Spheres of Power is a completely new magic system for the Pathfinder RPG and other D20 systems, built from the ground up to provide an easy and intuitive approach to concept-based magic. Spheres of Power lets you adapt magic to fit your needs rather than forcing games to adapt to the magic, and contains everything players and GMs need to bring a multiplicity of concepts to life through a system of at-will abilities, talent-based magic, and a ki-like system of Spell Points.
Included in this book you will find:
20 Magic Spheres—including alteration, creation, conjuration, dark, death, destruction, divination, enhancement, fate, illusion, life, light, mind, nature, protection, telekinesis, time, war, warp, and weather.
11 New Base Classes—including the thaumaturge, the elementalist, the mageknight, the armorist, the occultist, the eliciter, the soul weaver, the fey adept, the symbiat, the hedgewitch, the shifter.
Advanced Magic—including rituals, spellcrafting, advanced talents, and incantations. These systems may be implemented in part or en masse to grant a gaming table complete control over how magic interacts with their setting.
Casting Traditions—allowing both players and GMs to customize not only their characters, but even the entire concept of magic itself.
Magic Item Creation Rules—adapting the entirety of magic item creation to the new system.
NPCs for every new base class to spark ideas or drop into a game.
Guilds and Organizations to sprinkle throughout your world.
Sample Worlds, ready to play or to provide guidelines for adapting Spheres of Power to a variety of different world and game ideas.
And much, much more!
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I read the glowing reviews from Endzeitgeist and thought, wow, this will be a neat system for the players. Little did I know that the players would take literally every opportunity to abuse this system that they could. They will take abilities that chop up their action economy and have them acting through and literally on top of every other player’s turn in the game.
The system itself is quite creative. It uses a power points system that moves away from what smarky players like to call “Vancian Casting”. If you want to try a power points modular system, this is a good one to go with. The problem is that this system doesn’t take game balance, IE the literal math upon which the entire game is built, into consideration. It throws balance and game economy out the window.
My recommendation to GM/DMs is to only allow this if you trust your players 100%. It is too easy to abuse, and I’ve had to learn over the course of three campaigns spread through five years that Spheres of Power/Might players will do everything they can to destroy the game balance and make the entire game about them and their single PC.
As for design, I can only give this system FOUR stars, because it just takes everything that the game was built upon and ignores it. I deducted another star because when I backed this on Kickstarter, it was sold as the ULTIMATE SPHERES OF POWER.
Ultimate is an adjective meaning “being or happening at the end of a process; final.”
This book is anything but the final collection and honestly, I felt betrayed by the creators. They continued to release supplements during the kickstarter that were not included and then continued to release supplements after the Kickstarter was concluded. I wanted to purchase the system in its final form, not the PENULTIMATE version. Be upfront with your customers next time.
In summation, an interesting system. Horrible for game balance. Too easy to abuse by power gaming players. Deceptive marketing from the designers.
Recommended to avoid at all costs, unless you want your game destroyed. Only let your friends that you absolutely trust play with it. Otherwise, avoid it.
First off, I want to lead with the fact I'm basing this on the hardcopy. Some of these issues may be changed in the PDF, but at the time of writing at least some of my issues have been corrected, but not all. First I'll address something that annoyed me, but which didn't factor into my rating.
The fiction in each chapter follows a series of characters who are jerks at best, and often evil. I'll be honest, if I'd looked at the fiction before the rules, I wouldn't have even bothered buying the book. My recommendation is to ignore the fiction.
Pros: The system is designed so that when you use magic, you use everything at full-power unless you choose to scale it back. This is awesome in that low-end powers really never go out of style. While the infinite nature of most abilities is somewhat worrying, most of the game-changing powers are gated behind Spell Points, which you'll always want, or advanced talents which the GM can restrict access to. Even without advanced talents, you can build entire characters around a single sphere and have a broad range of satisfying options, though I personally find that I always want more.
This book also contains rules for customizing requirements for different casting traditions, allowing you to inject a sort of artificial magical divide without having something as sharp as Arcane/Divine/Psychic, and uses an example that shows how to create elemental martial artists in style. The Spellcrafting system isn't well explained, but allows you to create new and unique spells sanely with your GM's permission, and both the Rituals and Incantations were a delight to read.
In the Magic Items section, the Staves and Wands are great, actually giving a reason for a mage to have a staff or wand more often. The rest of the chapter will be in Cons, which... yeah.
