Dark Mistress
First Post
Super Genius Guide to: Rune Staves and Wyrd Wands by Super Genius Games
This product is 7 pages long. It starts with a cover, and intro. (3 pages)
This section explains how the new staves and wands work, why they decided to do this and a side bar about how these wands don't work like normal wands and Staves and how you can make them work like normal ones. The cost shows how much they cost to make, they are limited to adding a +5 but the chart goes up to a cost of a +10 in case you want to add more features to a single wand.
Next we get into the new effects you can give these wands and staves. There is 23 listed effects. They do anything from. (3 pages)
Alluring – You add your bonus to skill checks when used against targets under the effects of “charm” type spells.
Arcing – Changes the damage type to Electric. So fireball does electric dmg instead of fire.
Frosty – ads 1d6 of cold damage when cold based spells are cast using it.
In addition to the new effects the +1-+5 bonus from the stave or wand also come into play. They add a bonus to hit(if one is required), bonus damage to first dice of damage. (examples, 5th level wiz cast fireball would be 5d6+5 if used with a +5 wand, while Magic Missile would be 3 missiles, the first one doing 1d4+1+5, while the other two do 1d4+1) and to all caster checks to over come SR or effectiveness such as with remove disease etc.
It ends with credits and OGL. (1 page)
Closing thoughts. It also has sections on how to add other effects to these wands and staves. Such as a holy staff etc. It gets into the costs and why the choices where made. The enhancements are interesting and for the most part for me this makes staves and wands a lot more interesting than before. Before they was just battery operated spell devices you pulled out now and again to cast something. Now they can effect and change how your magic works, which makes them a lot more interesting.
Now I do have one critic about the book. For damage based spells these are great. For other spells they are still nice because of the new effects. But really the bonuses don't really come into play except on the damage based spells. Except on rare cases, I would have liked to have seen the bonuses have more effect on other spells. To give people more of a reason to want a +5 wyrd wand to use with charm person for example. Yes some of the effects do indeed do this. But it always helps damage spells, regardless of the effect. I would have liked to have seen something like that added for other spells.
I thought about it, I consider saves but discarded it quickly. But perhaps you could add the bonuses to the level of the spell for determining duration? Not sure but something like that would have been nice to add. So really that is my only critic of this book. The art is fair to good, with a mix of black and white and color. The writing, layout and editing was very well done as you would expect from SGG. So what's my rating? I am giving it a 4.5 review, only thing keeping me from giving it a 5 is the one critic I mentioned. I heartily recommend this product.
This product is 7 pages long. It starts with a cover, and intro. (3 pages)
This section explains how the new staves and wands work, why they decided to do this and a side bar about how these wands don't work like normal wands and Staves and how you can make them work like normal ones. The cost shows how much they cost to make, they are limited to adding a +5 but the chart goes up to a cost of a +10 in case you want to add more features to a single wand.
Next we get into the new effects you can give these wands and staves. There is 23 listed effects. They do anything from. (3 pages)
Alluring – You add your bonus to skill checks when used against targets under the effects of “charm” type spells.
Arcing – Changes the damage type to Electric. So fireball does electric dmg instead of fire.
Frosty – ads 1d6 of cold damage when cold based spells are cast using it.
In addition to the new effects the +1-+5 bonus from the stave or wand also come into play. They add a bonus to hit(if one is required), bonus damage to first dice of damage. (examples, 5th level wiz cast fireball would be 5d6+5 if used with a +5 wand, while Magic Missile would be 3 missiles, the first one doing 1d4+1+5, while the other two do 1d4+1) and to all caster checks to over come SR or effectiveness such as with remove disease etc.
It ends with credits and OGL. (1 page)
Closing thoughts. It also has sections on how to add other effects to these wands and staves. Such as a holy staff etc. It gets into the costs and why the choices where made. The enhancements are interesting and for the most part for me this makes staves and wands a lot more interesting than before. Before they was just battery operated spell devices you pulled out now and again to cast something. Now they can effect and change how your magic works, which makes them a lot more interesting.
Now I do have one critic about the book. For damage based spells these are great. For other spells they are still nice because of the new effects. But really the bonuses don't really come into play except on the damage based spells. Except on rare cases, I would have liked to have seen the bonuses have more effect on other spells. To give people more of a reason to want a +5 wyrd wand to use with charm person for example. Yes some of the effects do indeed do this. But it always helps damage spells, regardless of the effect. I would have liked to have seen something like that added for other spells.
I thought about it, I consider saves but discarded it quickly. But perhaps you could add the bonuses to the level of the spell for determining duration? Not sure but something like that would have been nice to add. So really that is my only critic of this book. The art is fair to good, with a mix of black and white and color. The writing, layout and editing was very well done as you would expect from SGG. So what's my rating? I am giving it a 4.5 review, only thing keeping me from giving it a 5 is the one critic I mentioned. I heartily recommend this product.
