Components and Foci: The Materials of Magic
By Adrian Bott
Mongoose Publishing Product MGP 1020
$14.95, 64 pages
Components and Foci: The Materials of Magic is the 20th book in the popular "Encyclopaedia Arcane/Encyclopaedia Divine" line (although only two of those have focused on divine magic; looks like the arcane stuff is way more popular). It looks like the line may be coming to an end shortly, because a few of the most recent have been focused not on particular schools of magic or new magic systems but rather some of the peripheral stuff that goes along with spellcasting. Recently there was a volume on Tomes and Libraries; this latest one is about spell components. Well, okay, and also about foci, but as even the author admits foci kind of got the short end of the stick in this book, as all but two of the book's 64 pages are focused (no pun intended) on material components.
The book is laid out as follows:
- Introduction: Explaining the "Encyclopaedia Arcane" line and what this book sets out to accomplish
- Components and Foci - An Overview: The Five Principles of material components: linkage, transference, essence, mythic resonance, and sacrifice; plus two new skills - Knowledge (correspondences) and Arcane Composition
- The Essential Material Components: Miniatures and models, metals, minerals, gemstones, incenses, and animal and monster parts
- Buying and Selling Components: Botanicas (material component shops), and what else they might be expected to sell there
- Substitutions and Augmentations: Handling substitutions (replacing a standard material component with another trying to get the same spell effect) and augmentations (purposely using an improved material component in an attempt to increase the spell's power), plus resultant side effects
- The Spells and Their Components: The bulk of the book: 34 pages of the spells of the Player's Handbook involving material components, giving details of each spell's material components, which of the Five Principals they exemplify, and possible substitutions, augmentations, and side effects
- Foci and Their Functions: Pushing foci (getting more power from a spell at the risk of "burning out" your focus) and bonded foci (more expensive foci that are attuned to one caster and one specific spell, which boost the power of that one spell)
- Additional Spells: Two new spells related to material components, mould morbid matter (altering a small amount of dead matter for possible use as a material component) and Crampion's congealed carbuncle (extracting the life force from a creature to create valuable gemstones for use as material components)
- Help for Games Masters: How to add these rules into an existing campaign
- Designer's Notes: Adrian's thoughts on why he wrote this book
Despite the over-emphasis on components (as opposed to foci), the cover painting (by Jon Hodgson) depicts a spellcaster using a focus in the form of an golden disk. The coloring is predominantly shades of browns and tans, making the blue-green of the spell energy arcing from the wizard's fingertips to the focus and then fanning out from it in a wide arc stand out all the more. Detail is good: there are tiny arcane carvings along the edge of the focus, and the wizard's hands in particular are very well done. If I had to point out a flaw, I'd say the wizard's nose looks somehow a little "off," but I really can't pinpoint it further than that.
The interior art is 23 black-and-white illustrations by five different artists, six of the pictures having previously appeared in
The Quintessential Sorcerer. As with the
Tomes and Libraries book, many of the illustrations appearing here are rather "generic magic" in nature and not really focused on the subject at hand, although there is a nice picture of a cluttered botanica (is there any other kind?) on page 20. I also really liked Rich Longmore's depiction of a young mage casting a
protection from arrows spell on page 56 - he uses a very distinctive style of magic, all wiggly runes. I also noticed that all but one of the interior illustrations have "shadows" along two sides of their boxed exteriors, making it look as if they're slightly raised from the page. This ties in nicely with the "shadow effect" they use on the words of the chapter titles.
As for the written content, Adrian Bott does a wonderful job with this book. I'll be the first to admit that the subject matter isn't going to be for everyone; after all, the d20 "default" is that an arcane spellcaster buys a bag of spell components and is then assumed to have whatever he needs to cast his spells, unless the component in question is rather expensive (like, say, the dust from a crushed diamond worth at least 100 gp). This default assumption makes it much easier to get on with the game without having to worry about how much bat guano your wizard PC has on hand (for those
fireball spells). Nobody likes the extra paperwork that goes with optional material component rules like the ones Adrian's providing in this book, but he makes a good case that it's worth the effort (and for those who don't agree, he also provides a "meet-you-halfway" rule on page 61, using the tedious bookkeeping methods only for augmenting spells and otherwise assuming that components of negligible value are automatically in your spell pouch).
