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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1063248" data-attributes="member: 8158">[PLAIN]Re: Re: [AU] Arcana Unearthed Questions[/PLAIN]I've only delved about halfway into AU, but I have to say that dmunch sounds right on the money.Magisters definitely trump the PHB arcane casters, and the warmain--with d12 hit dice, a superior Will save, and some class abilities that outshine core PHB feats--really eclipses the fighter in terms of raw power (although the latter has more flexibility). I'd say if you're using AU classes, then use them all, and allow fighters, rogues, monks, and barbarians to co-exist with them (essentially, drop the PHB spellcasters). Trust me, they're all great classes and you won't regret hedging out a D&D druid for an AU greenbond for a second.As for the rest of the book's compatability with "standard" D&D, I'd say the rest of AU is take-it-or-leave-it, because although it's different from core D&D, it doesn't offer any advantages over it in the way that the classes do. The classes are definitely the shining point of the book for me. The races are a bit blah--fairies and furries for the most part--and I like D&D's core races as they are. One specific niggling point is that I don't like the thought of having all these furry races co-existing with a totem warriro class (sorry, Monte, the thought of that leonine totem warrior having the totem of a snake or wolverine or shark doesn't mesh conceptually IMO). I was pleased to see that low-light vision is far more prominent among player races than darkvision.The magic system is extensive and it's the part I'm just starting to get into. It doesn't look like any new ground was broken in terms of how magic works. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> Same vancian system, and unfortunately the same rule that casters can't prepare new spells until they've had eight hours of sound sleep. Maybe it's just me, but that always struck me as totally unheroic. Heroes should be able to ride hard and fight hard, not one or the other. I am sick of characters taking half-day long siestas in the middle of a hellish dungeon, or over-extending their spell resources during a particularly brutal encounter and having no hope to meet the save-the-world deadline without massive DM fudging. Long, unavoidable breaks from the action erodes that cinematic "edge-of-your-seat" suspence I strive to create, but that's how the 8-hour recharge system often works. I have to say that my greatest disappointment with AU so far was that it didn't live up to Monte's assertion about death:This statement gave me high hopes, so my hear sank when I came across a section that states that a character suffers some nasty disadvantages after the sixth time he's been raised. As far as I can tell, the only meaningful difference between getting raised in AU and getting raised in D&D is that the AU-equivalent spell is a couple of levels higher. People can still be raised after weeks or months or even longer. There is no cradling a fallen comrade in your arms with tear-filled eyes. You do not send Boromir's body down the river on a makeshift pyre, unless you're a cheapskate. A hero's sacrifice still only amounts to XP and cash. If you can't raise him yourself, you pack'im up and take'im back to town and cough up the dough for a spell. There's a "Spells for Hire" section just as in D&D, going all the way up to 9th-level spells, which quashes the impression that high-level magic is so rare that there's no such thing as fixed pricing. As for the simple/complex/exotic spell system, it just seems to me that it boils down to a system where casters, for the most part, share a single ubiquitious spell list rather than a variety of lists tailored to each class. Max, there is not specific reference to the diamond throne campaign, so that won't prevent you from plugging it into a more generic D&D campaign. You're concerned with too much magic, and that might pose a bit of a problem. While it was noted that there are fewer casters in AU than in the PHB, all classses except warmains and unfettereds rely on supernatural abilities of some kind. Overall, though, they're about as magical as D&D classes (which are pretty darn magical, I should point out). Although I have uttered quite a bit of criticism of AU (I had lofty expectations, I suppose), I do still think this is a remarkable piece of work. Snatch it off the shelf as soon as you get a chance.</blockquote>

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