusion of magic items into the campaign. The first chapter addresses this point by providing a flurry of options for the GM, not just to make the system "like it was before", but to adapt it to the sort of campaign that the GM is interested and running. The most fundamental decision is if the campaign will be "low," "moderate," or "high" magic. From this decision, the chapter (and indeed, the rest of the book) provides a variety of options based around this initial options.
The author seems satisfied that money and time are sufficient barriers to item creation in a game. However, the other options are compelling if you are not convinced this is sufficient. Variants allow you to use XP like the standard system, incur instability in the item, limit a character's total items created, or require a character to "work their way up" to more powerful items. Much in the tradition of the Hero system, the book provides a worksheet that helps you define and keep a record of the choices that you make for the way your campaign handles magic item creation.
The heart of the book is really the second chapter. It introduces what the author calls the "spell slot system." The basic idea is that when creating an item, it requires the expenditure of spell slots for a number of days depending on the power of the item. This level-limits the creation of any item, since a caster must have the requisite number of slots of that level. Unlike the core system, the character can stop creating an item and pick it up at a later time. The catch is, the spell slots devoted to the item are lost and unusable until the item is completed or the owner abandons it.
The level of the spell slots devoted to the creation of the item are generally determined by the spell that the item most closely emulates, though much like the core system, items that provide bonuses have a different rule. The number of spell slots required depends on the type of item to be created. A single use item like a scroll takes far fewer slots than a continuous item.
So far, this is not that dissimilar from the core system. Where the spell slot system shines is that it doesn't require after-the-fact tweaking of the cost for some conditions. The spell slot system takes into account more factors when determining the number of spell slots required. For example, short duration spells are more difficult to make into continuous items than long duration spells. Further, the spell slot system opens a few avenues that aren't possible by the core system without resorting to fiat, such as rechargeable items. Other options that the character can select can modify the total spell slot cost of the item. Limitations can lower the spell slot cost and enhancements add to the spell slot cost.
You can put more than one effect into an item, but each effect past the first takes a cumulative additional spell slot. Unlike the core system, weapons and armor don't use a different method to determine costs, but the system does use the bonus equivalent of any weapon enhancements in their cost calculations.
Since more powerful items require more spell slots to create, this implicitly limits the level of caster than can create a given item. The author points out that this means that the character's casting attribute becomes important, as character's with higher casting attributes can cast more spells. What the author doesn't note is that this gives sorcerers an implicit advantage in creating powerful items, since they generally have more spells per level. This may or may not be a problem; while it is true this makes them more effective at item creation, their limited feats and spell selection sort of handicap them.
Some very powerful items may be beyond the power of even fairly powerful characters. For this purpose, the book provides the option of allowing helpers to pick up the slack for casters with the proper feat.
The final cost of the item and time to create the item is determined by the spell slot cost and the level of the spell and caster. The calculations can be daunting for those scared away by math, but the back of the book has a table tabulating the costs, a form for managing the method, and several examples taken from the core book (3.0) wondrous items. In looking over the costs and how they were made, it is obvious that the costs vary from core items. However, some of these cost alterations are compelling, such as more expensive skill bonus items and more reasonable prices on known troublesome items like the boots of striding and springing.
That is the core of the book, and it actually only consists of 23 pages. The rest of the book is supporting rules material, more options, and more ways to use the system to create magic items.
Chapter 3 introduces new feat dealing with magic items. The so called "core item creation feats" are four feats designed to replace the existing item creation feats. Instead of dividing the feats by item type, the item creation feats are replaced by a feat chain that starts with create single use item (which replaces both brew potion and scribe scroll), and create minor, moderate, and major items (which allow multi use items with spells up to 3rd, 6th, and 9th levels, respectively.) This seems like a more even-handed arrangement than the existing item creation feats.
Other optional feats provide benefits when enchanting items. Craft specialization makes it easier for the caster to enchant a certain item type, adapter allows a character to add effects to an existing item, and multi-spell allows the character to make items with more than one spell effect. The author recommends this last feat be free in medium and high magic campaigns.
