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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2011402" data-attributes="member: 1129">The Complete Divine is a full color 192-page hardcover sourcebook that deals with divine magic for all classes. In doing so, it updates a lot of older material found in various sourcebooks and Dragon magazines to the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Broken into seven chapters, the book starts off with some brief ideas about why do you serve the gods and what do you serve. A small section that briefly covers worshipping specific deities, pantheons and forces. It jumps into new core classes including the favored soul, shugenja and spirit shaman. None of these are brand new classes and the favored soul is actually from a 3.5 product. Color me silly, but why update one class from the Miniatures Handbook and not another, the healer, why you’re at it? That class would have a little easier time being added to a standard campaign than either the shugenja or the spirit shaman.The favored soul is to the cleric what the sorcerer is to the mage. A spellcaster with innate power that can only learn a limited number of spells but can cast them more frequently and doesn’t have to memorize her spells. They gain skill with the deity’s favorite weapon, starting with weapon focus and moving up to weapon specialization. A strong class overall but unchanged from its first appearance.I was a little worried when I saw shugenja as I thought that the Complete Warrior fairly butchered the Samurai as a core class. Thankfully, they left the version from Oriental Adventurers fairly unchanged. Alchemy and Scry for example are gone, but skill points, alignment, hit dice, and other class features, are virtually unchanged. Unfortunately, it’s also the first time I notice the sloppy editing with a reference to page XX. Despite the editing, the shugenja is a good example of a divine spellcaster with an elemental focus.The spirit shaman is not the same as the shaman from Oriental Adventurers. Instead, it’s a divine spellcaster that knows a limited number of spells but can change them on a daily basis. They have spirit guides that are similar to familiars and have abilities that focus on the spirit shaman’s relationship to the spirits including the ability to detect them or affect them with a ghost touch special ability.The section on prestige classes does a good job of breaking them up into various groups ranging from good guys/bad guys, strong spellcasting to stealthy. I find the chart useful because sometimes I don’t know quite what I want, but have a general idea. The chart helps narrow the search. Still, I almost wish that there were a table with a one to two line description of each PrC with requirements. That would let me create NPCs even quicker. Some specific PrCs are updated here and made generic like the Black Flame Zealot. Thankfully, they include an adaptation section that notes some appropriate deities, in this case Pyremius and Kossuth. Each PrC include background, adaptation, requirements, class skills, class features and an NPC already generated. To me, too many of these PrCs have individual spell lists like the Divine Crusader or the Holy Liberator. This makes them very Paladin like in spell progression and if that’s the idea, perhaps a chapter discussing various ways to bring a paladin like feel, that of a cleric-fighter, to other alignments and causes, would’ve been better than all of these spells per day tables.Overall, there is a good mix of PrCs here. My personal favorites are those that help augment the cleric just a tad in the fighting department, usually in exchange for spellcasting levels. Take the warpriest for example, a master of diplomacy who is always ready for war. They have reduced spellcasting ability, gaining spells every other level, but have proficiency with all simple and martial weapons, as well as bonus domains and bonus spells that effect a large number of people like mass cure light wounds and heroes feast. Chapter three, supplemental rules, includes new feats and epic-level divine rules in addition to options for other classes. The Divine Feats are updated here. Those feats require you to expend a turning attempt in order to use them. This often makes them more powerful than a standard feat but limits their use, as they aren’t innate like other feats. Wild feats are also updated and often follow the pattern of divine feats, requiring the user to give up a wild shape ability to activate. Some of the divine feats allow you to augment spells with metamagic feats. Others allow you to heal elementals or grant allies fast healing. The wild feats have a broad range of abilities ranging from growing wings to gaining claws. Fortunately, not all feats fall into those two camps. There are new metamagic feats, some of these updated or compiled from previous sources like Consecrate and Corrupt Spell, the former giving a spell the good descriptor, the latter the devil descriptor. One feat I can see some mages taking is arcane disciple, allowing you to select a domain available to clerics of the deity that allows you to cast those domain spells. You use your wisdom to determine if you can cast the spell, as well as determining the DC of the spell and you can only prepare one of those domain spells per spell level, but it’s still a great ability.Another variant, Faith Feats, allows those true believers to take a feat and gain Faith Points. Faith Points are similar to action points in that they can be used to do things beyond the normal range of a character’s abilities. For example, Pious Defense allows you to spend a faith point and when an attack would reduce you to 0 or fewer hit points, you can spend a faith point to take half damage. Now if the attack is great enough to bring you to some horrible negative, that’s not going to mean much, but it’s a 50 point attack that’s going