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Tome and Blood: A Guidebook to Wizards and Sorcerers (Dungeons & Dragons Accessory)

Tome and Blood: A Guidebook to Wizards and Sorcerers (Dungeons & Dragons Accessory)

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $13.57
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best Class Book So Far...
Review: Tome & Blood is by far the best of the three class books that WotC has published. I believe that this book adds some excellent rules/depth to playing wizards or sorcerers in the 3e D&D world. There are 15 new prestige classes, and nearly all of them seem playable. Also, players of evil spellcasters will also actually have some prestige classes this time. The True Necromancer is a wicked class.

In addition to the new classes, there are new feats, metamagic feats, expanded rules for item creation, new spells, descriptions of wizardly organizations (although brief in some cases), and a few new magic items.

The most amazing new rule covers magic sneak attacks. Now a rogue/wizard can do sneak attack damage with ray spells. Ray of frost is amazing as a 1d3 +5d6 sneak. Wow!

Excellent Sourcebook!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: cheese for the hero
Review: "Tome and Blood" is a fairly good supplement with a wide variety of useful feat, interesting prestige classes, and a couple of good spells. Some of the prestige classes, "The Acolyte of the Flesh" and the "Alienist" for example, would be hard pressed to be useful for a player character but would be nice NPC's.

I was slightly disappointed at the variety of schools, lots of innovation for necromancy, but the other schools, particularly illusion seemed to get short handed.

Also, compared to some of the d20 licensee products like Fantasy Flight Games's "Spells and Spellcraft" or Malhavoc Press's "Eldritch Might" series, this was pretty expensive for the amount of information given.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Metamagic, Good Spells, OK PrCs
Review: This is probably the guidebook I use most, since I play a spellcaster in my current 3e campaign. I recommend this book if for no other reasons than to upgrade the type of feats you can draw on as a Wizard or Sorcerer and open up a number of new avenues your mage can explore. I really appreciate the metamagic feats, particularly energy admixture and substitution, which give a battle mage new tools to take on the numerous meanies with resistance to specific energies, and scult spell, which allows you to move beyond the circular blast of a standard fireball and into some very exciting alternatives. Among the new spells, the Orb and Lesser Orb spells are a solid choice for low- to mid-level offensive attacks. I had some difficulty with the PrCs, which struck me as being of limited value. Without a DM who tailors his campaign to the inclusion of the elements needed to tap the capabilities offered, many of them would be counterproductive for a player to take. However, if you have a DM who will work with you, there's some very interesting campaign arcs that can be explored.

Overall, a solid extension of magic options for the D&D system.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: What a ripoff!
Review: This book is good only for explaining the metamagic feats more realistically.

Beyond that, it's practically useless.

I bought it because the books I bought for the druid and bard classes were so helpful, and I thought I'd get more help with my wizard/sorcerer characters.

I should be so lucky.

The book lacks many new spells that I think are particularly useful to lower-level players.

The main reasons one would buy this book is for a more clear definition between a sorcerer and a wizard, and because it explains the metamagic feats in a more useful way than the players handbook does.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A geuinely useful sourcebook, though not perfect
Review: This book has some good new arcane spells, especially some low to mid level combat spells which add a great deal of potential power to your wizards. There are some interesting new familiars and several magic items, a few of which are useful, and several prestige classes. There is a much needed fighter / wizard prestige class which (eventualy) has the ability to wear armor while casting spells.
A few of the other prestige classes are either useful or at least intersting (like the "Alienist" class, a thinly veiled Lovecraft cultist type done up in an amusing manner, and the candle making class which uses candles like potions or scrolls). Some of the other prestige classes are downright silly and / or unusable unless you are running a very cartoonish campaign.

Like most of the books in this series, this one has a lot of filler, including a fairly useless section on wizardly orders and an almost completly superfluous chapter all about a certain particular wizardly hideout.

Overall though far from perfect, this is a suppliment which even the most demanding D20 player or GM should get some use out of. The new spells alone are worth the price.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A definite buy
Review: To me, this book should be about metamagic feats, familiars, magic items and spells. Lots of spells. Unfortunately, most of the good spells went to the PHB, so you get the odd ones and "school fillers" in this book. Great for surprising a foe every once in while, but few are keepers.
The feats are particularly nice, especially Energy Admixture (adding another type of energy to a spell, such as say Sonic damage to a Fireball - a screaming fireball?).
The upgrade familiars are nice - its good to see the psuedodragon back, and presented in a balanced format.
The prestrige classes are a bit much (especially the Dragon Initiate), but in these books at least one tends to stand out as "kick butt" and all of them are interesting.
The information on magic schools and dwellings are mere filler and could have better been used for creative spell use, magic items or something more worthwile.
Unfortunately, there isn't much information in the book to differeniate between sorcerers and wizards, which the game really needs.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Pretty good.....
Review: Okay, liked 'Tome & Blood'. Let me start with what I liked about it. The prestige classes were very interesting, and seem to be fairly well balanced. My personal favorite is the Blood Magus. Really liked the 'Fun with Prestidigitation' section; it reads like a 'Dragon' article, and gave me some great ideas on how to use this under-appreciated spell. Some great new spells, too, like the spells allowing you to fix damage to constructs, although it's not clear whether they can be used on, say a simulacrum, which in the PH requires a set ritual, gold and time to repair. The sections on organizations were well done, and the sample wizard's home was intriguing. Overall a very good effort, and mostly worth the money.

Things that kept T&B from being a '5'? Well, it's a bit pricey for the info you get. At fewer than 100 pages, and softcover to boot, it's one-third the pages at half the cost of, say, the PH or any of the other core rulebooks. I would have liked to see more spells--a lot more. There are a couple of points in T&B where it seems a little, well, padded, like they ran out of ideas but couldn't bring themselves to charge for that few pages.

Overall, I recommend this book. It gives some breadth to your arcane spellcasters (some decent feats, too!), and really helps flesh them out.


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