Mongoose Books

The initial concept of this book is good. In fact, it is what arcane magic should. Loose form, free-fitting. teh book tells you how to on-the-fly crat your own speels whenevber you wish for your character, and how to know how powerful the spell is and how difficult it will be to cast.

However, the drawbacks required for the system is just too porhibited. It's difficult enough to cast the spells as it were. When they force you to use the drawbacks, it suddenly becomes not worth it.

The best use of this book is to run a Mage: the Ascension type campaign using d20 rules as its base. Just import the paradox rules from there to the spellcrafting in this book, and you may have something. But that is an awful lot of work.

Every fantasy gamer has at one time or another wanted a more freeform system of magic than that offered in standard Dungeons & Dragons. This book presents a great system for doing just that.

The content is centered around the introduction of a new base (20-level) class: the Chaos Mage. The author even included help for the DM who wants to integrate the Chaos Mage into existing campaigns.

There are several character concepts presented here, like in the other Quintessential books. For those who don't know, these concepts are essentially variations on a given class that are backed up by a substantial amount of fluff. Each concept includes a bonus (such as improved casting ability with one type of magic) and a penalty (such as restrictions on the abilities that a character can use). They are much like the Vow of Poverty feat in the Book of Exalted Deeds. The concepts in this book leave something to be desired, however, as they are all essentially specialist wizards, er, chaos mages.

The prestige classes presented could be of use and could be fun. As with all Mongoose products, there is a substantial amount of fluff/flavor text for each.

The system of Chaos Sorcery itself is quite straightforward. It relies on combining effects which add to a total casting DC, and then making a check against that. The choices seem daunting in their variety at first, but after a creating a few spells for yourself and becoming familiar with what each element can do, you'll be coming up with spells on the fly to fit any situation.

All this versatility and power has a price: a failed casting causes the caster lethal damage, and a critically failed casting leads to "backlash", which can lead to permanent steps along various paths of chaos. Go too far along a path and your character is lost forever.

I really can't say enough about this book. The system for creating spells dynamically is really entertaining on its own, and can even be adapted to completely replace regular arcane casting in your campaign world.