Swords And Sorcery: Spells and Spellcraft

[atemu1234]

Hi, I'm DMing for a group, and the person playing the party wizard wants me to allow Spells and Spellcraft (a 3rd party book), which contains quite a few spells.

Now, he doesn't have a history of "game-breaking" optimization, and I trust him enough, but I was wondering, what was some other people/DMs experiences with this book like? Are the spells balanced? Are there any that should be banned? He's happy to give me full authority to do so, but some other sets of eyes would be helpful.

[Miss Disaster]

I recall this book back in the day. It was part of FFG's Legends & Lairs series. Our group had it available to be used and tested (along with a myriad array of other similar D20/OGL spell tomes), but we never got around to run field-tests on it. Even though the memory is foggy, I don't recall their being any glaring balance/performance issues with the book after a quick, cursory glance. But as you know, in a tome of this size, there's probably a generalized bell curve that relates the quality level of the book's contents. So you as a DM certainly do want to find and address all the statistical outliers that are obviously overpowered and broken.

If you Google the book, there's a decent review of the book on RPG.Net and about 8 review of the book on Amazon. Those might help.

Otherwise, why don't you post the spells that your player wants to use so we can check them out and analyze them for quality and performance? I'll be getting the book in my hands tomorrow night (borrowing it from a friend).

[Ruethgar]

From what I remember of the spells they were fine. The familiar boosts were a little powerful to stack on top of the already T1 Wizard but not game breaking IMO. The small gods rules from that book are cool if you want to build around it and not that powerful. I believe that was the book that had the mad scientist patchwork creatures in the back. Very cool idea to be able to sew together and magically create new monsters, but not very balanced. Again not game breaking, just a bit more powerful than most official content.

[Extra Anchovies]

Well, he's a wizard. So maybe just have him let you know when he's adding a spell from SaS to his spellbook? Also, if you have the time, you could go through the book and pick out a few spells for NPCs to use against him.