Spellbound: The Enchanter's Handbook

[IDA_Guy]

Welcome to
Charm School!

Being the good-looking spellcaster
isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

The evokers laugh behind your back when your hold person is less effective than their fireball. The conjurers snicker when their summoned help kicks the stuffing out of the poor saps you’ve charmed. The clerics begin preaching when their inspiration magic matches anything you can do with spell or song. And the necromancers are just mean.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. With a few tactics, and a few new options, enchanters of all stripes can get back into the game. The first in the Arcane Academy line of supplements, Spellbound, the Enchanter’s Handbook has everything you need to stand side-by-side with the great enchanters of mythology. The tricks that once only Circe had access to can now be learned by a new generation of enchanters.

Within Spellbound you’ll find:

• Basic tactics for enchanters, including advise on picking spells and targets.
• Easy and balanced rules to allow two classes that ought to be natural enchanters - bards and sorcerers - to specialize in enchantments (becoming heralds and courtiers).
• New edges enchanters can take in place of a familiar or bardic music abilities, including Dashing, Retinue, and Silver Tongued.
• A few feats, and more than two dozen new spells - including new members of the most versatile of enchantment spells: power words and the related power signs.

Available from e23, RPGNow, and DriveThruRPG.

 

[Mythiasis]

A strong resource for the consumate Enchanter.

Review of Spellbound: The Enchanter's Handbook

IDA's short books may be small, but hey are full of crunchy. Spellbound: The
Enchanter's Handbook is no exception. With new feats and spells for Enchantment
Specialized classes, the Enchanter is now a force to be reckoned with.

As a gamemaster, this is definately a strong resource for campaign play. With a
mid-level NPC enchanter and feats such as Alluring and spells like Change Alignment, a
villainous spellcaster can take over a small town all to do his bidding. While a
player enchanter may make use of feats like Feedback spell to know whether her target
made or failed it's saving throw; and spells like Sway to prevent an angry mob from
rampaging through town.

Hero or Villian, targets with poor Will saves are nothing but puppets to an enchanter.
And for those with a moderate to strong Will save, there are some new Power Word
spells which have various effects based on the hit points and/or level of your target.

Spellbound: The Enchanter's Handbook also contains spells known as Power Signs. These
work very much like Power Words, but their effects vary based on the total Will Save
of the target.

Spellbound: The Enchanter's Handbook is a strong resource for Bards, Sorcerers and
Wizards; especially those specialized in enchantments.

 

[Owen K.C. Stephens]

Thank you veyr much for the review. I'm glad you found the product of interest. Feedback of all types is always extremely helpful.

Owen K.C. Stephens

 

[John Cooper]

SPELLBOUND - THE ENCHANTER'S HANDBOOK
By Owen K.C. Stephens
ID Adventures product number IDA 50009
14-page PDF, $3.50

Spellbound - The Enchanter's Handbook is apparently the first in a new series of PDFs that will examine the various schools of arcane magic.

The cover, as I've learned is common with PDFs (especially those without art budgets), consists of nothing but a swirl of colors, in this case, predominantly blues, magenta, and a blob of yellowish-tan in the center. I really don't know what more I can say about it, other than it's replicated as the back cover as well (although there the central part is lightened so you can read the back-cover text better).

There is no interior artwork, unless you count the two little swirly shapes that flank the page numbers. (Personally, I don't.) Still, you'll no doubt be purchasing a 14-page PDF expecting decent text, not artwork, so I'm not going to ding them for the lack of artwork, not in a PDF of this size.

However, I am going to ding them - hard - for the overall shoddiness of the presentation of the written material. I'm a fan of Owen K. C. Stephens' work - he used to contribute some really cool articles to Dragon in the past, and I know he wrote at least one standalone gaming print product (Bastards and Bloodlines, which I admit to not having read) - but this is not his strongest work, and the sloppy presentation does little to improve it. Before I go into my specific complaints, let me first describe the actual content of the PDF.

