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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2010905" data-attributes="member: 172">Redhurst: Academy of MagicRedhurst: Academy of Magic is the inaugural product of the new design house, Human Head Studios. The book details a somewhat "Hogsworth"-like institution of learning regarding the magical arts.Redhurst: Academy of Magic is written by Matt Forbeck, Seth Johnson, Timothy S. Gerritsen, David Gulisano, and Paul Tutcher.The book is written using 3.5 standards.A First LookFormat: 160 page full color hardcover book; $29.99. The book is printed in landscape format; the spine is at the bottom of the picture you see at the right.Art: The cover of the book is dark brown with a faux leather look. The cover illustration by Shaun Absher and Nichol Norman is a very nice picture of a reclining lady wizard with a glowing object levitating above her palm.The interior is full color with a light parchment-tone background. The interior is packed with quality art by Kyle Anderson, Tim Bowman, Steven Daniele, Jeff DeWitt, Mike Dutton, Larry Elmore, David Gulisano, Shane Gurno, Ted Halsted, Bret Hawkins, Jason Hill, Greg Marshall, Matt Mitchell, Nichol Norman, Jim Pavelec, Randy Redetske, Rebecca Rettenmund, Steven Sanders, Shawn Sharp, James Sumwalt, and Eli Quinn. Most of the art is color, though there are some ink drawings. Most of the artwork is appropriate to the topic and very nice done and detail. There are a few pieces that look a bit sub-par compared to others in the book, and a couple of pieces sort of seem an ill fit to the topic of the book (such as one illo that looks like it comes from a Frazetta Conan painting) or the alleged subject (such as one illo of an elven wizard that looks nothing like an elf).Cartography is by Jeff Lahren. The maps are visually striking. The end leafs are used to depict the outside view and three levels of the Redhurst campus, and sections of the map are cropped and blown up in the "specific locations" section of the book.Layout: The book uses a two column format with red writing in the sidebars (see below). The body text font is moderate sized, though the lines and paragraphs are fairly closely spaced. Game mechanics/OGC material are offset in attractive parchment-bordered shaded sidebars. An all mechanical section in the back has smaller type and has four columns.A Deeper LookRedhurst: Academy of Magic presents itself as a handbook for new students attending the academy. With the exception of sidebars with mechanics, it follows this facade throughout the book, right down to the foreword by Margaret Weis. This supposed student's handbook introduces the hypothetical erstwhile students to various details of academy life, such as traditions, rules and regulations, the various sections of the school, staff members, and more.The illusion of the book does not stop there, however. The story seems to be that we hapless customers have fallen upon a copy of the book that has some notes in the margin scrawled (or rather, printed in a rather handwriting looking font) in the margin. These observations provide some cynical (or even paranoid) insights written from the standpoint of a nameless villain who obviously has something against Redhurst, and his notes are addressed to some co-conspirator who intends to bring the academy down.Amidst all this banter, you will find a variety of important pieces of information for the purposes of using Redhurst as a setting, such as the rules that prevail at the school, living arrangements, graduation requirements, extracurricular activities the characters might find themselves involved with (such as the magical capture the flag variant spellflag.A section describing the staff to the hypothetical student readers provides the background of a number of significant NPCs at Redhurst. Each NPC also has a sidebar with statistics. The statistics appear rigorously done, and many take advantage of new features in the revised system rules, such as the archmage, eldritch knight, and mystic theurge prestige classes.Redhurst's classes are split into different schools, each corresponding to the schools of magic as they exist in the d20 System. In the staff section, major staff members of each of these schools is described, and later in the book, map details and details of course that a character might expect are called out, such as "scribing scrolls", "a first look at second sight", "basic enchantments" and so forth.Each school also has a number of "signature spells" that are described in the main text, and are defined either in the sidebar or the appendix in game terms. Many of these spells are rather more utilitarian and less combat oriented than many spells you see in d20 System products.Though many mechanical tidbits exist in sidebars throughout the book, the bulk of the mechanics text is gathered in 6 pages in the back, including game details about being a student at Redhurst as well as new feats, magic items, spells, and two new prestige classes.The first thing that bugged me about game requirements was that it requires all students to have an intelligence of 16 or higher. This seemed a bit high to me for two main reasons. First, if your GM happens to prefer the standard stat block, no student PC could qualify, since 15 is the best score in a standard array. Second, it seems that this would minimize the latitude for variety if you want to play a game in which all PCs are students at Redhurst. Not everyone wants to be Hermoine.A few other variants exist to highlight the nature of the school. PC wizards at Redhurst are not required to choose a specialty immediately, being able to put off selecting a specialization (if any) until 2nd level and allowing it to change at third level. Sound like anyone else's college experience?Another major variant to make such a game possible with the d20 System rule is the use of merits and demerits. Merits replace experience points while being educated at Redhurst. Each course the character completes is worth 100 merits, though some extracirricular activities are worth merits too. Of course, you can get demerits too, reducing your total. This mechanism also goes a long way towards realizing the Harry Potter feel the authors were going for, and creates a mechanism to remove monster bashing from the equation where Redhurst is involved.The prestige classes herein are the Blue Oracle and the Circle of Protection (or Protector of the Circle, depending upon whether you believe the header of the text or the table.) The former is sort of a divination specialist, and the latter is handy at abjuration. The blue oracle seems designed to correct the weakening of scrying that the 3.5 rules revision wrought by inflicting negative penalties on the saves of the target of scrying. Both seem engineered to make powerful spells of the concerned schools available earlier, possibly to slant the emphasis of magic at Redhurst away from destructive spells.One feature of the book everyone is talking about that I personally don't see much value in is the inclusion of details on several cities from settings by various d20 System publishers, such as Arcanis, Kalamar, Freeport, Battle City (from Altas' Seven Cities, Nyambe, Loerem (of Sovereign Stone), and Hallowfaust (of the Scarred Lands setting.) Most of these entries take up a good page each, including a illustration cribbed from the sourcebook in question. The premise behind these entries is that Redhurst regularly "translocates" between each of these locations, which is an approach I found a little over the top.The entries describe each of these locales and defines the relationship between the locals and Redhurst. This is great if you are running one of those settings, but even if you are running one, unless you are tolerant of the "crossworlds" concept, you are left with several pages of useless material. If you use the two most popular choices for d20 settings (i.e., homebrew and Forgotten Realms), all of them are useless. I think that while this section has some use, each city deserved a much smaller space in the book.ConclusionOverall, Redhurst is a very strong book, with a strong Harry Potter-esque feel to it. It does a good job of fitting the campaign model to the system in a minimal amount of space. The bulk of the book is "fluff", but well written fluff. Finally, the presentation is very nice and the rules material is top notch.Overall Grade: A--Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

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