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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009825" data-attributes="member: 18387">This review will be short and to the point.Smoke and Mirrors is a 64 page softcover guide to the school of Illusionism. The book splits the school up into two distinct entities: The Orthodox, containing elements of figments, glamours, patterns and phantasms (the traditionel illusions one might say) and the unorthodox, focusing on shadow magic.The two largest chapters give details and rules for these two schools of illusions, new skill uses, feats and spells. It is also worth noting that there are rules for changing the core class "Illusionist" into one or the other. Personally, I dislike the idea of splitting the school up, since it already is a sub-school of magic, but if you like to have many options and be very specialized, I'm sure that the rules presented herein are just the thing for you.For my sake, I tossed out the idea of orthodox and unorthodox as soon as I had read it, and decided just to use some of the rules, feats, skill uses and spells in the book. Many of the new skill uses are quite good and give flavour to the class, whereas most of the feats in my oppinion where a bit on the "bleh" side of things. Only three feats will make it into any of my games, and most inportant of these was the feats that allowed an illusionist to seize control over other casters illusions. It will make for some interesting mage-duels to say the least! A few of the feats are clearly overpowered, but I guess if you like powergaming and use many non-core books, they fit in nicely. Personally, I am a gamer who likes low-magic, non-munchkin games, so take it for what you will.The spells are the best thing about this book, because with quite a few of them, they get better with levels, and you can create many permanent illusions and contraptions with the rules in the book. It's also nice to see the Wraithform spell back in the game, as well as new spells such as a paralysation cone, shadow gate magics and new landscape altering spells.Other spells don't really appeal to me, because they are either way too powerful (like the Phantasmal Force spells, which acts a bit like Divine Power for the cleric, but the caster doesn't even have to be in direct combat when attacking his foes with his new and improved fighters BAB as well as great damage increases). Some of the spells are also missing some explanations, like what happens if a character makes a save with these Phantasmal Force spells, do you save each round and so forth...Finally, some spells just seem utterly pointless, like Shadow Beasts an 8th level spell creating a 50% real 30hp steed that can deal 1d8+6 points of damage. It gains abilities as the caster gains levels, like the ability to walk on sandy dunes, water, and even air, but as an 8th level spell with a casting time of i hour and duration 1 hour/level, no wizards in their right minds would ever use it. As a conclusion about the spells, I'd say about half of them fit well into the rules presented by the core books, and the rest are either too mundane or too overpowered.Then there's the prestige classes, and I hate every last one of the six presented in the book. My argumentation is this, and it's a personal viewpoint: Whenever a prestige class gives the same benefits as the core class and MUCH more, it is unbalanced because no caster would ever opt NOT to take it... All the prestige classes in Smoke and Mirrors gives the character normal spell progression, the bonus feats usually reserved for the Wizard core class, and then a whole bunch of extra abilities in the form of additional feats, spell uses and more. In my campaign, these would be outlawed :-(One good thing I would like to adopt from the prestige classes is the "spontaneous casting" rules made available to some of them. It could be converted into feats, so there would be Spontaneous Glamour, Figment, Pattern, Phantasm or Shadow.. Five different feats, that enables the caster to "drop" a prepared spell in order to cast an illusion of the same level or lower that he/she knows. It would certainly make the subschools stand out a bit more, and with a little tweaking the same rules could be converted to the other specialised wizard classes.The last pages of the book lists some magic items some designer notes and 3 pages of tables summarising the rules that I didn't really find helpful since no text accompanied the tables, and the only thing they contain are the spell and feat lists.All in all, I had expected much more from this book, but I don't regret having it, since the feat ideas are great and many of the spells are good and innovative too.Final notes: This review is based on my views, and I am a person who tends to distance myself from powergaming and munchkinism. Although I know there are products with far more power in them out there, I still rate this book as being pretty high up there in terms of overpowered classes, abilities and so forth. If you like Tome & Blood and what have you, this book won't let you down.</blockquote>

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