Page 1 is actually the cover, which I've already described. Page 2 is a combination credits page and table of contents. Pages 3-5 contain the brief introduction, sections on the basics of enchantment spells and suggested tactics for enchanters, a suggestion to allow spontaneous casters (bards and sorcerers) to specialize in enchantment magic like specialist wizards can, and 5 "enchanting edges" - special abilities that an enchantment-specialized arcane spellcaster can gain if he gives up his ability to summon a familiar or one of his bardic abilities. The rest of page 5 is dedicated to 6 new feats for enchanters. Page 6 and a bit of page 7 are the spell lists, and then pages 7-12 contain 28 new spells (all but one of them of the enchantment school of magic; the oddball is a divination spell that enchanters find useful to test whether a command will be useful or not on a given subject). Page 13 is the OGL stuff, and page 14 is the back cover.

A lot of the new material is pretty interesting. The "basics" and "tactics" sections are all fairly basic, but might be of some use to somebody who's never given a whole lot of thought as to how to run an enchantment-focused character before. Owen's scheme for allowing bards and sorcerers to "specialize" in enchantments seems like a pretty decent mechanic, and doesn't raise any alarm bells as far as game balance goes. The feats are okay; I liked the new metamagic feats the best of the bunch, with "Renew Spell" leading the pack. (This feat allows you to "tack on" the duration of a spell's effect by casting it again before the original spell runs out, without allowing the victim a new saving throw; fortunately, there's an upper limit as to how long you can do this so it doesn't get too far out of hand.)

The spells, though - the bulk of the PDF - were a bit of a disappointment. A full 9 of the 28 are new power word spells, and for the most part it seems like Owen went through the "Condition Summary" section on pages 300-301 of the DMG to see what hadn't already been covered. Nothing very interesting or innovative in that batch. Then, he devised a slight variant to the power word spells (which only require a verbal component) and came up with the power sign spells, which only require a somatic component. Okay, so far so good; these spells eat up another 7 spells. However, while I like the concept of a somatic-equivalent version of the power word spells, I really dislike the mechanic Owen came up with to use with them. Correctly noting that power word spells are targeted against the potential victim's current hit point total (power word kill, for example, only works against a victim with up to 100 hit points at the time of casting), Owen decided that power sign spells would be targeted against a potential victim's Will save modifier. So we end up with spells such as power sign, dead, which automatically kills one targeted creature with a Will save of +6 or less. (The victim gets no saving throw.) If he had a Will save of +7 or +8, he drops immediately to -1 hp (again, with no save allowed); a Will save of +9 to +12 means he drops to 0 hp and is disabled.

Now think about that for a moment. Granted, power sign, dead is a 9th-level spell, but then so is power word kill, and at least it has a hit point cap to keep things in line. With power sign, dead, as written, if you're a 20th-level fighter with a Wisdom score of 10 or less, you're instantly dead if an enemy casts this spell on you. It doesn't matter how many hit points you have or how high your Constitution is; you're dead, no save, end of story. Now, I'm not up on my Epic Level Rules, but assuming the Will save progression continues on at a normal pace, you could be an epic level fighter (with a below-average Wisdom score) and be wiped out by this spell without any chance of surviving. Maybe it's just me, but that seems messed up. I think Owen could have spent a little more time thinking this concept through a bit more.

Anyway, of the remaining 12 spells (we've already accounted for 9 power words and 7 power signs), several more are just variants of existing enchantment spells - charm humanoid, mass geas/quest, eclipse (a dominate person spell with an on/off switch), plague charm (a communicable charm person) - which leaves only a handful of the 28 spells to break any new ground.

So, what was all that about the shoddiness of the presentation, you ask? Here's a brief list of the worst offenses:

• There are only three chapters in this PDF. Of those three, only two appear correctly in the Table of Contents. You'd think that with only three chapters they'd be able to get them right....
  
• Several of the spells are given incorrect names in the spell lists. (Is it charm humanoids, as per the spell list, or charm humanoid, as per the spell description? Is it power sign, stillness, as per the spell list, or power sign, still, as per the spell description?)
  
• Worse yet, the actual spell levels of several of the spells are up in question. The change alignment spell is listed under the 3rd-level bard spells, but the spell's description lists is as "Brd 4." Which is it? Is power sign, stillness (or is it power sign, still?) a 2nd-level sorcerer/wizard spell, as it's listed in the spell lists, or is it a 1st-level sorcerer/wizard spell, as the spell description states?
  
