Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2009318" data-attributes="member: 172">Secret College of NecromancySecret College of Necromancy is the second in Green Ronin's Arcana series of books dealing with magic in the d20 system. Secret College of Necromancy provides details for necromancy as it exists in many fantasy settings: a dark magical art that defies the barrier between life and death.A First LookSecret College of Necromancy is a 112 page perfect-bound softcover book priced at $19.95 US.The cover of the book is a bizarre painting by rk post depicting a cowled man surrounded by strange and hideous creatures.The interior is black and white. The interior illustrations vary in quality. Some are decent, but some are done in a smudgy, dark style that does not appeal to me, and some portraits look like charactures with exaggerated features. The interior cartography is crisp and detailed, but lacks a legend.The interior body text is compact, though there is a space between paragraphs. The header text is conservatively sized, but the scrawl-like font used is a little hard to read.A Deeper LookSecret College of Necromancy starts by introducing two new core classes concerned with necromancy and undeath: the necromancer and the death knight. The classes are somewhat unfortunately titled, as a wizard specializing in necromancy is referred to as a "necromancer" in the d20 system, and the death knight already exists in the consciousness of the d20 fantasy market as a classic undead monster (which was reintroduced in D&D 3e in a Dragon magazine article and will soon be featured in the Monster Manual II.)The book doesn't make clear what the relationship is between the necromancer in this book and the necromancy specialist in the core rules. To confuse the issue worse, some feats and spells that are supposedly unique to the necromancer herein are listed in the stat block of a sample necromancy specialist later in the book.The necromancer class as presented here is an arcane spellcaster that casts spells like a wizard. However, the necromancer has a different spell list with a much stronger focus on necromancy (including some spells that are strictly divine spells in the PHB), but lacks many of the more utilitarian spells afforded to sorcerers and wizards. The necromancer also has a number of necromancy-related abilities, such as the ability to craft a necromantic (undead or construct) familiar, ability to control undead like a cleric, and various necromantic touch attacks.The necromancer's spell slot advancement is similar to a wizard's, except that they receive a slot with zero spells a level earlier than a wizard, potentially giving them access to higher level spells earlier if their intelligence is high enough. The "spells per day" progression also does not stop at four spells of each level as a wizard's spell progression does. A necromancer can eventually cast 7 spells of a given level. Some of this is doubtlessly in compensation for the necromancer's narrower spell list, but it still may be a bit generous.The death knight is a warrior devoted to the forces of death. Unlike the classic D&D death knight, this death knight is alive, or at least they start out that way. The death knight is a good fighter, receives bonus feats, elemental resistances, and other abilities. They also eventually learn to cast spells from the necromancer spell list, up to 4th level.Both the death knight and necromancer strike me as a little powerful. Further, they have nonstandard save and attack progressions for no good reason that I can discern.After the classes are a number of new feats and skills. All of the new skills are craft, knowledge, and profession skills related to necromancy, such as craft: embalming, knowledge: anatomy, and profession: graverobber.The feats include Cheat Death (allows a single heal check to recover a character who has dropped below –10 hp), Coup de Grace (allows Coup de Grace as a free action), Dying Blow (allows the character to continue to fight after falling below 0 hp), Revenant (the character returns from the dead to avenge themselves if slain), and Steely Gaze (adds to intimidate checks and roll to rebuke of command undead). Many of these feats strike me as exceptionally potent, and GMs should use care integrating them into a campaign.The second chapter covers the spell list of the necromancer and death knight, and new spells and magic items. Some of the spells in the spell list are from the Oriental Adventures and Tome and Blood books, which Green Ronin apparently asked special permission to list.The new spells provide a sinister addition to the arsenal of the necromancer. The spells are suitably evil, introducing new spell types such as dark pact (the caster makes a pact with dark forces in exchange for power) and the mortal curse (powerful curses cast with the caster's dying breath.)In addition to the dark pacts and mortal curses, the spells offer a variety of effects that wither away or ward against the living, and aid or create undead creatures. The most impressive among these are perhaps the "legion" spells. These spells start at 7th level for creatures like skeletons, and range up to 9th level for creatures like wights and mummies. Each one of these spells summons 1d6 creatures of the given type per caster level. Further, these undead creatures are permanent and have double the normal HD. While these are thematically great, they strike me as extremely powerful compared to other summoning and undead creation spells of the same level. Perhaps these spells need to be assigned an XP cost, reworked as a ritual-type spell, and/or the duration of the servants needs to be made less than permanent.The remainder of the spells and dark magic chapter outlines mundane items used by necromancers as well as magic items of a somewhat grisly nature. For example, floating eyeballs are actual enchanted eyeballs that can be used as an arcane eye.The third chapter, Graverobbing and the Undead is a curious mix. The first part is a discussion of graverobbing and other necromantic practices, which actually includes notes on historical practices of this nature. This information can be used for source material to provide details should PCs stumble upon such activities.The chapter then turns to a more rules-oriented treatise on undead, discussing categories of undead, different types of undead, and means of creating them. This section includes a special selection of feats available only to undead. These feats afford undead creatures abilities such as regeneration, or the ability to freely detach and reattach body parts.The fourth chapter introduces a number of new creatures that a necromancer might create or deal with. Examples include the death angel (an outsider serving the goddess of undeath), necromantic constructs, and new undead creatures like the flayed man and ghost hound.The last three chapters introduce the Secret College of Necromancy, including details such as history, day-to-day activities, maps of the college's secret abodes, and personalities of the college (including complete statistic writeups.) The secret college is a nefarious organization complete with everything you need to add it to your campaign.ConclusionThe Secret College of Necromancy has some excellent ideas for necromancy in the campaign. The spells, creatures, and the secret college itself have the foreboding feel that necromancy should have.Unfortunately, the book suffers from a bit of inexpert rules implementation. The necromancer and death knight class seem too powerful, and there are many unnecessary breaks with d20 system conventions. Further, many of the spells seem much more powerful than spells of the same level in the core rules, and many don't offer SR and/or saves in places where they logically would. If you are merely out to create fearsome necromancers, this book will certainly get the job done. But if you are sensitive to balance issues, this book may take a lot of GM intervention to integrate into the game.-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

Verification