The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard

Misfit Studios

Author: Steven Trustrum

Page count: (landscape) 12 plus OGL; (portrait) 11 plus OGL

Price: $1.40 at RPGNow or $1.99 at DriveThru RPG

 

The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard is another in a line of products that expands the concept of specialist wizards into full 20-level core classes. In addition to expanding the core class, The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard includes new uses for skills, new feats, new prestige classes, and new magic items.  The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard is a good product that covers the bases.

 

The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard begins with a new use for the Profession (Hypnotist) skill. Bluntly, this allows a character to place a subject in a hypnotic trance. Terribly fun at parties I imagine. This section is very long for a skill, having around 30 paragraphs, and a table. With it, a character can instill a delusion, provide a skill bonus, implant a suggestion, and even recover a spent spell. It is a very useful and powerful skill, balanced by the time requirements. These requirements range from a standard action to several minutes. So DMs don't have to worry about character hypnotizing enemies in the midst of battle.

 

Next is a selection of new feats. These new feats are primarily designed to either strengthen a character's resistance to charm-like effects, or strengthen his use of such effects. Solid, utilitarian, but unexceptional.

 

Following the feats is the Enchanter core class. This follows the standard D&D layout, detailing adventurers, characteristics, races, and so forth. The Enchanter receives different abilities as he levels up. These range from abilities like Strength of Character (applies Charisma bonus to Will saves) to Charming (provides increasing bonuses to Charisma-based skills). The Enchanter receives bonus feats as a wizard, but he receives fewer bonus feats by 20th level than a standard wizard does. The special abilities of the class compensate for the loss of a bonus feat. The Enchanter is well balanced against the core wizard.

 

Next is the Alpha Warden prestige class. The Alpha Warden is an Enchanter/Ranger or Druid that specializes in altering and controlling the minds of animals instead of sentient creatures. If you are interested in controlling animals, it is a solid prestige class. If you are interested in flash and style, the Alpha Warden will not interest you.

 

After the Alpha Warden is the Enticer.  This prestige class focuses on charming and commanding (as the spell) individuals. As with the Alpha Warden, this is not a particularly flashy class, and certainly will not interest those who like to blow things up, but I can see it finding a great deal of use in campaigns with heavy social interactions and manipulations.

 

Completing The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard are four new magic items. Three of these items are quite useful, and will be appreciated even by non-Enchanter characters. The other item, the lover's arrow, is useful as well, but it hits one of my pet peeves – I dislike magic items that are weapons, but deal no damage. I understand the basis of such items, but they bug me. Weapons should deal damage and inflict pain.

 

Layout and Style

Like all of the books in this series, The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard has a theme color. This determines the color of the page borders, headings, tables, and art. For The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard, the color is red. Well, in some cases, pink. I dislike red in general. But the use of red in this product is not bothersome. This is the first product in this series where the color didn't jump out at me.

 

The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard uses a standard two-column layout, with easy-to-read text. Even with the page borders, the document doesn't have a lot of wasted space. I appreciate this.

 

Art

The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard has few pieces of art. The quality is average, but the pieces are unobtrusive, so it really doesn't matter.

 

Open Gaming

The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard has a fairly standard OGC declaration. Game mechanics and statistics, and class names are open. A lot of other stuff is closed.

 

File Utility

The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard includes two files: one is a landscape version with graphics and color, designed for on-screen use. The other is a portrait version, with fewer graphics, designed for print.

 

The utility of The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard suffers from the fact that both files are locked. This prevents the user from copying text to paste into other applications, or extracting pages. Restricted functionality is a strike against any pdf product. I rarely use pdf products "as is." I like to make handout and other documents that frequently contain sections of pdfs. You can't do that with this file.

 

Conclusion
The Enchanter: The Core Specialist Wizard sets out to expand the specialist concept into a full class. It succeeds in this endeavor. Combined with the feat, and prestige classes, this is a solid product. It is not the type of product that will make you think "Damn! This rocks!" but it might just make you think "Hmmm, that could be interesting." The only downside to the product is the lock on the functionality.