Cons: So, the editing of the hardcopy was not nearly as good as the concepts as a whole. Every couple of pages I noticed an extremely jarring typo, just often enough I couldn't forget about them (Ligh sphere instead of Light, DR?bludgeoning) which I believe are corrected in the PDF. The Elementalist having Frost Resistance has not been, however. I also find the classes to be... problematic. It really will depend on the group, but personally I've never had a problem with a fighter getting utterly overshadowed, but the Armorist rather thoroughly stomps the fighter, IMO. Your mileage may vary. These cost a star, and if it weren't for the magic items, the product would be 4 stars for me.
Magic Items: This is the train wreck of the book. They reiterate much of the crafting rules from the Core Rules, which is annoying but understandable, then add their own twist on them which is poorly explained, then mangle the crafting feats. Why does a door that magically locks itself need to be made with Craft Rod? Why does Craft Wondrous Item only create charged or use-per-day items? Why are all worn items like a Cloak of Resistance created with Forge Ring? The authors obviously wanted to change how item creation feats worked, but refused to change the names. Considering everything else they did, they should have just created new item creation feats and been done with it, rather than trying to redefine the definitions of the existing feats. And most disappointing of all? The one question I had, of how much an item that added to a caster's spell points would cost, isn't answered anywhere.
Summary: I love the concept, and the rules as a whole work quite well, though some abilities will require a fair amount of GM adjudication, which isn't necessarily good. However, I'm extremely wary of the classes, and the magic item section is largely a disaster.
If you get no other third party materials, get this book. It manages to both close the power gap between martial and magical characters while making mages feel even more like mages.
Flexible magic system that allows casters to be casters
I never liked the "Vancian" magic system, but I do like a lot of other things about Pathfinder. My gaming group is now using this for all our campaigns.
Picked this up on a whim and it just...it works. Like the freedom of casting this gives without overpowering the player is great, and really helps solves issues with casters. Kinda wish it was easier to incorporate into alchemist and stuff, but that's a minor concern, it's an awesome book and deserves your attention.
Sounds great! I shot you the sphere document my players use for my homebrew world to look over. Still a work in progress but will fill it in with more lore and fluff with some built npcs in the system perhaps. Right now it is a lot of mechanical crunch, trying to fix that a bit (most of the fluff was in another document).
Once a date is set for the contest I'll buckle down and make sure it is something more presentable and actually publish-able (hopefully).
@Silvercat: It's part of the long-standing tradition that spells only require a touch attack. If we changed it for the base ability, every talent would become an exception.
Would it break much of anything if I houseruled the base ability to a regular attack? Maybe upped the damage at later levels to account for the loss of accuracy compared to the usual way?
Well you'd run into the unfortunate situation where you're expecting characters with 1/2 and 3/4 BAB bonus at best to be able to hit the full AC instead of touch. Not to mention classes like Magus now have nothing they can spellstrike/spellcombat with. It'd guarantee casters would almost never use it until they could get the shaping ones to turn it into other saving throws instead of relying on a fairly slim chance of hitting.
@Drop Dead Studios
Will Wizard's Academy, Player's Guide to Skybourne and Ships of Skybourne have print versions available here at paizo? I searched but found no entry (unlike Sphere's of Power, which has had a pre-order entry for months already)
They will yeah; Wizard's Academy is a hardcover, while the Skybourne books will be softcover. We're not pre-ordering them, but they might go up for pre-order after we send them to the printer.
As a quick guide, humans only, material casting for all magic-users, each caster can only choose one metal (creating each metal's range of potential spheres and talents would be the most time-consuming part) mystborn are high-casters. Or, just to keep things simple and fun in a low-magic way, all casting classes are limited to mystborn, and the people who can use only one metal get basic magic training and advanced magic training in place of the bonus feat and skill points humans would usually gain at 1st level.
That's obviously a very quick rendition, and I'd love to see someone's complete write-up if they want to make one.
...(creating each metal's range of potential spheres and talents would be the most time-consuming part)...
Well, I thought the mentioning of Mistborn as possible use for Spheres of Power meant that it was ready to use... So that's just a framework that I have to hook up in the right way.
Now I have an idea to do that, but don't have the time to really jump into it.
Drop Dead Studios wrote:
That's obviously a very quick rendition, and I'd love to see someone's complete write-up if they want to make one.
Is there a reason the character sheet doesn't have Knowledge: nature on it?