• The spell lists are incomplete. According to the spell descriptions, power word, paralyze is a 5th-level sorcerer/wizard spell, but it doesn't show up in the 5th-level sorcerer/wizard spell list. Likewise, mass geas/quest is both a 9th-level cleric spell and a 9th-level sorcerer/wizard spell, but there is no cleric spell list provided at all. Somebody needed to scrub those spell lists a bit harder!
  
• According to the spell list, greater charm person is a 3rd-level bard spell. Sadly, the spell does not appear anywhere in the PDF!
  
• A couple of the spells weren't even alphabetized correctly. Again, there are only 28 spells, how much time would it have taken to make sure they were placed in the correct order?
  
• There seems to be complete confusion between the proper usage of "its" and "it's" and between "effect" and "affect" on the part of the author and/or the editor.
  
• Perhaps the most amusing one: on the credits page, the person listed as the one responsible for editing and layout is one "Lj Stephens." Now, unless this is some affectation (like "e. e. cummings" who refused to be capitalized), I'm pretty sure that should be either "L. J. Stephens" or maybe even "LJ Stephens." It's pretty telling when the editor doesn't even catch an error in his/her own name!

I think I'm coming down harder on this product because it was only 14 pages long than I would have had it been a meatier work. With only 14 pages (and really, only about 11 pages of actual written content), this vast number of errors should not have made it to the "finished product."

I had really hoped to like Spellbound - The Enchanter's Handbook, based on the strength of Owen K.C. Stephens' name and reputation. Sadly, I really can't recommend this PDF for those who are interested in expanding the possibilities of enchantment magic. (And while I seldom recommend other books in a review, I will point out that Mongoose's Enchantment: Fire in the Mind, while a much more expensive product than this one - but then it's a 64-page print product, compared to a 14-page PDF - does a much better job of handling the subject.) I really have to give this PDF a rating of "2 (Poor)," and hope that future handbooks in the series will have a bit more thought (and a lot more polishing) put into them.

 

[Owen K.C. Stephens]

Thanks for the review! I'm sorry you're disappointed in the work itself, hopefully you'll like the next one better.

I will comment that "Lj" is correct. It's the editor's signature, and has been for years. Much as I don't put a space between my two middle initials (it's "K.C." not "K. C."), Lj is correct, rather than LJ or L.J.

As for power sign, dead, the fact it can kill an average 20th level fighter does not, in my opinion, make it unbalanced. Consider that power word, kill will do the same thing to a 20th level sorcerer or wizard with an average Con, or even one with a 13 Con unless he's gotten max hit points for 20 levels. Worse, pw, kill works on your current hit points, which drop as the fight progresses. Ps, dead works off your Will bonus which is much less likely to drop. Overall I'd say the power sign is less powerful than the power word.

Obviously the book does have some editorial issues, which is unfortunate. We'll try to get a revised version out after GenCon.

 

[John Cooper]

Owen, thanks for chiming in. Sorry about putting that space between the "K." and the "C." of your middle initials; I edited the review to fix that up. Likewise, please pass on my apology to "Lj" for assuming that "Lj" was a mistake. (Although, in my defense, I think that would be a pretty easy mistake for most people to make! That's certainly a new one to me.)

I guess I can kind of see your point about the merits of the power sign spells vs. the power word spells, but I still think the power sign mechanism is a bit wonky. Maybe it's just that hit point total seems like a better "fit" for an insta-kill spell than a Will save. It also seems odd to me to have a Will save play a part in a spell that doesn't allow a save of any kind. Oh well, maybe the concept will grow on me.

In any case, I look forward to seeing future books in this series. Will you be writing them all?

 

[Owen K.C. Stephens]

I'll certainly be writing the next book in the series, though it's not the next book on the schedule. We haven't planned out the whole series yet, so it's possible someone else will have a turn later on as well.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Spellbound
The Enchanter’s Handbook
14 pages
18 pages RTF
PDF

Owen K.C. Stephens tries to update the enchanter. Not as popular as the necromancer or as powerful as the evoker, the enchanter is a wizard specialty that the author feels needs some love. He’s not alone as Mongoose already tried to give the enchanter’s a boost with one of their Encylopedia Arcana books and others have done similar material.

