Internet Arcana by Expeditious Retreat Press
The age of the computer is here!! It has also invaded our little industry and there are a few nice little products out there to make our life easier. Internet Arcana is one of them, and it is a great little gem. Internet Arcana is a pdf of 302 pages. It is designed to be used at the gaming table as it is hyperlinked, major hyperlinks. A hyperlink is the ability to click on a word and then it takes you elsewhere in the document to more information on the word. Here the words are spells and magical items. So, while one is looking through the bard spell list and comes across a spell he is not familiar with, just click on the spell name and one is brought to the spell description fully typed up.
The book starts with an introduction by the authors, Joseph Browning and Suzi Yee. It fully explains what the book is and how it works. Next it goes into an explanation of all the schools of magic. This is a very thorough look at the schools and what they are and do. It goes into the subtypes of the schools as well. Next it goes into arcane and divine magic. How the different types prepare spells, gain new spells, research, and use spell books. It’s very useful to have all this information in none place and very well explained.
Then we get into the meat of the product, the spells and spell lists. Internet Arcana not only has spells from the Players Handbook, but by many of the third party publishers. It lists over four dozen books it referenced in the Open Gaming License. There are a lot of spells here. All of them are in the class lists just like they are presented in the Players Handbook. Then all the spells are alphabetized. Many of the spells include the source they are from, the source company, and magical items it can be used to create. That information is greatly useful, especially the magical items that can be created from the spell. Since magical items are the next section, they are all hyperlinked and an easy click away.
Magical items are done just like in the Dungeon Master’s Guide to make things easy to find and familiar. Unfortunately, the spells in the item descriptions are not hyperlinked back to the spell description. But the sources and source company are hyperlinked to were to find them on the world wide web.
This is a must have book for anyone who uses a computer at the gaming table. Even for people not using the computer during game, this is a very useful resource to just have around. It’s a lot easier to find a spell or item here, then to try to look through dozens of books. Also, since this tells one where to find the spell, it would be very easy to go grab the book to find everything that book has.