I realized that as well during Paizo Con; an oversight on our part, we'll get that fixed up here quickly.
The Spheres of Power games during Paizo Con were a blast. Each one was just an hour long rump, but I still got to see a nymph-eating guerrilla, a Creationist win a fight by filling a room with cotton candy, and a blind Thaumaturge on fire leap into a river to grapple with a target and win. Good times.
Not with a booth, but I will be there myself, and I'll be running a special Skybourne preview game for kickstarter backers and any spectators that want to show up.
RPG1569239, Sat @ 2:00 PM, Location: Crowne Plaza, Executive Boardroom
For falling objects made with the creation sphere, is the ranged touch attack originating from you the spherecaster, or from the location the objects come into being?
Say I wanted to drop a Huge sized meteor on someone that is 30 feet from me, and wanted the double damage from >150 ft. Would the ranged touch attack take penalties from range increments? Assuming I have distant creation a few times.
From where you drop it; the higher it is, the more time people have to get away. We're working with the Pathfinder rules on that, though, so I'd personally include a +2 bonus per size category over Small to off-set that penalty, since the bigger it is, the harder it is to dodge, but I haven't tried that in game so I can't verify it's usefulness.
We've begun using Spheres in our game, started up a simple "Mage Guild" campaign where the players take on odd jobs.
After a bit of talk we added something to the Conjuring Sphere. We felt it needed something you could do that didn't cost a spell point so we added Summon a Familiar. Duration: Concentration or spend 1 Spell Point to change it to 1 hour/level. We also made Improved Familiar a Talent.
After a bit of talk we added something to the Conjuring Sphere. We felt it needed something you could do that didn't cost a spell point so we added Summon a Familiar. Duration: Concentration or spend 1 Spell Point to change it to 1 hour/level. We also made Improved Familiar a Talent.
Does it function like Wizard/etc familiars? I had this idea earlier, would like to know how an actual trial went.
I've got a feeling that unless you'll be paying Lone Wolf to implement this stuff, it is probably way more complex than can be implemented via normal scripting mechanics. But I haven't read the stuff closely yet. I might be able to figure it out.
After a bit of talk we added something to the Conjuring Sphere. We felt it needed something you could do that didn't cost a spell point so we added Summon a Familiar. Duration: Concentration or spend 1 Spell Point to change it to 1 hour/level. We also made Improved Familiar a Talent.
Does it function like Wizard/etc familiars? I had this idea earlier, would like to know how an actual trial went.
For the most part. Slightly more expendable than the normal familiar. Only penalty for it dying is 24 hour wait to resummon.
I apologize if this has been asked already, but I was looking at the craft wand section, and it seems like it would be prohibitively expensive.
It mentions that "The simplest wand a crafter may create contains a base sphere,
1 spell point, and a caster level of 2," but for base sphere effects (not to mention if you want something like a wand of fireball, which would be base sphere, plus a talent that costs a point/use) that require the expenditure of points, that pretty much guts it.
With the rules, even a Wand of Cure Light Wounds would be several thousand gold for a few uses a day, as the base sphere requires a spell point.
Am I misreading this? If not, it sorta seems like crafting wands is neigh-useless.
I don't know about anyone else but that sounds more like a feature than a bug. Personally I think there are enough spells in a can effects so I intend to make wands into charge-based metamagic apieron wyrd wands.
Note that unlike wands in base Pathfinder, wands in Spheres of Power act more like staves in base Pathfinder (while staves in Spheres of Power are their own uniquely awesome thing), and are capable of being recharged, which makes them a lot more valuable than wands in base Pathfinder.
True, though disappointing. Don't get me wrong, I *love* SoP (currently I'm playing an Incanter/Magus in an XCrawl game, for *tons* of teleporting/blasting fun), but I'd been toying around with the idea of an Investigator (or other, skill-monkey class) that, while unable to cast, could still use magic via wands. Sort of a wand for every occasion class, though given the rules, vancian wands are created at absolute minimum level, so the saves are atrociously low. I'd hoped that SoP would give it interesting tricks without having to settle for abysmal DCs, or missing 90% of the more interesting spells.
And wands still remain pretty potent, access to even a basic sphere can offer a fair array of options, since spheres tend to be rather more flexible than spells in Pathfinder. Though yeah, your save DCs are still going to be low. Honestly, if you want a wand-slinging skill monkey, I'd recommend a hedgewitch with with the Focus Casting restriction and just flavor the magic as coming from the focus wand, perhaps modify the restriction a bit so that you can have multiple foci, but each allows access to a different sphere, instead of all of them.
