Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Simon Collins" data-source="post: 2009252" data-attributes="member: 9860">This is not a playtest review.Pocket Grimoire Arcane is the first in the Pocket Grimoire series from Green Ronin Publishing, a collection of spells from various d20 publishers, publishable under the OGL agreement.Pocket Grimoire Arcane comes in at $14.95 for 256 half-size (A5) pages. This comes in at an equivalent of about 11 cents per two pages (equivalent to an A4 page) which is pretty good value in terms of content volume. Font size and margins are fairly good whilst there is some white space only at the end of each alphabetical chapter. There is no art as such (even the front cover is just a fake vellum look). The quality of writing varies from spell to spell but is concise and rules-orientated as the subject matter dictates. The editing seems good, with few spelling/grammatical errors.The OGL is at the beginning of the book and provides an insight into the number of d20 publishers from which this collection is drawn: Atlas Games, Paradigm Concepts, Malhavoc Press, AEG, Thunderhead Games, Sword & Sorcery, and Fantasy Flight Games, as well as all the spells from the Players Handbook and some Green Ronin spells.The actual book begins with spell lists based on all the spells given in the book - not just for wizards, socerers and bards, but also assassins. The spells themselves take up the remainder of the book, apart from three pages of ads at the end. This constitutes over 600 spells.Conclusion:The volume gives a kind of stamp of approval on the spells contained within, since they are theoretically drawn from the best d20 releases so far. However, the major detraction from the book lies in the seemingly positive phrase in the blurb which reads "All the spells have been edited for clarity and revised with all known errata." When 'edited for clarity' can occasionally mean missing out an important part of the spell description and 'all known errata' means that some recent errata may have been missed by the editor or released after the book was sent to print, this makes the book less than perfect. Still, there _have_ been errata updates for spells and most of the spells remain intact, but be wary if you're looking for perfection here.Apart from this factor, your interest in this book will be dependent on your situation. If you are a GM who wants to give your players access to a wider range of spells than the Players Handbook offers, or you are a player whose GM is willing to allow you access to a more extended spell list than found in the PHB, then this book provides a very handy way of doing this. The major benefit is all the spells are in one volume, rather than having to drag several volumes with different spells along in order to check rules mid-game. Obviously if you are content with, or restricted to, the spells from the Players Handbook then this volume has limited use unless you like collecting new spells for the sake of it.I can certainly see the value of a volume like this - I would have been reluctant as a GM to allow extended spell access because of the hassle of bringing all the different books together. I can certainly see future releases of this volume, containing newly released spells, though this in itself would detract slightly from its current uniqueness.</blockquote>

Verification