I'd like to preface this with a statement that I do not particularly enjoy Spheres of Power. I don't mind playing full casters of both spontaneous and prepared types, and most of my favorite classes are 6-level casters of some variety. As a result, Spheres of Power's biggest draw (providing an alternative magic system for players and campaigns to use) doesn't matter much to me at all. With that in mind, the rest of it still immediately drew me in, but I found myself dissatisfied with the system after tinkering with it for a while.
Nonetheless, one of my playgroups does use Spheres of Power in their games, and after taking part a bit in the Illuminator's Handbook's playtest, I felt an obligation to pick up the book and see what I like in it. So let's get down to business. I'm going to review the content page-by-page, so for a much shorter summary, scroll to the bottom.
Content
This PDF is 24 pages long. After the front and back cover, title page, introduction and table of contents, and OGL page, it has a total of 16 pages of game content, and one page of a rather neat introductory story. Page 3 (page 4 of the PDF) has a short scene of fiction including some characters that I don't recognize, but found myself interested in knowing more about. Though it's not particularly important to the content of the book itself, I greatly enjoy touches like this; fluff blurbs and quotes, small stories, and the like show that the writers cared about what they were doing. There continued to be small quotes tied to the Light sphere and its thematics scattered across the sections as headers. I quite liked them.
In any case, the actual game rules. There are five different sections of the book (labeled 2 through 6, for some reason)—Class Options, Player Options, Basic Magic, Advanced Magic, and Equipment.
Section 2: Class Options
The first option in this section is a hedgewitch tradition called Astrology. This gives them the Light sphere as a bonus talent and the ability to project 30-foot auras that buff their allies; they start with two auras of the four available and can pick up the other two by spending a Secret each on them. Moon gives allies a scaling bonus on Fortitude saves (+1 at 1st, +5 at 20th) and some negligible temporary hit points, Planet gives people resistance to fire or cold (chosen when you project the aura) equal to 5 + your hedgewitch level, which starts out pretty good (immunity to nonmagical fire) and keeps scaling well, for a worthwhile defense against elemental attacks of those types. Star gives allies a scaling bonus to Perception and initiative checks (same bonus (same as the Fort save bonus), and Sun gives allies a scaling +1d4 to +5d4 fire damage on all weapon damage rolls. You can pick up the ability to project two auras at once as a Grant Secret.
Overall, I think that the best two auras for the Astrology tradition are Planet and Star, the former because it's a useful defense and the latter because going first is amazing. At low levels, Sun's damage boost is worthwhile, but it'll stop being as useful as you level up because it scales so slowly and is fire damage (it gets incrementally better the more full attackers you have in the party though). Moon is good but not good enough for me to want to pick it as one of my starting two. Personally speaking, the most interesting thing to me in the tradition is the Wax and Wane Hedgewitch secret, which lets you brighten or dim the light of your aura as a free action. Mostly? I want to use this as a signal beacon. Level 2 hedgewitches could be pretty interested in seafaring campaigns because of their ability to blink 30-foot auras of bright light into being whenever they want. Morse code anyone?
The second class option in this PDF is a gunslinger archetype called the Glass-Eye Gunmage. I like the this archetype, but it (and the new type of talent introduced in this book) have an awkward problem: since the Glass-Eye Gunmage never gets access to the light sphere itself, it does not have the Glow ability, and thus the Lens ability has no range and cannot function. My guess is that the intent of the ability is for the Lens' range to be identical to their Glow as if they had one, but the Glass-Eye Gunmage just gets some talents, not the basic parts of the sphere itself. However, it's quite good at those talents, treating their gunsligner level as a full caster level and letting them spend grit points instead of spell points. The two deeds they get are likewise useful; at level 1 they get the ability to reroll Perception checks (does this let them reroll hidden Perception checks rolled by the DM? Seems like soemthing that might be awkward to adjudicate at the table) and at level 3 they get a worse version of Uncanny Dodge that makes them not flat-footed at the start of combat. Still useful though. This archetype is a lot more interesting than the baseline gunslinger. It's also compatible with Bolt Ace, which is nice.