Adrian makes an excellent point on page 4: "It is worth remembering that 'arcane' and 'occult' are both synonyms for 'incomprehensible.'" He had a Herculean task in front of him when he undertook this book: figuring out why the spell components listed for the spells in the
Player's Handbook are what they are. I really like the Five Principles he came up with (linkage, transference, essence, mythic resonance, and sacrifice), especially "mythic resonance" - it sounds so much more professional than "bad puns the game designers couldn't resist." Here we're talking about such things as throwing away "a handful of clay, crystal, glass or mineral spheres" to cast a
feeblemind spell (causing the victim to "lose his marbles") and using a pinch of sesame seeds for a
passwall spell (due to the phrase "Open Sesame" in the Ali Baba tales). Adrian does a great job figuring out these obscure reasons (ever wonder why you need a shaving of licorice root to cast a
haste spell? - licorice is a natural laxative, "hastening" the activity of the bowels...), but I think I have one he missed: he identifies the copper piece used in a
detect thoughts spell as falling under the linkage principle (copper being the metal of conductivity, transmission, and sending), but I think the phrase "a penny for your thoughts" is also a player. In any case, even if you never use the rules in
Components and Foci, I think most people will enjoy just reading through the "Spells and Their Components" chapter that makes up the majority of the book.
Adrian also takes advantage of the opportunity to add a few of his own into the mix. Since he has to come up with possible substitutions and augmentations for each standard spell using material components, he suggests using a blond wig for the
feeblemind spell (insert blonde joke here) and references a "dead parrot" as a possible material component for the
hideous laughter spell (Adrian's obviously a Monty Python fan - but then, who isn't?). He also got in a Scotty reference (from the original Star Trek series): "Pushing foci...has a lot in common with engineering - 'The augury tokens will nae take any more o' this punishment!'"
Adrian writes in a straightforward, easily understood style, although he occasionally throws in a word or phrase I'm unfamiliar with - I'm not sure if this is because I'm not British (assuming Adrian is; just because he writes for Mongoose doesn't mean that he lives in the UK) or my vocabulary is not sufficiently broad. What, I am forced to wonder (since my dictionaries are unhelpful in these cases), do the words "spilth" (as in "the fossilized spilth of dragons"), "horripulations" (as in "the casting time of
identify is enough to give many low-level spellcasters the horripulations"), and "dandelion clock" (as in "a child's windmill or dandelion clock") mean? I'm guessing "urine," "a sense of dread," and "some wind-based children's toy," respectively.
I was pleased to see a significantly smaller number of typos and punctuation gaffes in this book - apparently the Mongoose proofreaders and editors (Andrew Wilson was the proofreader for this book; oddly, no editor is listed in the credits) are buckling down. I was pleased to not find my first error until page 19, and even then, the small handful of errors that made their way into publication are trivial things like double periods at the end of a sentence (three occurrences), ending a sentence with a comma instead of a period, and flipping the "ie" to "ei" in "hieracosphinx." There was only one phrase which threw me: on page 49 (discussing a side effect of altering the
rope trick spell), we are told "Having made some mistakes in his dimensional he caster is intermittently confused about the direction in which he is traveling." Um, huh?
There were a few things that might have made this a better product. The "Spells and Their Components" chapter had the spells alphabetized (definitely a good thing!), but several of the spells are lumped together, possibly making it difficult to find, say,
create greater undead. Fortunately, in that case, you don't have too far to look (it's lumped in with
create undead, right there on the same page as you'd be looking for
create greater undead), but the listing for
acid fog mentions that the listing also applies to
solid fog. Unfortunately, this is just a remark in the
acid fog section; there is no
solid fog listing, not even just a "(see
acid fog)," which would have been helpful. Also, I noticed that the items in the "Essential Material Components" chapter aren't alphabetized, but fortunately there are few of them anyway and it shouldn't be too difficult to find "copper" listed after "iron" and before "mercury." Finally, it's never a good idea to refer to "Chapter 4" when the chapters are not numbered. "See the 'Buying and Selling Components' section" would have been a better way to go about it.
On the nitpicking side of things: Adrian suggests "the hair of a dark naga" as a possible augmentation component for the
nondetection spell. While he's on the right track - dark nagas have an innate nondetection ability (called "guarded thoughts") - they have no hair. I'll give Adrian the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "scale of a dark naga" instead.
A final observation: the paper in this book seems thinner than that I've seen in other "Encyclopaedia Arcane" volumes, and I noticed that both inside covers are used for advertising again this time. I assume these are cost-cutting methods (is the "Printed in China" on the table of contents page also a cost-cutting measure?), and if they're keeping the price from going beyond the standard $14.95, I guess I'm all for them.
Still and all, I found this to be an excellent resource, one well worth the read and one that will probably see use in my campaign, especially since I can take the "meet you halfway" approach and only get finicky with the bookkeeping when it comes to spell augmentations. Given the rather dry subject (and given that most DMs and players probably never even bother with material components in the first place), Adrian did an excellent job coming up with an interesting - and useful - approach to the subject.
