Why are there so many spells for flinging flame, but none for harvesting crops?
101 Spells for the Common Man brings arcane power back to the people.
Magic isn’t just for adventurers anymore. As the common folk go about their daily business, a select few augment their efforts using magic. No matter how rare magic is in your world, those working folk who possess the gift make good use of the following spells.
While these spells make life easier for the common man, a clever adventurer can find use for them as well. Rob a bank with silenced work, or create a distraction with awaken instruments. Jot down a confession with recorder’s quill or put a guard to sleep with bed-time story. Remove a watery obstacle with expeditious evaporation or track the passage of time with shadowdial. These spells bring life to your world while providing a fun, creative new toolkit for PCs.
Included in 101 Spells for the Common Man:
101 Level 0, 1, and 2 Spells, categorized by class and likely profession.
The Arcane Worker, a new NPC class who mixes magic and raw skill to make his way in the world.
8 magical NPCs to inhabit your world, including the arcane artist and town doctor.
Spells include abernathy's abacus, illusion of quality, and moneylender's mark, perfect for the successful banker.
Boil water, create ice, and fortify wine, an excellent pairing with chefs of all levels.
Create soil, locate stock, and scarecrow, turning a single farmer into a one man operation.
Bed-time story, schedule, and track child for the parent with too much to manage.
Enhance voice, perfect pitch, and game field for entertainers and musicians.
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This supplement clocks in at 35 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD, leaving us with 31 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
After a brief introduction, we get a rather nice list of spells by suggested profession – want to know which spells work for doctors and artisans? There’s a list here, and each occupation lists the respective spells by spell level. The spells only cover the spell-levels from 0th to 2nd, focusing on magic for the common man, as befitting of a magical society. If that seems inconvenient to you, fret not, for the supplement also provides spell-lists by class, which btw. also include the Advanced Class Guide and Occult Adventures-classes.
The spells, as would be expected, cover utilities, and the first, Abernathy’s abacus sets an apt tone for the entirety of the supplement, providing a purely mental abacus that helps you perform calculations, including notes on actions to operate it. There are two versions of magical bed-time stories, which send targets down the sequence of fatigue-related effects, and which don’t work in combat – nice! (As an aside: These do work imho even better when combined with Everyman Gaming’s Sleeping Rules)
I was really enamored by bonds of hospitality – a representation of the concept of not partaking in violence against a host whose food or drink you have consumed, using a sanctuary-like basis, Utility spells to boil water, to butcher carcasses or for a butler’s bell, with the latter based on alarm, we have quite a few cool ones here. There also is a really funny one that magical parents would love – castellan’s dungball attracts low weight/value physical clutter and makes it form a katamari-style ball that follows you around! Speaking of order: Categorical organization is great to order those treasure heaps, and chef’s crew lets you have a taste of being a chef in a proper cuisine, providing a crew of unseen servants to follow your directions. Bonus points if you give them red or blue jackets. ;P
Speaking of which: Phantom mannequins do pretty much what you’d expect them to do. There is a spell that allows you to better filter out background noise, and if your mansion isn’t exactly up to snuff, there is pleasing façade, which makes a structure take on the idealized appearance of a painting, while the painting becomes an exaggerated representation of reality – kind of like Dorian Gray lite.
Kidding aside, there is a handy spell that emulates a cock’s crow. I’m not as happy with coiner’s honesty, as it identifies nonmagically altered and counterfeited coins, without taking the skill of the forger into account. Moneylender’s mark allows a bank to make a debtor’s outstanding debt ever more apparent with a darkening sign. A godsend for scribes would be mirrorquill, which makes a quill duplicate your writing as you go.
With two spells, conjure cart and create ice, you could duplicate more wholesome fish/meat markets, and some farmers will certainly love create soil. Particularly in a setting where entities with defiler-like powers exist, this cantrip may be of vital importance. Distill cure is neat, as it enhances the usefulness of a nonmagical curative, allowing for the rolling of a save twice, taking the better result. A spell to make an animal hardier and better suited to working as a draft animal, a herald’s voice enhancer…some cool ones. If the painful time of having to let go of a creature has come, you may want to consult the euthanize spell, which btw. thankfully does come with caveats that prevents abuse. Kudos!
