The Complete Arcane Review

Not enough roleplaying in here despite the title, so here's a post to redress the balance.

Complete Arcane (Wizards of the Coast, £19.99)
The third in the Complete Series after the Complete Warrior and the Complete Divine, The Complete Arcane can be considered as being an additional core book by many groups. Because I would have a tough time excluding a character choice from what is an official book, I hold the Complete Arcane to a higher standard than say a Mongoose Publishing splat book.

Following the format of the previous Completes, Wizards unveil three new base classes. A lot of pre-release buzz was on the Warlock class and unlimited spells did sound unbalanced. However the eldritch blast requires a ranged touch attack, only does 1d6 at 1st level increasing to 9d6 at 20th and even the ability to wear light armour without suffering arcane spell failure doesn't stop the Warlock falling behind the power curve at 6th level. The Wu Jen is a cool wizard-analog with a nice spell list, I'm a sucker for new spells, they don't have to be more powerful, but using a spell that the players don't know does recreate the aura of mysteriousness that all magic should instill.

Then there's the third class, the Warmage. Poor attacks, d6 hit dice, same saves as a wizard, a limited spell list and a combination of sorcerer spell progression with the limitation of having to prepare spells beforehand like the wizard. What's wrong with that? In a word, armour. At 1st level they can wear light armour without incurring arcane spell failure, at 8th, they can wear Medium, and with the Battle Caster feat, that can be heavy armour. That's right, it's not just the party's Paladin that's going to want to Full Plate +5. Somehow the idea of someone blasting fireballs while armoured like a small tank just seems wrong.

After the base classes, the next logical step is to look at the prestige classes. In the two Completes so far, the prestige classes have been split 50/50 between good guy classes and bad guy classes. But in Complete Arcane, most of the classes are specialised bad guys, such as the cthulhuesque Alienist and the Green Star Adept. Even the good guys tend to be too specialised to be very attractive to players such as the teleport-specialist Wayfarer Guide. About the only classes that will see much play are the Mage of the Arcane Order (thankfully fixed from it's last appearance in Tome and Blood), the Enlightened Fist (a kind of monk/wizard) and the Wild Mage. However for a DM, there's a lovely selection of baddies here.

Next to feats and the aforementioned Battle Caster. This is not a good feat to publish and I'm not going to allow it. There's some nice feats here, particularly the metamagic feats that improve certain spells, such as the Sanctum Spell (+1 spell level when standing in a sanctum, -1 when not). Then to spells and a mixture of the good (Anticipate Teleportation, Brillant Blade) and the downright ugly (Fist of Stone - why bother with Bull's Strength when this is better and is one level easier to cast).

The book continues with some items, including some enhancements to spellbooks. But this section is less useful to players than it appears. Most DMs don't like to annoy players by doing things that they have no way of stopping, and wizards spellbooks tended to be off limits for that reason, but now players have defenses for their spellbooks, they have now become targets :-)

The monster section is disappointing, Effigy creatures are a new version of construct, Elemental Monoliths are just very big elementals and the rest nothing to write home about. The book wraps up with some advice on running an arcane campaign (sounded interesting to me until I read it), Spellduels (good) and the obligatory epic level progressions.

Overall 2/5, the weakest of the three Completes so far released, but you still need to buy this book.