Encyclopedia Arcane: Fey Magic. Anyone Ever Use It?

[lylsyly]

What the title says - If so, Did you use all or parts. What was your Experience? Enquiring Minds want to know. Do you think the system works ? Balanced with 3.5 overall?

Thanks in Advanve!!

[Fizban]

No, and I doubt anyone around here has, though I've looked through it before. For starters it's a 3.0 book, so no it almost certainly won't be 'balanced' with 3.5. Second, it's a 3rd party 3.0 book, which means it's most likely going to be very 3.0, with most things either being useless by char-op standards, or immediately and obviously broken.

Taking a quick skim through, the first half of the book is basically a huge pile of mechanical hoops and skill checks to jump through for a single 1/day SLA of a level 1-3 Druid spell (3rd level is effectively 1/2 days, since the max energy you get per night is 2). You spend feats to get more SLAs, but they all use the same pool of resources.

To really make use of the 'reverie', you can take a feat to make 'tokens' which are fairly cheap (max value 500gp), but must be made using the craft skill rules, and then must be initially and re-charged by you. Tokens can store quite a few charges, but more importantly they can be made to cast druid spells of your choice, not from your list of gifts or spells but just picked, of up to 5th level, at no extra cost. Any failure on the first reverie skill check to awaken, or the second to add the gift, means that level of power is permanently failed on that token.

And you can take a feat to bond with an animal, which takes a skill check based on CR. It becomes sort of an animal companion (this is 3.0 so no table of bonuses, but it gets free Awakening which gives a couple HD), and if it dies you take a bunch of ability damage and must save or be stunned. However, as long as your companion stays within 1 mile, you can (with your nightly reverie skill check, precluding things like charging items) give yourself an ability like natural weapons, a 1/day rage, or polymorph self into their form, or natural armor or ability score bonuses based on skill check and capped by your companion's maximum.


In short, it's the sort of thing a DM (or rather, 3rd party splatbooker) might write to add some cool Fey/Druid setting stuff to the game that players don't need to class into, without being overpowering. . . which then has an immediate and exploitable char-op flaw. Because such systems are means to be played, not optimized. If you play through the game from 1st level, with characters not explicitly planned for future events they have no knowledge of, meeting hard mechanical prerequisites for feats and PrCs can be annoying- while being able to go out and do something to get an ability feels way more huge, and the hoops you have to jump through to do it are significant. Making tokens relatively cheap and completely open ended means you can use 'downtime' to try and fail and try again to get the thing you want and build up for your next adventure, while the DM decides whether or when something happens that forces you to go deal with it.

If you're allowed to create a character at X level with Y liquid assets and Z amount of past downtime, the tokens are immediately and obviously broken. You just take some of the ridiculous skill bonus spells to speed up the crafting and make it impossible to fail the reverie checks, and now you can make items that cast a 5th level spell 3 times for 500gp each, times as many as your 'backstory' allows (you even get to charge those items faster than the limit on charging your SLA). Meanwhile you simply find a way to keep your companion safe and within 1 mile of you, and the bond is also broken: for a single feat and some skill check hoops you can have ridiculous natural armor or stat bonus.

If you've got a party of characters who want to go join the fey court and bond wolf companions and keep track of their supply of fey tokens, with a DM that really wants to play up and roleplay all the fey setting stuff, it's fine. If you're looking for exploitable mechanics to char-op it's either useless, or broken.

[atemu1234]

At its core, Encyclopedia Arcane are good concepts, but the magic systems they introduce are usually pretty unbalanced. I love them dearly, but for the most part I use their periphery - monsters or feats that factor into games well, rather than the individuated magical systems.

But I disagree with the 'No one around here has' line, Fiz, because this forum is old and a lot of us on here have been playing this system a while. I know people IRL who were at the 3e launch party and stick to 3.5 like glue. There are quite a few 3rd-party options people ignore, but the Encyclopedia Arcane ones are actually one of the more popular ones. They were among one of the first I became aware of.

[Skysaber]

What the title says - If so, Did you use all or parts. What was your Experience? Enquiring Minds want to know. Do you think the system works ? Balanced with 3.5 overall?

Thanks in Advanve!!

I use it. I love it. As for balance? Like Dragonmarks from Eberron, you can trade a couple of feats to get a low-level SLA with minimal uses. So since a comparable exists, I'd say balance is pretty good.

There aren't many ways to get Druid spells on a non-Druid character, so it has a place.

Book is also chock-full of flavor. One of the best attempts I've ever seen to get mythology written up as a usable game resource.

You almost don't notice doing the 3.0 to 3.5 conversion. A couple of knowledge skills have to be rolled into existing ones. No big deal. Now we've got a use for all those ranks of Knowledge: Arcana we've been packing around.

Actually gives players a reason to play elves, which often get sneered at by this board but it is nice to see something other than the endless parade of humans once in a great while.

And it grants a useful buff to the Ranger class, which means one or two of those might show up once in a blue moon.

