Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism

Game: Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 22nd, July 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10   [ Really good ]
Total Score: 15
Average Score: 7.50

I almost didn’t notice at first. It occurred to me just as I closed the book. I had to go back and flick through the pages – twice! It’s true though.

There are no new feats. There are no new prestige classes.

The Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism is a 64-paged book about those specialised wizards and sorcerers with a special understanding and mastery over elements and those magics influenced by them.

There’s a great expansion to the standard magic rules. There is text for the Elemental Planes and the creatures who live there. There’s all this and yet nothing in the way of feats or prestige.

Does this omission adversely affect the book? Hell no! It’s a boon. It’s a blessing.

It would have been easy for an author to set about creating the prestige class “Elementalist” or even jotting down a couple of magic feats which describe a special relationship between the character and an element.

Pick up your copy of the Player’s Handbook, turn to page 172 and start to flick through the reams of spells there. Loads of these spells have elemental descriptors; fire and ice damage are especially common.

On reflection, though it would have been ludicrous to claim that arcane spellcasters didn’t already have a good understanding and capability with elemental magic.

The solution that this Encyclopaedia Arcane puts forward is an elemental magic system which “normal” spell-casters can use but which elemental specialised wizards can use more effectively.

This means that you don’t have to introduce a brand new class just to make use of the new magic in the encyclopaedia, you don’t need to swap out a player’s current character or even fall into the trap of being one of those DMs who’s the latest villain just happens to be of a prestige class from the last book they’ve bought.

You don’t even need to shake up the current magic system too. The elemental powers in the book are in addition to the basic magic system, an extra level that fits on top of what you’re likely to be using already.

An Elementalist is a mage who has an elemental speciality: fire, water, earth or air. This can be in addition to the School of Magic speciality common to the standard rules. The advantages and disadvantages of all these specialities stack up. The book explains how all this works in a way that even I can understand.

The general principle behind the extra elemental level of standing in magic is that spell slots can be sacrificed on the fly in exchange for raw elemental magical energy.

This energy can then be used in a number of ways. You can increase the presence of an appropriate element, form a barrier, move it around, shape it, change it or use it to counter the effects of a rival element.

There’s an example where a wizard manages to change the damage descriptor of a fireball from fire to ice so it’s effective against the fire giant he’s currently fighting. This conversion process is something that those mages with special elemental training are more efficient at; they’re able to produce more of this energy more quickly.

The training of elemental mages is represented by actual in-gaming teaching that takes time, gold for tuition costs and suitable skill and ability prerequisites before the student is able to progress into the next circle. As the Elementalist progresses through the circles she’ll gain more power and even start to change slightly until they’re plane touched.

For example, those specialised in water magic end up with blue skin and may have webbed hands.

I have mixed feelings about in-game training like this. All too often it’s a headache for those campaigns that don’t have the mechanisms of guilds or colleges. It’s a headache but not an insurmountable problem. In this case, given how nicely the suggested rules in the Encyclopaedia can slide into a currently running game I think the in-game moderated level of progression makes sense.

I’ve said that there are neither new prestige classes nor new feats (did you notice?) but there are new spells. There are seven new pages of spells and these are usable even if the GM doesn’t want to make use of the extra spell casting rules in the book.

In addition to the new spells, there is a chunk of new text on elementals and the Elemental Planes. For Elementalism: The Primordial Force (I tell you, RPG books these days have about three different titles) the Elemental Planes are populated with a whole range of creatures, some sentient, some not, some trifling, some amazingly powerful and further enriched by having the resident population ordered into official Courts and hierarchies.

I’m not so keen on this; despite the nudging from the core rules, I always like to think of the elemental planes as almost purely primal in nature, certainly nowhere near the civilised heights of a society based on rank and not power. Still, this extra information is presented in such a way that it can be used or ignored at will and it’ll not adversely affect other bits of the book.

The suggested hierarchy within the Elemental Planes is not the only thing I have small complaints about. It might have been wishful thinking but I was hoping for a rather more academic study on the symbolic nature of the elements and perhaps even some help for people not wishing to confine themselves to the pan-European view of the four elements.

Why have fire, earth, water and air? Why not fire, earth, water, metal and wood as some Asian cultures describe the elements as?

I suppose it’s because D&D traditionally take the first four as the base elements. It’s not to say that there is no discussion on some of the insidious problems in the simple elemental definitions; the book offers the examples of acid (as water which burns) or sonic energy (solid air) and the front cover itself shows a wizard dealing with some sort of lava (fire and yet earth) creature.

This is another book from Mongoose in which the inside cover has been blessed with a full-colour illustration. I really do take this as an excellent bit of free art; it’s certainly not standard for other RPG publishers. Well. Not yet.

On the topic of “standards”, it is my opinion that the Encyclopaedia series (Arcane and Divine) really has pushed aside the smaller and cheaper Slayer’s Guides as the popular core of the company.

The Encyclopaedia Arcane: Elementalism may sound like the least exotic of the series but I’ve found it to be the most approachable and the one which is clearly the easiest to build into any game.

On the last note, I’ll mention the two sides of rules summaries right at the end of the book. It sounds mundane enough but its this sort of thing which can sometimes decide whether the book stays on the shelf or makes it to the sacred space behind the GM screen.