While it seems obvious in hindsight, I'm not sure just how much I realized that the Campaign Guide Reference books are supposed to be campaign-specific iterations of the Player's Handbook Reference series.
The major parallel is that these books - or at least the latter two - are focused on a particular class, just like the PHBRs are. Except in this case it's a class specific to that campaign setting, which unlike the broad classes in the PHB, are narrow enough that they need to expand their focus beyond the class and flesh out parts of the campaign world itself in order to flesh out the book (with CGR1 doing nothing but that, since Spelljammer has no class to focus on). In that regard, the CGRs are most similar to
The Complete Barbarian's Handbook and
The Complete Ninja's Handbook.
That's really the main thing I came away with, after settling down to re-read
CGR3 The Complete Sha'ir's Handbook.
That and this book has a white cover, the second-rarest among the leatherette books (since the next two are white also, compared to the super-dark blue covers, which are only found among the previous two).
I picked this book up quite some time ago, long before I bought either
Arabian Adventures or
Land of Fate, the former being the rules book for the Al-Qadim setting (including the basic rules for the sha'ir class) and the latter presenting the flavor text and campaign overview of the setting itself. (Similar to how, in 1E,
Oriental Adventures was rules-focused while
Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms gave us the eponymous setting.)
I mention that because, the same way CGR2 didn't overview the basic information for gladiators, this one has the same lack of basic information on the sha'ir (i.e. their THAC0 progression, saving throw progression, experience tables, etc.). As with the gladiator, I find that to be a missed opportunity to make this book into a one-stop resource if you want to play a sha'ir character, especially since Zakhara, Al-Qadim's geographic region, is part of the Forgotten Realms. That makes it much easier to use what's here if you're playing a mainstream FR game, or a game set in Kara-Tur, or in
Maztica. Heck, or even on another plane; Toril is nowhere near as isolated as Athas, after all.
Of course, that lack of information about the sha'ir is basically emblematic of the entire book...
Now, that may sound like an uncharitable statement, but if it is, it's because I regard this supplement with more than a little frustration. The sha'ir class is one that eschews virtually all of the traditional wizard weaknesses in AD&D 2E. There's no limit on how many spells you can cast per day, no hard limits on what level of spell you can cast, and no maximum number of spells known (side note: while the AD&D 2E PHB had you being able to learn any number of spells once your Intelligence hit 19, this was rolled back - albeit as an optional rule - in the
Wizard's Spell Compendium). It sounded like a dream come true for a budding young powergamer! Of course, at the time I didn't quite realize that the sha'ir balanced this by introducing a lot of
other weaknesses, like how long it took your gen (i.e. elemental genie familiar) to fetch each spell you wanted, or how you could only hold one spell that had been so retrieved at a time, etc.
The reason I didn't know that, of course, was because this book
wasn't really about the sha'ir class much at all. Instead, it was more of a generic arcane spellcaster sourcebook for the Al-Qadim setting, more similar to Birthright's
The Book of Magecraft or Dark Sun's
Defilers and Preservers: The Wizards of Athas than
The Complete Wizard's Handbook. Needless to say, I was quite irked when I found that out.
I can only presume that I either received this as a gift, or bought it sight-unseen, however, because a quick glance at the table of contents would have made that obvious. The book only has four chapters: the first one overviews the basic sha'ir, but also elemental mages and Zakharan sorcerers. The second presents a whole bunch of wizards kits, which - spoiler alert - are the best part of the book due to how
wildly different they are. The third chapter is an overview of wizardly organizations in Zakhara. The final chapter is a modest collection of new spells. So in other words, the sha'ir-specific information is roughly one-third of one-fourth of this book.
To this day, I still can't get over this, simply because it seems to leave so much potential on the cutting room floor. Insofar as the sha'ir class goes, half of what we get here is about the various restrictions on how much a sha'ir's gen can be put to use. The text goes on for quite a bit about how they need to be given time off, must be paid for their work, told that they're doing a good job, etc. I'm already seeing a D&D version of
Office Space in the making here, where the various gens hate the wizards they're working for (especially if one of them is a mage named Lumbergh). Though that might be pretty funny...
...yeah, maybe not.
You can give your gen various permanent upgrades based on various rituals that are here, but these are difficult to pull off (e.g. various factors go into a percentage chance, which unless you're already high level are going to only have small chances of success) and the penalties for failure are...not inconsiderable. I suspect that this is something used more for NPCs than PCs, since then the GM can just rule that the sha'ir in question succeeded at some point in the past, off-camera.
And guess what? That's really it, insofar as the new sha'ir options go. I mean, we get some stuff about free gens, genie prisons, etc. but for the most part there's not much else here specific to the class. The stuff about Zakharan sorcerers (who can use two elements, and don't believe in "opposed" elements) and elemental wizards takes up the rest of the chapter. It's not uninteresting, but it's not exactly what I signed on for.
Neither are the new kits, and I feel bad saying that because as I noted previously, these are the best part of the book. Almost all of them are a departure from the standard D&D wizard in terms of how their magic works, sometimes wildly so. The Ghul Lord kit can only cast a few necromantic spells (since they have to be spells that are
only of the necromancy school), along with several other serious drawbacks, but receive a bunch of negative energy powers to offset that. The Mystic of Nog
permanently gives up spell slots in order to gain (likewise permanent) increases to their ability scores, or other permanent powers. The Clockwork Mage (also called the Mechanician) essentially introduces an entirely new sub-system for creating their clockwork companion, which casts their spells for them. Between things like the sorcerers and the sha'irs, this really makes Al-Qadim look like the setting where arcane spellcasters were at their most avant-garde.
I really couldn't get excited about the various societies presented here, unfortunately. Part of it was that these were firmly grounded in Zakhara to one degree or another, and I went into this (both when I originally read it and now) with an eye toward cherry-picking for cross-campaign shenanigans. As it is, I find it only a little ironic that the discussion of sha'irs in wildspace was limited to CGR1 (where it didn't really talk about how gens are restricted from retrieving spells in the Phlogiston, though it strongly implied it;
Dragon magazine's "Sage Advice" column would later say that gens could get spells there anyway, in a clear sop to preserving the class's playability).
The handful of new spells at the end are okay, but there's nothing too iconic here. More notable is the expanded list of what spells are appropriate for an Al-Qadim campaign, expanding on what's in
Arabian Adventures.
Overall, this isn't a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one that drives home how the CGRs are - like their abbreviation implies - about their respective campaign settings first, and the new classes introduced therein second. Again, that's no real surprise since the first book in this short series has no new class at all, but I still thought that this book would have more meat on its bones when it came to the sha'ir.
If PHBR15 can present us with two different ways to reskin the ninja class - one of which has kits to add mechanical support - why can't this book give us sha'irs by another name, who have imps instead of gens and bind devils instead of genies? Or pixies for familiars and bind fairies? You could keep the basic concept and swap out the specific creature types with comparatively little difficulty, I would think. For a book that seems to go broadly afield in what wizards can do, it's surprisingly tame when it comes to reskinning the class whose name is in the title.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a generic sourcebook about arcane spellcasters in Zakhara, this is a pretty good resource. Or heck, if you just want to introduce some truly weird wizards, regardless of where you set them; most of these kits change things up considerably. As far as send-offs go, this isn't a bad one for the short-lived CGRs, but it could have been better.
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