Is it overpowered? Power level is actually kinda low. Is it useless? Never! Is it flavorful? Absolutely!

A very nice book that actually treats fey as something other than pop-up targets with an evil alignment (as most of all fey outside of the monster manual are).

It's also got some useful and usable spells. Gift of the Leprechaun is a Druid variant of Miracle/Wish. It's nice to see them get one of those finally.

[Fizban]

I use it. I love it.

I stand corrected then, glad you like it.

It's also possible Saintheart's 3rd party book thread might have a reference? Searching. . . nope. Got through I think most of Mongoose's Quintessential line, but none of the Encyclopedia Arcanes.

[atemu1234]

I stand corrected then, glad you like it.

It's also possible Saintheart's 3rd party book thread might have a reference? Searching. . . nope. Got through I think most of Mongoose's Quintessential line, but none of the Encyclopedia Arcanes.

There is nothing new under the sun, especially for D&D nerds who stick to older editions.

[Kalkra]

It seems to me that the EA series was written and playtested with the assumption you'd only be using the core books, and in that context a lot of the broken stuff gets way less broken. Without splatbooks, web material, or other Mongoose Books you can't reliably make high-DC skill checks and saving throws at low levels.

Also, just to be pedantic I'll point out that it's actually Encyclopaedia Divine, not Arcane. One of two that I know of, the other being Shamans.

[Darg]

Actually gives players a reason to play elves, which often get sneered at by this board but it is nice to see something other than the endless parade of humans once in a great while.

Really? I like the benefits elves have. My favorite is only needing 4 hours of "trance" a night. Sure wizard, sorcerer, and bard don't get to benefit as much, but other elves can save the party time and make night watch easier. Also, elves don't "sleep" and therefore don't get fatigued by staying in armor while in their trance.

[atemu1234]

Really? I like the benefits elves have. My favorite is only needing 4 hours of "trance" a night. Sure wizard, sorcerer, and bard don't get to benefit as much, but other elves can save the party time and make night watch easier. Also, elves don't "sleep" and therefore don't get fatigued by staying in armor while in their trance.

Also, there's an elf subrace for literally anything. If memory serves, the Candlekeep quick reference sheet for races spends about as much page space for all the elf variants as it does for the entire rest of the core races.

If any race doesn't get enough love, it's either gnomes or halflings. Though in my opinion, the former is basically a subrace of the latter, which means it's probably the winner of that contest.

[Zanos]

But I disagree with the 'No one around here has' line, Fiz, because this forum is old and a lot of us on here have been playing this system a while. I know people IRL who were at the 3e launch party and stick to 3.5 like glue. There are quite a few 3rd-party options people ignore, but the Encyclopedia Arcane ones are actually one of the more popular ones. They were among one of the first I became aware of.

Agreed. Unfortunately I don't have much to add to this thread because Fey are up there as one of my least favorite themes for a character. But I've used almost every EA book at some point, including Battle Magic, Blood Magic, Chaos Magic, Chronomancy, Conjuration, Crossbreeding, Demonology, Divination, Dragon Magic, Enchantment, Necromacy, and Star Magic.

EA books are generally badly balanced though. Almost every book has nearly game breaking mechanics. Off the top of my head, Blood Magic lets you summon quite powerful creatures with a tiny hp cost for very long durations, basically giving you unlimited summon monsters. Chaos Magic lets you attach a bunch of very powerful metamagic-like effects to spells at the cost of taking tiny amounts of nonlethal damage. Chronomancy is chronomancy, it will give you a headache and probably break the game too. They tried to limit it, but there's basically nothing you can do that's incredibly interesting with time magic without causing problems. Crossbreeding lets you fuse monsters together, including people, and causing increasing check difficulty and expense per ability kept, but this effectively all the problems with shapechange, but worse. Demonology lets you make skill checks to summon demons; skill checks are broken so demonology is kinda broken. Dragon Magic lets you make speak high draconic speech checks to attach free metamagic to spells, and not having the metamagic feat just increases the DC. Enchantment has a bunch of spells that make permanent minimonancy even more permanent and even more miniony. That's only the worst offenders I can remember in each book, there was other stuff that just made some characters outright better at no cost because you didn't have to take a feat or anything to access the mechanics in the books in most cases. Necromancy and Star Magic were mostly fine but had some poorly edited items and spells.

So good luck with the Fey magic book. I would be shocked if there wasn't something game smashing in there.

Actually gives players a reason to play elves, which often get sneered at by this board but it is nice to see something other than the endless parade of humans once in a great while.

This is just wrong, between the massive number of types of different Elves with different ability score adjustments and all of the unique magic items, feats, class variants, etc. that Elves can access, Elves are a good or even the best choice for many classes. In fact humans are pretty rarely the best choice for any kind of caster because +2 to your main casting stat is generally superior to a bonus feat.

[lylsyly]

I would like to thank everyone for their input