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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009822" data-attributes="member: 18387">The Epic level handbook is a 319 pages hardcover. This book is written to help your characters to go past level 20. The lay out is in the familiar WOTC core book. The artwork is exactly what I aspect from the creators of Magic the Gathering, pretty good. It has six chapters. Chapter one: Characters, skills and feats.This chapter provides the hard rules for going past level 20. The system is that you basically get at every odd level an epic attack bonus and every even level an epic bonus on your saves.  As they explain, a system with more attacks or strong and weak attack rolls wouldn't have hold out. The saving throw would automatically fail or succeed depending on if it were a weak or strong save, because they would differ more then 20.The other cornerstone of the system are epic feats. For example the bard will gain only extra feat every three levels. If you fear it will make him another fighter don't worry. There are feats that will give him new or expand his bardic music. Since there are ten such feats and there are other interesting feats, your bard should be able to level for a while.The problem is that some old abilities are expanded. A barbarian gets an extra rage every four levels. Since the barbarian is still only able to rage once every encounter, at some point the extra rage becomes useless. There is only a set number of challenging encounters a party can handle every day. Luckily they realized it with the paladin; he gets as many feats as the bard, and still gets more remove disease each week.WOTC has also updated their prestige classes into epic careers. They haven't forgotten the psionic classes either. Good job!What would a book be without the prestige classes, for some persons reason enough to buy any book. In that philosophy WOTC has written epic prestige classes.  The first is the agent retriever, a guy that retrieves objects. Then there is a guy that infiltrates a guy that is bodyguard, a guy that starts religions in countries, a combat monster and a cop. I belief this is the weak spot of the chapter, I'll explain below.They have also written additional epic DCs for existing skills. Some are good, climbing like a fly on the ceiling DC 100, others are goofed up, standing on your horse: ride DC 40. I must assume every circus needs an epic acrobat to do this trick.I give this chapters two and a halve star. The system works and does the job. The reason why I don't give any more is that they have ignored a few issues. Take the fighter. As written in the D&D books it's a frontline fighter. When such a fighter reaches 21 level, he is an extremely elite soldier and a veteran that can write the book on how to wage war. What would any society do with such a guy, they would get him in as an advisor. He would get a lot of skills that made him a master of waging war, not the limited skill list of the PHB. This guy would get intimidate or diplomacy to motivate the troops. Bluff for all kinds of misleading tactics, and knowledge about most battles. In short it would be more realistic to have the fighter evolve into a warmaster. And that would have been a real epic class, instead of the agent retriever.For the cleric the problem is even worse, at some point the cleric's power will begin to rival that of his god. What happens then. Will he pray "oh not so mighty Pelor who is weaker then me. No, the guy will go and look to become a god himself, a god is best helped by an allied god and many gods have cleric levels (see deity and demigods). Time for another epic class: The seeker of divinity.Unfortunately the book ignores these problems.Chapter two: Epic spellsWhat do you think makes for a good epic spell. A rabbit out of the hat, a ball of fire that burns a  20ft radius, a spell that conjures a dragon, a spell that puts a country in a year long winter or a spell that fills the granaries in a country. If you rightfully belief that the latter two were it, I have a disappointment.This chapter lets spellcasters build their own spells. Sounds cool, looks cool but is flawed. You start with a seed, for example energy. This seed will let you do 10d6 damage to an 20ft radius, with a reflex save like a level ten spell. You can design a spell with a bigger save, more damage, a better roll against spell resistance or greater area. You can even add another seed that animates the corpses of your victims into zombies. Before you think "great, that makes up for not being able to turn my country's summer season into a blizard", hold on. the only thing that limits you is your spellcraft skill. This baby has a cap equal to your level level+3. Your potential targets will get more hitdice, better spell resistance and better saves. You can improve the damage by 1D6 for a +2 on the development’s DC, a +1 saving throw DC costs for another +2 development DC. In short at higher levels a big gap will start to form.You can have the spell damage yourself, or pay XP to make it easier to develop and cast, but that won't solve it. Even worse the XP burning will make sure that you will limp even more slowly behind, and the development of epic spells costs XP. The only way to keep up is to take the epic feat "Improved spell capacity" as many times as possible. That baby will give an extra spell slot up to one level higher then your previously highest slot. Use heighten spell and go for save or you're out spells. The cool frostball that turns your victims into zombies simply won't cut it. But in case of emergency, we still have timestop and mordenkainen's disjunction.Pity, this chapter could have pushed the book into the four star region, now it keeps it down.Chapter three: Running an epic gameThis chapter starts to explain how special epic characters are. You are encouraged to let them explore major events in the multiverse. The chapter goes on with explaining how to upgrade your dungeons, luckily they do hint your dungeons should change. They also give the advice that you should fast-forward something, like a wilderness. Your players should easily walk trough it. They also note what I belief is the spot for epic characters: the planes. They also introduce some optional rules, nothing really special. The epic campaign is the next topic. The main message here is that you should be prepared for some spells. The best part of the chapter is a hundred epic adventure ideas, there are some really cool ones.This chapter has some good parts and some part any GM should have already figured out.Chapter four: Epic magic itemsThis chapter does exactly what it says.Chapter five: MonstersThe chapters give your Epic characters new enemies.  A very cool idea was abominations, or what happens when gods make mistakes. Or the genius loci, when the landscape itself animates. Such enemies do well in an epic campaign. The chapter does unfortunately also feature some critter that lack epic feeling. If you would downgrade the stats of a prismasaurus or ruin swarm, they will make great normal campaign monsters, the only epic thing about them is their stats.I find this chapter about average, there is some good stuff and there are creatures that clearly say "yes, I'm not original but the writers thought they had to put a creature of this type in the book".Chapter six: An epic settingThis chapter start with a couple of epic organizations. One again the writers repeat the mistake they made in chapter one. Putting epic before a chapter and boosting the stats does not make something epic. We are getting an assassin guild (you'll never find those outside an epic campaign), A society that seeks magical devices (ok, that's not that bad), a society in which members claim divine ancestry. A mage guild, a group of mercenaries, a planar cartographic society (yes, the first one that is truly epic), a group that secretly tries to govern others and a police force. Then they introduce the city of union. Although they describe the city, they fail to answer one question, why, apart from the stats and society that it houses. I could easily downgrade the stat into a non epic one, without losing taste. To add shame to injury on page 248 in the sidebar, they address the really interesting cities, the ones the have written epic all over them. My conclusionChapter one is the most important one of the book and it works reasonably well. Therefor the book does what it says and earns two stars. However the book keeps lacking things. chapter one could have been more innovative. Chapter two could have been great but isn't, chapter six could have been much more interesting, any city in the Manuel of the planes would have made a great epic setting. Sure if you want to keep dungeon crawling after twentieth level, go ahead. But epic should mean you are just that, epic. Not crawling through a dungeon killing bigger goblins with bigger stats for more XP and treasure. Half the book says it should be that way and the other half says bigger dungeons and bigger critters. A lost opportunity.</blockquote>

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