The third class option is called the Radiant Protean, and is an archetype for the shifter class from Spheres of Power. Their gimmick is that they're bioluminescent, which is pretty neat. They gain the Light sphere with full CL, but also get the Touch of Light drawback keeping them from using it at range. They also get a couple new things for their Shapeshift effects, and the Bioluminescent Transformation feat as a bonus feat, letting them apply Glow effects to someone for free when they shapeshift someone. I'm not too familiar with the shifter class, but this seems like it could do some interesting things with the action economy thanks to doubling-up Shapeshifts and Glow effects.
The final class option is the the mageknight, one of my favorite classes from Spheres of Power: the Sun Warrior archetype. These are Charisma-based casters that get the Glory talent for free, and count their full mageknight level as their caster level for it and any glow effects you attach to it. This is huge, letting you keep up with the people who went all-in on spherecasting. They get some other neat tricks with the Light sphere that they can take instead of mystic combat abilities or bonus feats, such as increasing the radius of their Glory, letting them selectively apply their light to people, and applying the Searing Light talent to their Glory as a free action for some extra AoE damage. Overall, this is a good archetype. The fact that they can get full CL for the Light sphere is wonderful.
Section 3: Player Options
Surprisingly, section 3 is not Player Options. Section 3 is actually Basic Magic.
Section 3: Basic Magic
The Basic Magic chapter opens with a cool in-universe except from a character's journal describing light mages, and then goes on to first introduce a piece of errata ('Glow effects can be created as bright light,' basically), then gives us two new types of talents: Lens talents and Nimbus talents.
Lens talents are light-bending laser beams of different sorts. They require melee or ranged touch attacks (or just work, on allies), last for as long as you concentrate, and can be made to last 1 hour per level by spending a spell point. Nimbus talents alter how the area of a Glow effect works, and can be swapped between freely on your abilities. Both types of talents are free unless something makes you spend spell points on them.
I'm not going to go fully in-depth on the new talents, but some standouts in this section were Bend Radiance (freely poke holes in the area of your Glow effects to not affect creatures), Chameleon (a lens effect that gives them Hide in Plain Sight, effectively), Dim Light (a lens effect that makes the target outright immune to light effects; I'm not sure if there's any way for a Light spherecaster to get around this easily, but it's pretty amazing), Dual Light (lets you apply two Light talents to your Glow), Irradiance (penalizes someone you put it on, or if you use a spell point, hits everything in the area with a save-or-nauseate that still sickens them if they pass the save), Lure Light (mind control people to move towards your light source), Style (lets you freely change how your lights look, making complex "paint" effects and the like. Not strong in combat, but exceedingly awesome), and Visual Overload (save-or-stagger followed by a save-or-daze on a target you made Glow).
Overall, the Basic Magic section has a lot of really cool stuff in it. The nimbus talents give a decent variety of alternate area shapes for your light, and there's a couple strong buffs and debuffs.
Section 4: Advanced Magic
The Player Options chapter got hit by soemone using the Chameleon lens effect. The Advanced Magic chapter, on the other hand, shines brightly. It's full of unique things. Opens with an account of a battle where a mage hit everyone with a massive laser, then moves on to interesting advanced talents like Everglow (makes non-bright light effects permanent), Incarnate Glow (turns someone into a light-based lifeform with a worse version of incorporeality), and Light Speed (lets someone you used Incarnate Glow on move at the speed of light for a brief moment, running 100 miles per caster level in one round). The chapter also had some rituals for people to use, Beacon Pillar (makes a consumable that makes a massive column of bright light that can be seen for miles) and Reflection/Refraction (changes how something reflects light).
I want to play someone with Beacon Pillar. That thing is awesome.
Section 5: Player Options
Theeeeere we go. The Player Options chapter has feats, traits, some drawbacks for the Light sphere, and some racial traits. In the feats, the standouts are Bioluminescent Transformation (lets you apply a Glow for free when you Shapeshift something), Searing Brilliance (makes Searing Light's damage untyped; incredible for Sun Warrior mageknights). There's also a small pile of feats that let you cross over a sphere's effects into Light, like Hard Light (use Creation to make things out of light) and Destructive Radiance (shoot destructive blasts as lasers). The traits in this chapter are fairly neat, and include stuff like knowing the time of day (Daysense) and or emitting light (Aura, Minor Bioluminescence).
There's three Light sphere-specific drawbacks, Lens Focus (you can't make Glow effects, and can only make Lens stuff), Nimbus Focus (you pick a single Nimbus talent to get for free, and all of your Glows use that shape forever), and Roving Glow (you can't put Glows on creatures or objects, and get Dancing Lights for free). The race traits are essentially getting the Light sphere for free on Gnomes, Aasimars, or Ifrits, in exchange for their racial SLAs. Useful for Light mages and others who don't like the limited spell-likes that those races get.