The PDF is black and white with no art. The outer borders are large and the two-column format is crushed together making it readable, but not easy on the eyes. The cover and rear cover are some art design that looks painful. Thankfully it has a printer friendly version without the off purple color. Page numbers are on the inner border in the middle of the page. For those who care about open content, I couldn’t find a declaration of such, probably my old eyes. The back notes that it has an RTF file for copying any of the completely open game content, which makes me wonder if the whole product is open.

While the book has an introduction and some feats, the majority of the book is devoted to new spells. Some of these options in the introduction are quite interesting though and deserve a second or even third look. For example, a bard or sorcerer can gain a +3 effective caster level with enchantment spells and a –2 effective caster level with spells from other schools. Owen also allows a caster to exchange his familiar for an “edge”. A good thing as the familiar is not everyone’s cup of tea.

These edges range from dashing and magnetic, to silver tongued. Each one offers slightly different benefits. For example, the silver tongued individuals gain their class levels to any bluff, diplomacy or sleight of hand checks when attempting to bend the truth. Those with the retinue edge gain leadership at first level.

The new spells are broken up by class, and level. For wizards, they also provide a breakdown of school. Not hard to do when the spells are all about the enchantments. Spells range from 1st level, missing out on the good old zero level spells, to 9th level. Spells range in utility from the ultimate power of mass quest, to intriguing spells like plague charm, where the person suffering the charm effect causes those touched to possibly be charmed.

The spells provide a good mix of material and allow an enchanter to take on more of his traditional role and in general, be more useful. Some of the spells are even effective on the field of combat like the 6rth level power word deafen or the 4th level spell confidence that provides a bonus to skill checks and armor class.


A couple of things prevent the book from receiving a higher rating. The first is no art. I can understand that it’s a PDF and all for a low price, but as prices continue to go up and page counts continue to increase, to effectively retain attention, the books need to compete with print products on more levels. The second is the layout. While effective, the columns are forced too close together and there’s plenty of space on the outer edge. The third is the bookmarks. They are generic and don’t breakup anything by say, spell level or provide any utility outside of going to one of three areas. The printer friendly version is also a little odd since it’s in essence the regular version, just with out the color cover. Hardly a reason to have a printer friendly version.

For those who have access to Pyramid, an online magazine, some of the material is noted as coming from different issues of d20 Weekly, the short lived Steve Jackson Games d20 webzine. You might want to take a crack at those archives of Owen’s to get an idea of his writing styles if you’re not familiar with him.

 

[Owen K.C. Stephens]

Thanks for the review!

The back cover is where we mention the book is completely open game content. I suppose we should have mentioned it other places too, but yes the text is 100% open.

And if anyone really wants to see my writing style (and hasn't picked up a Star Wars or EverQuest book I've worked on, or the Advanced Gamemaster's Guide, Bastards and Bloodlines, d20 Cyberscape, or any of the dozens of articles and aventures I have on the WotC website) I'm happy to put a few more examples out there.

For example, here's Plague Charm, from Spellbound. It's still 100% open content.

Plague Charm Enchantment (Charm)[Mind-Affecting]
Level: Brd 6, Sor/Wiz 7
Casting Time: 10 minutes
Range: Unlimited
Target: One or more creatures touched
Duration: 1 day/level

This powerful spell functions as charm person, except as
noted above and with the following differences. Any
creature who fails his save against the plague charm is
now a carrier, able to infect other humanoids with the same
enchantment. Any humanoid who remains in physical
contact with a carrier for ten minutes or more must make a
Will save (same DC as the original spell save) or also be
charmed and become a carrier. Any target charmed by
plague charm treats both the original caster and the target
that infected him as close friends (as described in charm
person), though obviously if a charmed target never
encounters the original caster, this attitude is irrelevant.

Once a carrier fails to infect a target he is no longer a
carrier (though he is still charmed), and any creature who
saves against this spell cannot be affected by any other
carrier infected by the same casting. At the end of the spell’s
duration all affected targets are free of the spell’s effect,
regardless of how long they have been affected.