to take you to –10, then shaving 25 points off of that attack is a good thing that leaves you still standing.My problem with Faith Points is that they exist in a vacuum. What about Action points, an option in Unearthed Arcana, and a standard in other d20 settings? No advice on combing the two. Would such a character be too powerful? Too in charge of his own destiny without dice? I don’t know. I’ll have to playtest and report.The epic material follows similar material we’ve seen before with advice on how to make prestige classes into epic prestige classes and includes a sample, the Epic Holy Liberator. Epic Feats help round out the section including bonus domains and even the ability to strike incorporeal creatures normally.Chapter four, magic items, covers a wide range of devices. This includes relics, devices that require you to sacrifice spell slots (or have the True Believer feat) and be a certain level. These items are often powerful, but not obscenely so. Their limited nature insures that you can use one or two of them as plot devices without undue fear of a player suddenly picking up the Chromatic Rod and turning it on the world.Other items include staffs. Many of these are similar to the staff of the magi or a staff of power with different abilities. For example, the Greater Wanton has cloak of chaos, unholy aura, and word of chaos. Not bad eh? The wide variety of relics prevents the chapter from being boring but their utility is limited. More items wold’ve benefited this section.Chapter five augments the standard deities in a campaign and most, if not all of these, are Greyhawk natives.  The deity descriptions include portfolios, domains, cleric training, quests, prayers, temples, rites, relics and herald and allies. The core deities are listed, along with four new ones, Bahamut (platinum dragon), Kurtulmak (kobolds), Lolth (drow) and Tiamat (chromatic dragon). The new bits of information are useful and can add a little more depth to the standard worshipper and provides the GM a quick guide to the various relics introduced in this book. For example, under Heironeous, you can see that he has the following items, Helm of the purple plume and sword of virtue beyond reproach.For me, much more interesting, just because they awaken older memories, are the other Greyhawk deities including individuals like Incabulos, lord of plagues and famine and Pyremius, the god of poisons, assassins and fire. Some of these are old Suel gods that I haven’t seen in a long, long time. Unfortunately, WoTC bails out on these deities, providing only rank, a few sentences of information, portfolio and domains. Others like Zuoken, are familiar due to their relatively new nature from the Expanded Psionics Handbook.Chapter six, the Divine World, is a little odd in that it offers numerous pieces of information on where your soul goes after you die. Information that is probably better left to the Manual of the Planes or the upcoming player resource on the planes. More useful is the section on organized religion in the d&d campaign. This includes information on theocracies, global churches and sects and schisms. It provides some brief notes on their orign and use, structure, important NPCs, adventure seeds and what role a PC can have in such an organization.The closing chapter introduces new spells. They are broken down by class and level and include numerous new domains. Unfortunately, in spell selection at least, the cleric gets the shaft with a handful of new high level spells, while the druid gets five new ninth level spells alone. Some of these spells, like Bolts of Bedevilment, are domain spells only. Others like Domination domain, are updated from other 3.5 books. Now I don’t mind it when something from a 3.0 book is updated but there are too many 3.5 materials updated in this book.And that is probably one of my problems with the book. It takes material that some may not have, like spells and domains from the Draconomicon, as well as core classes and other details from the Miniatures handbook, and combines that with older material from Defenders of the Faith and Masters of the Wild and it doesn’t come out as a unified whole. Some of this is due to the poor editing. I expect a little bit more from WoTC than I do an average publisher but there are numerous (page XX) over the book and other typos that indicate that this shouldn’t have been the final draft. The art ranges from fantastic to below average, and once again, for WoTC, that’s not a good thing. When a company can hire Ron Spencer do to a full page painting of an elf like female surrounded by various animals in the wild and Wyane Reynolds to do a full page painting of Tiamat in the lower realms, why do we have these smoking boots by Wayne Reynolds, an old illustration, joining D. Crabapple’s terrible illustration of a bogun, that’s also seen print before? Why can Green Ronin and Malhavok have books with consistently good art, all the way through, and strong editing in them and WoTC can’t? No reason at all.There is a lot of information here that can be used by any fan of a divine spellcaster. The prestige classes and feats are a good collection of crunch. The maps for the various churches, despite having no accompanying write up, are good filler material to be used in a pinch. I’m not too crazy about the NPCs but its good to have if needed in a flash. The book makes efforts to be useful, but fails just as often as it succeeds due to poor editing and reprinting too much modern material. The book is a fair price, coming in at $29.95 for almost 200 full color pages in hardcover. Hopefully we’ll see some errata and official updates soon. I’d like to stop getting ribbed by my players about Tharizdun’s favorite weapon being “check toee”. “How much damage does that do? What’s the critical threat on that? Can I get a masterwork check toee?”</blockquote>

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