Sign in to create or edit a product review. 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
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
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
Section 3: Basic Magic
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
I want to play someone with Beacon Pillar. That thing is awesome. Section 5: Player Options
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
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
Layout
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
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 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. |