Dungeons and Dragons Blog

I just got my copy of Complete Mage a couple of days ago and I’ve had a chance to dig through it pretty deeply.  The premise of the book is that it allows players to greatly expand their options for arcane magic.  While Complete Arcane isn’t absolutely neccesary, a lot of the information in Complete Mage builds on what’s in Complete Arcane so to get the most for your money, I recommend that you also own Complete Arcane.

The first chapter of the book is on Fundamentals.  The nature of magic is explored as well as an indepth look at arcane magic.  There’s a cool section on each of the spell schools, including what the personality and philosophy of a given magic school specialist should have.  There’s some interesting stuff to really round out a character and I found myself making notes regarding some minor changes on some of the NPCs I’ve already created for my campaign so they fit better within the book’s description.  There’s also a section on arcane archetypes.  While these aren’t neccesarily different classes, they do give you ideas for pointing a magic user in a specific direction.

Chapter two provides character options.  The first section gives you arcane options for each character class to mix in a little magical variety to spice things up.  For example, one option for the Paladin is the Curse Breaker.  Instead of getting the remove disease ability at sixth level, you can opt to produce remove curse instead.  There’s a section with several new feats, including a new type of feat.  The reserve feat is unique to Complete Mage and are used to augment a spell like ability the character already has. 

Chapter three are your prestige classes.  There are eleven new ones and my favorites are the enlightened spirit and the ultimate magus.  The enlightened spirit is a warlock who’s seen the light and has turned to good.  The ultimate magus is sort of the super mage.  It’s a mix between a wizard and sorcerer so you get the best of both worlds when it comes to casting both innate and learned spells.

Chapter Four are the new spells and there’s quite a few of them.  Although honestly, there’s nothing in this section that really sticks out.  I’m probably the last person who will tell you that you can have too many spells, but that be where we’re at.  I saw a few spells that looked interesting, but nothing that jumped out at me and made say I had to have it for an NPC or a bad guy.

Chapter Five deals with arcane items and there’s some cool stuff in here.  The Ring of Instant Escape looked interesting.  It allows the wearer to escape particularly nasty spells.  The Rod of Spell Channeling appears particularly nasty if you have someone who is linked with a familiar and this could be really useful in conjunction with the Familiar Belt detailed in the book.  This section out of all of them gave me the most ideas to test my players.

Chapter Six discusses arcane adventures.  It provides some themes and then it also has a nice list of 100 adventure ideas.  There’s also some magical locations listed, like Bigby’s Tomb, Boccob’s Reading Room, and an eternal vortex, amongst other things.

I give Complete Mage four stars out of five but I almost gave it a three because I wasn’t really impressed with the spells.  Fortunately the other areas picked it up.  It’s useful and I found some tidbits in here that can help me and got the brain turning.  If you don’t own Complete Arcane, you might want to start with that one first though to get the full effect.