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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Archer" data-source="post: 2011106" data-attributes="member: 2950">This book is the crunchy bits to end all crunchy bits. If you only buy one expansion book, this is the one to get. Like it says in the introduction, you could play for a lifetime and never be able to get through everything in this book.Like all Wizards products, the book has very nice art and a hardcover is always my preference.The book has something for every campaign. Unlike most other expansion books it isn't full of more feats and prestige classes. What it is full of are amazing ideas and concepts. Each chapter offers many ways to change your campaign world. The book explores many different ways to approach fantasy gaming.My complaint about other products is overpowered and underpowered feats and classes. One kind every min-maxer wants to take and the other never see play.This book has the solution to many of the problems that have plagued expanded race selection and multi-classing. It has options to buy off your ECL over levels to get rid of the inherent unbalance of ECL at low and high levels. The concept of bloodlines is an elegant refinement to the concept of racial classes.The book is divided into 6 main sections: Races, Classes, Building Characters, Adventuring, Magic and Campaigns.Races covers environments variants which I didn't find particularly exciting, reducing ECL which I thought was long overdue, bloodlines which are very interesting way of distributing bonuses over 20 levels at the cost of your 12th, 6th and 3rd level depending on the power of the bloodline. Your bloodline levels count towards all your spellcasting classes but provide no other benefit that the bloodline ability (often +1 to a stat) of that level. Minor bloodlines have 5 boosts, Intermediate have 10 and Major bloodlines have an ability at all 20 levels. Bloodlines for every dragon, giant and all the "staple" races are provided. Racial paragon classes make you more of whatever race you are. You get increased racial abilities and +2 to your main attribute over 3 levelsClasses covers all sorts of variant classes. There are many different kinds of barbarians, paladins, specialist wizards, divine spontaneous casters and so on. I particularly liked the battle sorceror option. The sorceror gains cleric HP and BAB at the cost of 1 spell per day and 1 spell known for each level plus the ability to wear light armor with no arcane spell failure chance. Variant classes take away much of the need for prestige classes which I think is a good thing. There is a high powered campaign option called gestalt classes, you get to increase your level in 2 classes everytime you advance taking the most favorable BAB, HP and Saves and all abilities of both classes. The possibilites of 40 class levels is quite vast and yet the system doesn't collapse quite like it does at Epic levels.Building Characters was not one of my favorite sections but I did like the concept of using weapon groups. You can focus and specialize in a whole group per feat and you can become familiar with exotic weapons in all of your weapons groups instead of with one weapon at a time. There are 17 groups and fighters have 4 groups at 1st level in addition to all basic weapons. This is more like 2nd edition with weapon proficiencies than 3rd with familiarity with vast amounts of weapons but you get more flexibility when you invest feats in weapons. There is an option to reduce all classes to 3 classes, the warrior, the expert and the spellcaster. You pick and choose class abilities to generate a character without using prestige classes or having to multiclass.Adventuring covers using Star Wars defense bonus, wound and vitality points, armor as damage reduction, an abstract systems of taking hits which reduce your fortitude save by 1 until you fail a save by more than 10 at which point your are disabled which is a lot like staggered. The concept of non-instant healing is quite intriguing. Instead of curing damage, heal spells convert lethal damage to non-lethal damage which heals at 24x the rate of lethal damage. The stops one from springing from death's door to perfect health in under a minute.Magic is full of special items and more special weapon and armor properties than you can shake a stick at. There are all sorts of metamagic varients, spell point systems.Campaigns covers things like honor, reputation and other stats seen in other d20 products like Wheel of Time, Star Wars and Call of Cthulu.All in all, a must buy (or download) for any serious player and like the blurb says, everything is open content so saavy 3rd party publishers will make use of all these elegant rules systems. Many of these concepts have been attempted before but invariable they were flawed or clunky plus incompatible with established products. This book manages to put everything together in a modular format that meshes better than any product to date.</blockquote>

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