This one covers the mythic magic of our World.
As always I will be following my rules for these reviews.
Elements of Magic - Mythic Earth
PDF in a zip file. 58 pages. Front and back cover supplied as separate JPG files.
You can tell this is the early days of PDF publishing. The publisher provides a README file to explain how use the layers to make a print-friendly PDF. Vey nice I have to say. Very polite.
This book largely assumes that you will be using this in a modern d20 game where magic is real. There is an appendix in the back about using it with "Fantasy d20" coughD&D3.5cough.
Preface
A one-page overview of what this book is and how it is updated from it's predecessors (other Elements of Magic books).
Chapter One: Myths
This chapter is the foundation layer for playing a "mythic" game. This covers what sorts of myths you to use or create for your game. The default is a modern high fantasy. We get some very basic examples of how myths work in the world. Such as the abduction of Persephone causing the seasons to a basic overview of A Hero with a Thousand Faces monomyth.
Honestly, there could have been a lot more here.
Chapter Two: Spellcasting and Magical Traditions
This covers the spell-casting basics. This includes "regular" spell casting and ritual magic. Magic is largely a skill-based system. Because of this any class can cast spells but some are going to be better trained than others. There are new backgrounds, new skills, and of course lots of new feats. Feats are the primary vehicle to differentiate the various magical styles. It works much better than it would seem or even to anyone that is "feat exhausted."
In truth, the feat system is really rather perfect for this, or maybe, this book's conceptualization of these different mythic traditions is well suited for feats. In other games, these would be all different classes or sub-classes. Here it is entirely possible to build an arcane dabbler that knows a little runic magic, some voodoo. Your dabbler will never be an expert in anything due to the limited number of feats you can take, but that is also true in real life. They are also designed to provide some interesting playability if you do take more than one Tradition feat.
Examples of some magic items and a ritual spell are also given.
Chapter Three: The Magic of High Fantasy
This is our campaign world; magical modern Earth. They make a distinction between our Earth, "Terra" and the magical Earth, "Gaia." It is not a particularly new idea, but it is well executed here and that is the important part. Detailed within are various organizations that exist on Gaia that are related to magic. There is the governmental "Bureau" that act as the law enforcement in the magical world and "The Knights of the Round" that enforce the treaties with the Fey. There is room for many more.
We are also given The Mage, an Advanced Class for d20 Modern. This rounded off with some NPC Mages.
Chapter Four: Spells
Spells here are applications of magical skills. The ten skills are Attack, Charm, Create, Cure, Defend, Divine, Illusion, Move, Summon, Summon, and Transform. Each skill must be trained. So it is easy to see you can have generalists in all skills and experts in just a few. Each skill has a number of spells associated with it. You can design spells as needed with whatever enhancements seem to work the best. Each enhancement requires a skill rank. So four enhancements mean four additional skill ranks.
The system takes a little bit to learn but is easily adaptable and usable in play.
Appendix
This covers converting the Mage advanced class to a Base class for use in Fantasy d20 worlds.
It is obvious to me that this was someone's favorite campaign model for a while. There are a lot of really great ideas here and few I'd like to try out. Reading it now I am taken by how much of this could be ported over to True20 or even a modern OSR game.
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