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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9775748" data-attributes="member: 8461">I picked up Orphaned Bookworm Productions' PF1 supplement <a href="https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/539935/Read-Magic--Alternative-Spells-I?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Read Magic - Alternative Spells I</a> (affiliate link), and while I didn't dislike it, I nevertheless found myself a touch disappointed.Rather than bury the lede, I'll come out and say what my issue was here: a significant number of these spells (more than half) were attack spells which changed the type of damage dealt, e.g. switching electricity damage for acid damage. While there were still several spells which were more innovative in how they changed things up, the plethora of "hurts you with sound instead of fire (or something similar)"-style spells was enough to leave me cold.To be clear, I like variations on a familiar theme. I'm a big fan of Owen K.C. Stephens' four-part Genius Guide to 110 Spell Variants series of supplements, to say nothing of Rite Publishing's 101 Variant Monsters, 20 Variant Foes - Worgs and Winter Wolves, and #30 Variant Dragons, Necromancers of the Northwest's Exotic Encounters series, and numerous others. Small twists oftentimes merit big rewards.But just switching around damage types is, to put it bluntly, the least imaginative way of doing that. That kind of alteration has been around for decades at this point, going all the way back to when Ernie Gygax had his character, Tenser, create the cone of cold spell because he wanted a variation of fireball that <a href="https://thebedrockblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/interview-benoist-poire.html" target="_blank">wouldn't destroy treasure</a>. As far as d20 System-derived games go, there are myriad iterations of metamagic feats that let you change the damage type that energy-damage-dealing spells use. It's the simplest degree of alteration, and the least imaginative.For a far more minor nitpick, I wish that these spells had indicated which spells they were variants of, if only to ease making side-by-side comparisons. While in most cases it was obvious, there were a few where I wasn't one hundred percent certain what spells was being riffed on.I say all of this with some minor trepidation, since too much innovation can be just as hard to take in as too little (for a case study on this, see Orphaned Bookworm Productions' other recent release, Contact Other Plane - The Evalvarith I (Player Part 1), which goes far out of its way to make a PC race that's nothing like a "human in a funny hat"), but there's a happy medium which this book manages to fall shy of. Not too far shy, and certainly nothing here is bad per se, but the bulk of the spells here are too simplistic in what changes they make.If I had one bit of advice to give to OBP, it would be to come up with a thematic change first, and then write mechanics to reflect them, rather than the other way around (the latter being what this product feels like).</blockquote>

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