And wands still remain pretty potent, access to even a basic sphere can offer a fair array of options, since spheres tend to be rather more flexible than spells in Pathfinder. Though yeah, your save DCs are still going to be low. Honestly, if you want a wand-slinging skill monkey, I'd recommend a hedgewitch with with the Focus Casting restriction and just flavor the magic as coming from the focus wand, perhaps modify the restriction a bit so that you can have multiple foci, but each allows access to a different sphere, instead of all of them.
In the organizations at the back of the book, there is an artificer tradition created for the Artificer's guild that builds off of that idea.
Wands are expensive, but by combining Wand Wielder, Artificery, Improved Artificery, and probably Skill Focus (Use Magic Device), you can create a character that can create any wand he wants and can use his caster level in place of the wand's caster level, giving him effectively every sphere at his own potency for a comparatively small gp price. I understand they can get expensive compared to spell-in-a-can wands, but at the same time you can use wands that don't have the 4th level limitation of core wands, are rechargeable, and grant you at-will, unlimited-use abilities along with their limited powerful versions.
I'm starting a new game using spheres of power, and so far we are having a blast. A very nice alternative to vancian magic. However during character creation we got a couple of questions, and we would like to know if we overlookend something:
1) how big can you make the Nature sphere Wave power? The book explain how far can it go, but not how large.
2) can you use the Dark sphere Step Through Darkness power while remaining inside a single darkness effect? It says that you can step in one patch of darkness and emerge in another (so you need two darkness "bubbles"), but in the next paragraph the only requisite is that both the locations are in the area of your darkness
3) One of my players want to specialize in telekinesis and weather (wind), is there any way to quicken the severity change (using a power in the first round of a combat and getting some benefit from it starting on the third round is not so great). How should i treat his telekinetic weapons for the effect of the winds (should they count as ranged attack or as flying creatures)?
Sorry if i'm not very clear, English is not my main language.
1. I apologize for that oversight; it's a line effect, so it effects a 5'ft square in width. However, in my games I'd allow someone to double the width by halving the length, applicable as many times as appropriate.
2. You can step into and appear out of the same darkness effect.
3. There is no RAW for quickening an effect, but it's not hard to add an appropriate weather talent:
Quicken Weather
You may spend an additional spell point to hasten the effects of your control weather; rather than altering the severity one level per round, the full effects of your control weather happen immediately. The weather's severity still returns to normal one level per round.
The product is amazing, I am totally in love with it. The only limitation is that its hard to read since I have to be at my computer with the pdf file open. I would really like there a physical hardcopy that I can open and flip through as needed. :)
Right, but preorder doesn't actually state that its going to be delivered to my house because its out. It just means its potentially available to pay for but no date on release.
On the bright side, they've actually received the printed books, and are currently packing them for shipments. So... shipping for original backers will probably start soon, and presumably, all other orders will be after that. ^^ So I wouldn't expect too much of a delay, actually.
Oh really, that's cool and really good to hear, preorder away! As long as its not like seven months I don't mind preordering it now, hopefully I will get it soon. It really needs to have a shiny physical copy version that I can search through and flip through while reading and analyzing the rules.
Yeah; we're in the middle of pre-Gen Con rush, but we'll be shipping big boxes of books out to Paizo and the D20pfsrd store soon, and we're in the middle of sending books to backers.
Is there ever going to be any advice on converting monsters, perhaps in the monster supplement I think I've heard about? I don't mean 1-to-1 conversion, I mean "If the monster's theme is ice give them [sphere] with [talent], [talent], and also [other sphere]".
Out of curiosity, can you use things like Alteration and Enhancement talents on Conjuration Sphere companions? Because with the way spellcrafting works, it could make for some interesting concepts (caster summons spirits or lets them possess them).
Okay, got the Softcover from the Kickstarter Rewards (you're welcome), and there's something I was wondering... ...One should be able to use these rules to create something like Supers, right? I'm thinking you could make a Flying Brick using the Spheres Enhancement (Personal Magic) for Super-strength, Telekinesis for Flight (and perhaps augmenting the Strength when lifting things), Protection (Protected Soul) for Invulnerability, Divination for Super-Senses...
Maybe using the Mageknight as the Class for "Supers" type characters.
