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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krug" data-source="post: 2009490" data-attributes="member: 2141">I don't know why character books are so rare, particularly when compared to Monster books. Possibly because they're harder to do, and to do well. With a monster you can slap a couple limbs and abilities together and voila; new monster! It's just cannon fodder anyway, so why bother with motivations, personality and background? Malhavoc Press has taken up the challenge of the character book with Skreyn's Register, the first of two works featuring spellcasters. Cabal focuses on Arcane Spellcasters, while the The Faithful, the next book in the series, will cover divine spellcasters.Cabal is a 36 page PDF and is available at $5 from RPGnow.com. Each of the 25 spellcasters gets a page, and there's 5 pages worth of new feats, spells and magic items. Besides the stat block, each character gets an illustration, a brief history writeup, a personality description, how to use the spellcaster in your campaign and tactics. There's just enough information to work on, without going into too much detail. The higher level the character, the bigger the stat block, and consequently the lesser the other information. For example, in the case of Zursha, a Fleshbound Vampire Conjuror 10, the non-stat stuff has shrunk considerably, and her tactics are limited to just one sentence. There's quite a few standout characters, which range from CR3 to 13, particularly amongst the monstrous humanoid races. Kevis the Kobold Sorcerer is in exile and looking for a tribe to adopt her. Gaush the Bugbear is an 'accidental transmuter', stumbling upon his magic skills after picking up a wizard's spellbook, who has to teach his fellow bugbears to wait until he's done casting the fireball before charging into combat. When Xaven the Transmuter casts a fly spell, "intangible moth's wings sprout from her back." Ironically, because of the smaller stat blocks for lower-powered characters, they get more attention and are thus better-developed.The 'crunchy' stuff, featuring a plethora of new magic items and spells, is good and well-thought out. I can see many mages clamoring after Lesser Invisibility, a first level version of Invisibility.The Register has raised the bar for character books. There's a diverse range of characters in here just waiting to be used in your campaign. The writing is top-notch, the illustrations are well-done and the whole design and layout is up to Malhavoc's usual high standards. However, I hope that there's more flexibility to the one-page limit on characters that Malhavoc has self-imposed. It seems to penalize higher level and templated casters, since they would have obviously bigger stat blocks and leave less space for the 'cream'. I would have also liked to see more multiclassed spellcasters, as well as spellcasters utilising Prestige Classes from Malhavoc's own books, such as the Diplomancer from BoEMII.I'll definitely purchase the next book in the series, and hoping that Registers featuring characters from non-spellcasting backgrounds willl be published.</blockquote>

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