Metablades: Warriors of Mind and Magic [Expanded Edition]

[genjitsugaming]

Many wizards and warriors now learn to utilize both combative and magical skills, and a few, like the arcane archer, have begun to blend magic and combat into a single synergistic art. The skills and secrets in this volume will help you, too, learn what can be done to make your magical fighter or martial wizard into a distinctive, potent character with unique combinations of powers.

This expanded edition updates the psionic content for the rules presented in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, as well as presenting epic-level content and new feats, spells and other goodies!

• 45 new feats including spell-powered feats for permanent arcane benefits, as well as martial arts styles for the magically inclined.
• 13 new prestige classes for creating eldritch warriors.
• More than 45 new spells and powers.
• Over 50 new enchanted items designed for usefulness in combat.</LI>
• Full support for psionic campaigns including psychic feats, classes, powers and items.
• New epic-level material, including 16 epic feats.
• Six sample characters to illustrate how the material can be used, suitable for inclusion in campaigns of many power levels.
• Updated for maximum compatibility with both revisions of the 3rd Edition, including the expanded psionics rules.

Metablades Expanded Edition is the key to making your character more than simply a fighter/wizard or a barbarian/druid. As a guide to distinctive character creation, it is highly useful to both players and game masters.
This guidebook requires the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, 3rd Edition, published by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Players and game masters who wish to use the psionics material herein will also need the Expanded Psionics Handbook.

 

[Crothian]

Metablades

A little bit of magic or psionic power can go a long way. As most people have noticed within the game magic is the ultimate power in the game and psionics are not so bad either. They easily pass by the power of the fighters even those with the best equipment. There are always exceptions but this is not about those. Metablades is about adding a bit of power to those that pursue both the magic and physical skill.

Metablades is a PDF by Genjitsu Gaming. This is the expanded version of the book they released that includes psionic and epic rules. The book is sixty two pages in length and comes in both landscape and portrait formats. There is little art in the books and the layout has a lot of extra white spaces. The book is book marked and not hard to read.

The book starts with a discussion of all the base core classes and how they can be used to create that martial spell caster. It has some good advice for multi classing and goes beyond the bits that most everyone knows actually going into detail on what specifically spell wise makes the martial classes work the best. And while I am mostly referring to magic they also cover psionics as well. A side bar in this section is a good bit about ability and spell combinations. Like the use of blink and area effect spells since blink protects one from some of the damage. One idea that I really like is the use of grabble to pin a person and then placing an immovable rod on them trapping them.

Feats as we all know area familiar and common tool in many d20 products. Met Blades presents feats, but many of them are actually a bit more creative and different from the run of the mill feats that are seen in most books. For instance there is Flock of Blades that uses ones knowledge of mirror image to make simultaneous attacks that deal non lethal damage. There are also feats that are a bit more powerful then standard feats but they require an additional cost. Guardian Angel grants a bonus to AC and all saves, but also takes the place of a second level divine spell. There are some powerful feats like Psionic Spring Attack that allows the character to intermix a full move and a full round attack. Some of them are pure combat like Searing Shot which allows the caster to spend arcane spell slots to deal more damage with a missile attack. Along with the many feats there are Styles. These are like the martial art Styles presented in Oriental Adventure except even more detailed. There are different levels to each one so multiple powers can be gained by acquiring the many prerequisites to the different levels of abilities.

After feat prestige classes have also become very common. The ones here try to meld powers with martial ability to different degrees of success. The Affinitist is not one of the best here. The class requires a base attack bonus and some good combat feats, but gains the base attack bonus of a wizard which does not seem to jive with the intention of the class. The Fortress Mage is an interesting one allowing it the chance to cast a few defensive spells without expending a spell slot. The Mental Marksman is a psionic who continually gets better with the ranged weapons. For the most part while the prestige classes are nice and different there really was not any that really amazed me.

The book also provides a variety of new spells, psionic powers, and magical items and weapons. There is a section for epic levels of the classes here as well as new epic feats. That is a bonus since epic feats seem to be an area that very few products support. Lastly are some sample NPCs. The NPCs are pretty good and the stat blocks are complete yet do not take up much space. I tire of NPCs like in the Complete books that seem to take up a page or so by themselves.

Overall the book does a nice job of combining some classes and giving some cool options for people who do. The feats are the high light of the book but the other options are well done and can easily be used. The writers did a nice job on this using many areas of the game like psionics and epic rules to make their creations the best they can be.