The fourth chapter introduces two new prestige classes, both 5-level classes. One of the most common class concepts dealing with magic items is that of the so-called artificer, and this book follows that same path. The artificer is simply a spell caster that concentrates on item creation. The artificer's class abilities allow it to more easily create magic item, but the character's caster level (though oddly, not the total spell slots) suffer.
The other magic-item related class is called the infuser. Though the infuser gets some item creation abilities, the infuser's forte is enhancing magic items. An infuser can pull tricks like apply metamagic feats to spell effects from items, or recharge a normally non-rechargeable item.
The fifth chapter introduces new spells, primarily spells that allow the character to create certain types of items. For example, borrow ability lets the character borrow the use of a feat, or to create an items that grants use of a feat.
Chapter 5 also has a variant of the identify spell based on the low/medium/high magic campaign descriptors used throughout the book. However, I think this variant goes in the wrong direction. I have long felt that as is, the identify spell too easily dispels the mystery of magic items, but as written in the book, the low magic variant is close to the core version, while the medium and high magic version are much easier to use.
Chapter 6 discusses the item instability option for creating magic items. The DM has a lot of choice in the actual likelihood of instability, but the basic concept is that the more powerful an items it, the more likely it is to suffer instability (based on a random roll.) Unstable items can gain quirks, impair character abilities, become cursed, or gain intelligence. There is even a small chance, but the tables, that such an item will become an artifact or relic.
Chapter 7 expands the DMs options for items in a campaign. The two most notable variants in this chapter are those of gestalt items and sockets and talismans.
Gestalt items are a classical fantasy schtick, often created by fiat in past versions of the game but never explicitly covered by the rules. Gestalt items are sets of multiple items that have certain powers that only express themselves when the items are together.
Sockets and talismans are a concept familiar to players of the Diablo II computer game and some console games. The basic concept is that specially enchanted items have sockets in them. These sockets can hold a variety of talismans which provide them with special powers varying dependant upon which talisman is put in. This allows the character to vary the abilities of their weapons. For example, in some situations, a keen blade may be more helpful than a flaming blade.
Talismans are primarily for armor and weapons. Some talismans have different effects dependant upon whether they are in armor or weapons. For example, a flaming burst talisman in a weapon might provide flame resistance ability while in armor.
The eight chapter covers components. The basic concept is that the cost paid to create an item is primarily for purchasing special components. For those GMs wishing additional details in this process, the component chapter introduces methods for finding such components for sale, as well as a laundry list of different types of components and what they may be useful for.
The ninth chapter is primarily composed of flavor details to add to items. Using these tables, one can quickly generate details of the history of an item as well as potion characteristic.
Appendices provide tabulated costs, costs for sample items from the DMG, and collect tables from elsewhere in the book.
Conclusion
Despite the matra on the back of the book (and expressed throughout), whether or not you like xp is hardly the biggest selling point of the system. A better mantra to find a target audience might have been "did you ever think the costs and limitations of the core book magic item system don't make sense?"
Perhaps the highest praise I can give a book, I had no intention of using the Artificer's Handbook when I picked it up, but knew I would be using it by the time I finished the second chapter. The spell slot system provides a compelling alternative to the existing system. The costs seem more appropriate than the figures provided by the core book method with less guesswork, and provide for many effects that the core system does not handle easily. Both the slot system itself and the supporting material provide a lot of interesting options for magic items.
The book is not perfect, however. The system is modestly more complicated than the one in the core book, so is not for the math-weak. Complicating this is the composition of the book. I usually don't quibble to much about the writing style of the book, but I really felt that a few changes in the layout and paragraph composition would have made the slot system (and the various subsystems) easier to understand. As it is, many examples are immediately entrained in the text where offsetting methods from examples and making clear step-by-step bulleted methods would have made the book easier to use.
Overall Grade: B
-Alan D. Kohler
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