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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009974" data-attributes="member: 18387">Heroes of High Favor elves is the third book in the series, Heroes of High Favor Dwarves and Heroes of High Favor Half-orcs  being books one and two respectively. Heroes of High Favor Elves is also the longest book in the series and follows the same outline as the last two books. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of elves. First is the Introduction, followed by a chapter on skills and feats. The largest part of the book deals with Prestige classes, followed by ideas on roleplaying elves. The last section is the appendix which deals with spell creation.Chapter one starts of with a small introduction describing that this book like the previous two uses the races favored class. The next section talks about the elves long life span and how that affects the ways elves act; following that is a small amount of information about the elves favored class the wizard. Also included is some general information on the prestige classes in this book and how half-elves relate to them. The last section in this chapter is what is open gaming content.Chapter two is broken up into three sections starting of with general feats, followed by arcane feats and ending with skills. General feats include Favored Terrain which grants a +1 morale bonus to all skill checks while in your favored terrain. Pulse of the Wilds is another good feat to have it allows you to receive a bonus to your spot check equal to the CR of any hostile creature anytime the area within 30 feet. Arcane feats add a few very interesting feats (Spell Wards) besides the new metamagic feats. There are four types of spell wards, Counterspell, Turning, Absorption and Immunity. Spell wards allow you to use a spell slot in order to prepare a spell into a slot for later use as a defense. If you want to keep fireball memorized as a spell ward counterspell than any time the fireball spell is cast at you, not your general area your spell ward will go of and act as a counterspell. The next section is skills, no new skills are included just some extras for normal skills. Arcane conductor is used with Craft (Armorsmithing) and allows you to craft armor taking 5% off of the spell failure percentage.Chapter three lost arcane is broken up into two sections. First is specialist wizards followed up by ley lines and power nexuses. The specialist wizard section has some interesting options allowing a specialist to gain even greater powers for specializing in a school, these benefits range from gaining more spells to lowering the cost of metamagic feats for spells from their favored school. Ley lines and Nexuses are a new way to add a little extra to the elves. Ley lines are magical line that run across the world, nexuses are a where ley line energy is centered (standing stones like Stonehenge etc.) By attaching themselves to a ley line or nexus spellcasters can overcharge their spells, adding a + 1 to their caster level for a ley line to the ability to use a metamagic feat to affect a spell not memorized as one.  Ley lines and Nexuses are an interesting feature to use but they require a little work to be fully integrated into an existing campaign.Chapter four is the largest part of the book dealing with prestige classes. This chapter is a full 40 pages long with four pages for each prestige class.  Each one of the core classes are represented here multiclassed with the elves favored class the wizard. Two of the PRCs deal specifically with ley line and nexuses. The problem I have with these is that there are no options for using them without the new material. The rest of the PRCs are not to powerful but a lot of the abilities gained from the PRC could be gained from one or more of the core classes.  The Arcanist which is a (Wizard-Rogue) gives you sneak attack, evasion and uncanny dodge in the first few levels while this is good, to take this class you would need at least two levels of rogue which would already give you evasion. Now if you took another level of rogue you would get uncanny dodge. The other PRC I had a little problem with is the Outcast (Sorcerer-Wizard). To me this makes no sense while it is true you would have a lot more lower level spells by the time you had enough power the creatures you fought would require more powerful spells. That is not to say that there is no benefits to this class, there is by taking a few levels of sorcerer you could choose spells that you would not normally memorize freeing up the slots for more combat or defensive spells. For instance a first level sorcerer knows two 1st level spells and can cast three 1st level spells, now if you knew say identify and expeditious retreat you could use your wizard spell slots for other spells. Chapter five is two pages of ideas for roleplaying elves. There are four archetypes which are stereotypical descriptions of the elves and a small section on immortality.The appendix is the most interesting part of the book dealing with creating new spells. This section alone is worth the buying the book, while it is not a perfect spell design system it does offer the player to create just about any spell they wish. To create the spell they have broken down each school into templates that list different parts of the spell, by adding and subtracting “steps” you can get a general level for a spell. Steps are the main parts of spells, Range, Duration etc. Once all the steps have been totaled you are basically done, all that is left is to describe the spell and research it and of course hope your GM allows it. While making simple spells are by far the easiest you can combine different schools templates, this is a little harder but can be done.Overall this book is a good buy even if you don’t like elves; the spell design system alone will be very useful for any wizard. I also like that although they added around fifteen pages the price still stayed the same.  The art is getting better but still is not the best and there were a few typos but I am looking forward to the next book in the series.</blockquote>

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