Section 6: Equipment
My favorite chapter. Opens with a section about the magic weapons that glow 30% of the time, and unique effects you can apply to those items (like having the light follow you in a trail, work like a strobe light, or glow when orcs are near). It's an awesome, fluffy, and interesting addition to the book, and I'm glad that Amber Underwood decided to spend the page space on it.
In the rest of the magic items stuff, we've got two weapon special abilities (Radiant Edge, a +2 ability that increases your reach by 5 feet on your turn, and Sunset, a +1 ability for Light spherestaves that lets it carry your bright light effects for one round after you stop concentrating). In the wondrous items, there's a relatively cheap magic item that gives +2 on saves against light effects and turns off the light sensitivity ability, which is nice, and then two incredibly fluffy items: the Gleam Brush, a 200gp paintbrush that paints in endless glowing ink, and the Miniature Orrery, a magical compass that glows in the dark and tells the time.
This PDF's final material is a set of magic tattoos created using light magic. They glow from under the skin, and do not take up item slots. There's one that lets people hypnotize those watching them dance, one that counts as a holy symbol and grants allies a +1 morale bonus on saves, one that makes it harder to lie to you while they're within the light of its glow, one that works like a lantern and lets you toggle its light, one that makes you better at Intimidating and lets you demoralize people at range, and one that makes you better at Diplomacy. A couple of these are far better than others (especially the Icon Tattoo, which is 10,000gp to give your party +1 on saves), but they're all fairly useful.
Overall, I really enjoyed the content of this book, barring a couple mechanical snags like the gunslinger archetype's rules hole.
On the other hand, there's a couple things I really did not enjoy.
Art
Always the elephant in the room when it comes to Spheres of Power products, was... Well. The art exists. I will grant it that. Overall, it's some very low-quality stock art, though there were several pieces in the book that weren't bad at all. I like the piece on the cover (which also shows up on page 9, or 10 in the PDF), and the art on pages 15 and 16 were also quite nice. 3/7 isn't that terrible as far as Spheres of Power products go, so I guess there's that. From a personal standpoint, seeing less Blackmon and more Brett Neufeld and Jack Holliday as far as stock art goes would make Drop Dead Studios' books a lot more palatable to read.
Layout
This book's layout is okay. Two columns, decent formatting. There were some questionable decisions made though, such as using an eye-searing yellow font for ability titles and headers, when the page background is a bright off-white parchment. In some cases I had to copy out a line from the PDF and paste it into the notepad document I'm writing this review in so I could actually see what it was meant to say.
Spacing for indents is about twice what it needs to be in this PDF, the sidebars are extremely jarring (they look like someone made them using Wordart from Microsoft Word), and overall, the choices made about tying the layout to the topic of the book means that it is an extremely bright and hard to look at PDF. There's not enough contrast in the pages and border, and honestly I'd have preferred reading the material on a web page like d20pfsrd instead of a PDF, because it's just... Not nice to look at, at all.
Minor Nitpicks
Hyphens are not em dashes. The font used makes hyphens look very thin compared to the length you want for something replacing a colon or comma in a sentence. In some contexts it can look okay, and in some contexts no one cares (or should care) about the proper use of dashes, but in a professional, published work, I feel like properly using the right type of dashes in the right contexts goes along with everything else relating to proper grammar and wording.
On that note: wording. There's some stylistic choices made that I found ever-so-slightly jarring when reading the PDF, such as the use of second person pronouns in class features instead of third, or incorrectly using "bonus to" when normally it's "bonus on." Those aren't big deals though.
tl;dr
I liked this book. As far as Spheres of Powers go, I actually enjoyed the abilities therein and could see myself using them in a game, which is rare for me when looking through Spheres products. In particular, I'd like to play a Sun Warrior mageknight, and I want to customize weapons with special glow effects. There were a couple minor quibbles in the rules (Lens effects being broken by RAW for the gunslinger archetype, one of the defensive talents seeming way too strong for a no-cost Lens effect), but Amber Underwood has done good work, and this was well worth purchasing.
I give it four out of five stars in this review. The content is good, but the layout and presentation ranges from eye-searingly-bad to merely okay.
