Joe’s Book of Enchantment

Game: Joe’s Book of Enchantment
Publisher: Throwing Dice
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 9th, October 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10   [ Really good ]
Total Score: 8
Average Score: 8.00

Joe’s Book of Enchantment is a surprise packet. The title alone is rather unassuming and the cover is entirely without art.

As the old adage goes you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. That adage needs to be updated for the 21st century so it can include something appropriate about not judging a book because it’s a $5 PDF download either.

There’s more than just new enchantment spells in Joe’s Book; there are intelligent observations on the spells already available in the Player’s Handbook and this includes the author pointing out spells he thinks have gone wrong, there are new feats, a feat template, new prestige classes, new magical items, NPC groups, new uses for skills, new cleric domains, an odds and ends section and, yes, new spells too.

That’s a long list of things you’ll find in Joe’s Book of Enchantment. The list of things you might expect to find but won’t is a bit shorter. There are no illustrations anywhere in the supplement. Truthfully there’s a small black and white picture of a pair of bottles and that’s it.

This one picture is nestled in between two columns of text and makes that single page of text much more easy to read. PDFs without illustrations to break up the flow of text often become a sea of text that’s especially hard to read on the screen – even if they’re easier to print off. Joe’s Book isn’t quite the sea of text since there natural breaks but it would be easier to read and kinder on the eye as a whole if they were there.

The other missing item from Joe’s Book will impact on users who read straight from the screen as well. There are no bookmarks. There should be. It’s as simple as that.

On the plus side, Joe’s Book of Enchantments is rather good.

Chapter one looks at the Enchantment school. In order to be playing a specialist enchanter, you’ll need to sacrifice another school of magic and Joe runs through those possible sacrifices and discusses the pros and cons of each; whether to keep it or pick it as your sacrifice.

Normally such discussions stray quickly into the sorts of game mechanics debates that’ll put me to sleep; this doesn’t happen here. The points made are quick, clear and fair.

More importantly, the debate here represents an in-game choice in a whereas making sure you have Dexterity 14 so you can buy Feat X when you advance to Prestige Class Y after reaching Character Level Z is entirely a meta-game choice. You don’t need to know how well the schools of magic size up but the chances are that your level Z wizard would and should know.

With about a page of text, Joe’s summed this all up so you can make the sensible choice for your character. The rest of chapter one will leave you gasping at the apparently huge coding flaws in the d20 core rules.

Chapter two is an example of the dreaded “new uses for skills”. I do dread such chapters and that’s probably because I’ve read so many of them and have yet to be impressed by one – but at least Joe points out why he feels its better to present these new uses rather than new skills.

As with the other game mechanic and rule modifications, Joe suggests this point is rooted in good logic. The new uses for skills are all solidly done but are of perhaps more useful to new GMs and this is in a book that will probably to more experienced GMs. There are some examples of composite skills.

Composite skills are really skills that can be resolved by the application of one or more “character sheet skills.” For example, there’s the “Haggle” that’s described as the art of negotiating the price of goods or services, which base skills like Bluff, Diplomacy or Sense Motive could be used to resolve the skill check and which then offers up tips on when a skill check would be appropriate. There’s a handy table of skill synergy bonuses at the end.

There’s a whole bunch of new feats. The idea of a Feat Template is also introduced. The feat template is such a simple little thing and yet so effective it’s amazing you don’t see it more often.

A feat template is a rule that can be applied to a range of attributes, spells, weapons or whatever. It avoids having 3 pages in a book dedicated to describing “Axe SuperDude” which gives you an additional +1 to your attack while using axes, “Sword SuperDude” which gives you an additional +1 to your attack while using swords, “Spear SuperDude” which gives you an additional +1 to your attack while… yes, you get the point.

The “SuperDude feat template” would have been a better idea. Joe’s feat templates are better than my example and include the likes of “Paired Skill Bonus” where the character is particularly good at using two complementary skills together and receive a bonus on them.

Hypnosis is introduced as a feat. I rather like that, it makes more sense in a fantasy setting and the way most people will want it to work in a roleplaying game to have it as a feat rather than a skill.

There’s an index table at the start of chapter four, the prestige classes, and so you can type in the exact page number for the new class and jump straight to there – but bookmarks would have been better.

There are eight prestige classes, “Animal Tamer”, “Charlatan”, “Disenchanter”, “Fear Eater”, “Fey Discipline”, “Hand of Jherana”, “Reveler” and “True Enchanter”. The church of Jherana is detailed later on in the supplement.

The lack of illustrations is particularly apparent here and I think it would have been better to make a separate page for every prestige class. The text for the prestige classes and the table of level advancement is a little awkward and I found myself having to scroll back up once or twice just to double-check that I was reading the right paragraph for the right prestige class.

Most of the skill classes are detailed throughout 10 levels but not all of them. Each of the prestige classes predicts the most direct routes through the core classes to them.

For example, the Disenchanter is one of the two prestige classes which are only detailed through five levels and not ten but we can see from the minimum paths to the Disenchanter that you’ll need to be at least 12th level to pass the prerequisites. A 10th level Disenchanter is likely to be epic level.

The new spells are presented well. There are three new clerical domains: Charm, Domination and Hatred. You’ll find next long lists of spell by level, then spells by class and then spell summaries – just as it is in the Player’s Handbook.

There are a whole lot of these new spells and they measure up to Joe’s tough but fair standards. Some of the spells in this section aren’t exactly new though; they’re straight from the core rules. These are the spells Joe suggests GMs might want to change, he doesn’t reprint the entire spell simply those bits that might be changed.

There are nearly as many magical items as there are new spells. Magic items include armour, rings, wands and charm tokens too.

Charm tokens are small figurines that have an Enchantment spell stored so that it’s cast on the next person to touch it. There are also a few random item lists but the intelligent magical items variant particularly caught my attention as a good set of rules.

There’s more. There’s even a list of new monsters and monster templates. We’re still trying to keep an “Enchantment” theme here and I suppose it does. Most of the new monsters are Fey and that’s because they’re the obvious choice for Enchantment monsters.

The Peaceful Glade is of particular note here; it’s a strange idea for a monster and because it’s larger than Colossal in size. Tucked away as a side note to the Peaceful Glade is a simple rule mechanic for extending monster sizes far beyond Colossal. The Glade’s Colossal+1 but you might squish things with the foot of a Colossal+5 creature if you want.

Finished? No! There’s a chapter for interesting NPCs and organisations that’ll be particularly useful for GMs wanting to keep Enchantment in their game. The organisation section here is particularly good since it ties back in with previously described prestige classes.

Finished yet? No! The plus side of having no illustrations is that there’s a heck of a lot packed into this 66-paged PDF. Chapter nine is a collection of interesting odds and ends.

They are fairly odd – like aromatics, but interesting too – such as the effects inhaling the aromatic might have. You’ll also find a quick summary of the new spell descriptors that you’ll have first noticed back in the first half of the book.

The appendix finishes the book. This appendix isn’t a collection of game mechanics which didn’t fit anywhere else in the book but is actually a rundown of why Joe made the choices he did – why, for example, the Animal Tamer prestige class doesn’t actually need to have Animal Empathy.

You’ll discover that attention was paid to the layout of the PDF and this really did help appease my concerns about lack of illustrations and the slight clutter of text and tables I detected in the prestige class chapter. The layout was designed so shaded areas wouldn’t overlap when you print the document off double-sided.

I hadn’t heard of Throwing Dice Games before Joe’s Book but I expect this offering really will push the small company out and into wider attention. The website describes the company as a “Vanity Imprint for a Few Veteran Players” and this product really does ooze ‘veteran player’.