Savant and Sorcerer

Rating:
Summary: Pretty decent, but could have been incredible
Review: I wasn't completely thrilled with "The Book of Three Circles", but I was pretty close. Thus, when this book came out, I was excited -- maybe, I thought, they'll fix everything that was wrong with "Three Circles". "Savant and Sorcerer" comes close to living up to its promise, but doesn't quite -- except for Rebecca Borgstrom's incredible demon-summoning section, which I'll get to in a minute.

Most of this book is just exactly like "The Book of Three Circles". The writers, apparently realizing that the in-game techniques / schools / etc for learning sorcery were sort of half-assed in "Three Circles", made a half-hearted attempt to expand on them in this book, but didn't do a good enough job. They did do an excellent job on rebalancing and rewriting the spells themselves (thank goodness, since we've had what, two years of playtesting since then?), but nothing particularly interesting was added to that section either.

There are only two really new things in this book. One is the new Artifact creation rules, which are pretty good (if badly edited -- I found at least one sentence that directly contradicts itself twice). I have a couple of issues with these, not least of which is the fact that an Artifact that was made using an exotic component is apparently lower level not only for the purposes of construction but also for the purposes of character generation (so when you're giving your character a Daiklave of Conquest, you can up and say, "Hey, my Daiklave of Conquest required the dying breath of seventy god-kings in its construction, so it's lower than level 5!"). These, however, can be fixed with a little common sense. I was disappointed in this section because the writers chose to basically ignore Manses (aside from some notes on how to reshape Demesnes and rules on building Manses themselves -- more revamped "Three Circles" fare); however, this, too, was easily fixable, [shameless plug] (...) /shameless plug]

The best part of this book by far was the new section on demon-summoning. Typical Rebecca Borgstrom work, it's extremely well written and really quite incredible in conception, although some of the flavour text reminds me of something written by Hunter S. Thompson. It not only gives new details on the process of demon-summoning itself, but it explains something of the nature of the process and, most importantly, makes demon-summoning into way more than just a summoning / binding roll. It goes into excellent detail on why, exactly, it's dangerous to have demons around even if they're perfectly bound, and why you have to make some concessions to a demon's nature when forcing it to perform tasks. This section fixed demon-summoning for me. Previously, I was always vaguely irritated with demon-summoning in "Exalted", but couldn't put my finger on why; now I know that it's because it just wasn't dangerous, interesting or just plain mystical enough.

In short, if the above things -- revamped spells, expanded Artifact creation rules, and demon-summoning that's actually cool -- are something you want in your chronicle, you should look into "Savant and Sorcerer". However, if you've been playing this game for a long time, chances are you already fixed the spells you had a problem with and made your own houserules to deal with Artifact creation (if you needed them). Furthermore, you can get a good enough impression of the new demon-summoning rules by flipping through this book at Borders to use them in play. So, particularly if you already own the "Book of Three Circles" and have read the Errata and everything, I'm really not sure this book is worth [the cost]. But it's a close enough call that you should check it out and judge for yourself.