Immediate water-evaporation is nice, and exquisite display case is certainly neat to showcase your triumphs. Fey gift can be used to barter with fey and keep them away (and there is a version for spirits as well!), while invite house spirit does the opposite, inviting a benevolent, supernatural entity into your home. Fortify wine increases the potency of a given draft. Greenery light can help you handle the regenerative properties of plants, and herder’s ward can help you keep your livestock in place – and if you do lose animals, you can still fall back on locate stock, which is based on arcane mark. Quick plucking and defeathering of targets, raise irrigation and prize vegetable growth boosts can really help. And yes, there is a magical sow seeds, a scarecrow spell…
Inner clock does what it says on the tin. Tired of gritty and grimy surroundings and those nasty creepy-crawlies? Louse screen suddenly makes your game much more hygienic for the characters. Projection of memory is amazing, as it creates a visual illusion of an object prior to damage sustained, which can be sued for puzzle/narrative purposes by the enterprising GM. There is a road ward that enhances the integrity of streets, and roots to plowshares turns a tree stump into a plow – very handy! Scent wall blocks, bingo, what you’d expect. Schedule is absolutely glorious, and lets you put a cantrip/orison on a timer, affecting objects. I’d have this one cast all over my stuff! Shadow lockpicks nets you thieves’ tools that later upgrade to masterwork, and surgeon’s watch pings you when the target takes damage. You can also cast a spell to direct vermin to weave and assemble a nonmagic woven item for you, and with the right spell, you can warp glass!
The pdf also includes a 20-level arcane worker NPC-class, basically a caster-commoner with spells of up to 4th level, ½ BAB-progression, good Will-saves, d6 HD and 4 + Int skills per level. The pdf contains also an array of sample NPCs – a CR 3 arcane artist, a CR 4 arcane baker, a CR 1/3 arcane farmhand, a CR 2 arcane parent, a CR ½ magical merchant, a CR 2 magical miner, a CR 2 singing tavernkeep, and finally a CR ½ town doctor.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting are very good on a formal and rules-language level. Layout adheres to a two-column b/w-standard with red headers. The pdf uses fitting public domain and stock b/w-art, with some other contributions and annoyingly, has no bookmarks, which represents a serious and unnecessary comfort-detriment for a book of this size.
Jeff Gomez crafted this book with contributions from Andrew Ready, Charles Kulick, David J. Rust, Jason Owen Black, Jennifer R. Povey, Kat Evans, Kate Baker, Landon Winkler, Maria Smolina, Matthew Morgans, Matt Roth, Matthew Oatman, Mike Welham, Nik Geier, Nikolaï Samarine, Robert Metcalf and Wojciech Gruchala. And while that are a lot of authors, the quality of the material herein is consistent and high, offering a fun assortment of creative and cool spells that help depicting magical societies. Not all spells herein will be fantastic for all games, but even low/rare magic games will find a couple of worthwhile and intriguing spells in this book. All in all, a great book, only hampered by the really grating and puzzling absence of bookmarks. My final verdict will clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded down.
Endzeitgeist out.
One of the best recent PF 3PP Spell Tome Products!
While I'd like to write-up a full-bodied review of 101 Spells for the Common Man ... this short one will have to do for now.
This is a 5-Star PDF, folks. As a huge fan of Pathfinder & 3.5 (Paizo, WotC & all reputable 3PPs) spellbook tomes, this is one of the most creative & mechanically-sound 3PP spellbooks I've seen over the years. Ranking right up there with Dave Paul's recent terrain-centric spellbook series over at Rite Publishing.
My players have been diving into this PDF with glee. We currently have a little over 20 of these spells that have already been cast (or written to character spellbooks) at our gaming tables over the last 2 weeks. As a DM, I love how info-packed yet streamlined/concise design of many of the spells. Clever, thoughtful titles, too. Props to Jeff Gomez for bringing all of these talented game designers together into a PDF that's easy to navigate and a lot of fun to read. For you demiurgic types, many of these spells can be subtly optimized for innovative application, too.
Gosh, I wish I had time to list my Top 10 Favorites. But I will definitely say that Pleasing Facade brought me a whiplash smile and totally stroked my inner gothic sensibilities. I've never seen anyone capture The Picture of Dorian Gray in an RPG game mechnanic as elegantly this spell. Bravo!
This book provides exactly what is says it does. With plenty of material to justify the price. I look forward to sprinkling many of these spells throughout adventures.
I think of these spells like spice, adding little tastes of flavor to a campaign.
My only disappointment was that I dislike one of the spells. But hey, that's less than 1% right? Five stars.
I love the spells in here—even the ones I didn't write. ;D
There are so many simple, creative spells that I could see myself using in my games. Some could add a ton of flavor—like having the PCs encounter a spelled scarecrow—and some might even be fun for the PCs to use. I loved working on Spells for the Common Man, but I'm also going to lose using it in my games. The class really does fill a void, in my opinion. And man, this book was made for Eberron.
Like the others, I had a wonderful experience. It was my first collaboration with another group of writers and I learned so much (Google Docs seems like an old friend now.)
Kobold Cleaver worked on this too?! Who knew? I guess that explains a few of the creative and interesting ideas.
A really fun game supplement to work on with a really useful NPC class, the Arcane Worker, to use in my game-setting. I'll be able to look at my PCs and say, "Yes, that's a 'real' spell: it's in a supplement! I also wrote it!"
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Accessories, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
These have always been my favorite kind of spells, the sort that provide a bit of utility and flavor at first but are just waiting for their right moment to shine later in the story. So it was a lot of fun to work on this.
I lover it. Nice design and great spells. The built in limitations are very nice done. As an example, Euthanize is a very powerful spell but its constraints prevent it from being abused. I can see a 4th level Paladin using it to grant a peaceful and dignified end to someone. These are a nice addition to a world with magic. Limiting the spells to a maximum of 2nd level makes perfect sense, anyone capable developing higher level spells would probably be an adventurer instead of a worker needing the magical help.
Working on it was so much fun! With these spells around, villages and cities really belong to a magical world, providing quite a bundle of surprises for PCs.
I worked with Jeff Gomez, et al, on the “100 Spells for the Common Man” supplement, and I’m really excited about this product. There are some very talented and creative people involved in this, and I’m happy to have been offered the chance to collaborate with them. Don’t hesitate to check it out – it will definitely add a whole new level to your game!
I lover it. Nice design and great spells. The built in limitations are very nice done. As an example, Euthanize is a very powerful spell but its constraints prevent it from being abused. I can see a 4th level Paladin using it to grant a peaceful and dignified end to someone. These are a nice addition to a world with magic. Limiting the spells to a maximum of 2nd level makes perfect sense, anyone capable developing higher level spells would probably be an adventurer instead of a worker needing the magical help.
Thanks Saint Bernard!
MichaelCullen wrote:
This book provides exactly what is says it does. With plenty of material to justify the price. I look forward to sprinkling many of these spells throughout adventures.
I think of these spells like spice, adding little tastes of flavor to a campaign.
My only disappointment was that I dislike one of the spells. But hey, that's less than 1% right? Five stars.
Very fun book. My favorite is Schedule. It could be used to make a very convincing haunted house:
Schedule + Prestidigitation to make spots in the air that grow cold or hot at particular times.
Schedule + Prestidigitation to make blood stains that reappear no matter how many times they're cleaned up (using the "soil" function of Prestidigitation).
Schedule + Ghost Sound to fill the place with maddening whispers and inarticulate screams.
Schedule + Dancing Lights to create ominous glowing vaguely humanoid shapes that float through walls and such.
Schedule + Mage Hand to press invisible hands against beds in the house deep in the night, so that anyone sleeping in them wakes to the touch of some formless, invisible thing.
Schedule + Mage Hand to push objects off shelves, poltergeist style.
Schedule + Open/Close to make sure all the doors are sensibly shut, as per The Haunting of Hill House.
I can imagine a low-level party spending ages trying to exorcise "haunts" that are actually malicious pranks by an eccentric former owner. ^_^
Damn, Tinalles, I love that. One of my favorite things about this book is how versatile the spells in it can be. That's an idea I might borrow in my game.
