Chapter Four: Soulmelds
Your blue soul energy collects in big piles and um... does stuff? I guess?
Chapter 4 begins by explaining how Soulmelds work. It's a pretty dry and almost incomprehensibly telegraphic description that still goes on for three pages. As mentioned earlier, there are way more moving parts here than really benefits anyone. Basically, you get to reselect your soulmelds every day off your class list (although you actually may know other soulmelds off other lists, like with the feat we talked about earlier). But you have 10 named slots (which are each called “chakra”) and each soulmeld goes into a specific one, and you
also have a smaller number of omnislots and every soulmeld uses one of each. Then on top of that, you have two different soulmeld upgrade systems, the first of which is called “Essentia” and is a set of powerup points you can reassign in the middle of combat, but when you use them to power feats they get locked in for a 24 hour period and I have
no fucking idea what happens if you subsequently dynamically change your number of Essentia points (such as with psionic incarnum crystals). Essentia has a total limit, but also a maximum that can be invested into any one soulmeld at a time, which is called “Essentia Capacity” and it can change too. The second system of soulmeld upgrades is called “chakra binds” which themselves have two sets of currencies, one of which is a set of omnislots called “chakra binds” and the other of which are up to ten named slots called “open chakras” that are a subset of the chakras that you stick the soulmelds into in the first place. Benefiting from magic items uses up open chakras but not chakra binds.
So to recap, if you have a soulmeld attached to your chest, you have used up your chest chakra and also one of your soulmelds, but if you haven't chakra bound it, you haven't used up any of your chakra binds and your open chakra chest slot is still open. So your chest chakra slot is filled but you still have an open open chest chakra slot. Is that clear now? Fuck this book. Oh, by the way: Totemists also have extra chakras that can also be open chakras. Because go fuck yourself.
Finally, for reasons that defy ready analysis, the maximum number of soulmelds you can have is capped by your Constitution. Not by your constitution
modifier, but the actual stat. In the same way that Wizard maximum spell levels are theoretically capped by Intelligence. I have no idea what that is even for other than to force Undead meldshapers to set a feat on fire to use their Wisdom instead.
Despite having about seven to nine distinct currencies (depending on how you look at it) with overlapping terminology, a soulmeld really just provides three things: a basic function, an Essentia bonus, and a chakra bind bonus. You'd think you could do all that shit way simpler by giving people basic, advanced, and master soulmelds and dropping all the extraneous currencies – but I guess that would have been too simple.
Now the actual abilities themselves are unleveled. You need to hit specific levels to do a chakra bind on soulmelds in specific chakra slots, but you can take things into the attached chakra slots (not to be confused with open chakra slots) as soon as you have a free soulmeld. And what you
get for soulmelding, chakra binding, or essentia investment is pretty much random. If there is any logic to this shit at all, I have no idea what it is. And the power tables are pretty unhelpful (over and above the fact that the headings are mislabeled), because they only tell you what the things do if they
aren't invested with Essentia and
aren't bound to chakras.
As previously mentioned, Incarnates basically don't count. Some of their chakras only have four listed soulmelds for them to take, and none of them have more than seven listed options. Remember: there are four flavors of fucking Incarnate, and that is exactly as fucked as it sounds. Even within the context of having hardly any choices, most of your choices are ass. You can make your feet all glowy to get an insight bonus to Tumble checks, despite the fact that Tumble can't be used untrained and it is not a fucking class skill for Incarnates.
There are some neat options for the Totemist, but by and large you will be crushingly disappointed again and again. Want to know what you get for melding your soul into a basilisk mask? The ability to see in the fucking dark. I'm not kidding. A magical beast whose name is virtually synonymous with shooting death rays, and you get to mimic their totemic ability to... see in the dark.
Is he using his blue soul armbands to jump? Sure. Why not?
Some soulmelds can be bound to different chakras to do different stuff. What chakra slot do they use up when they are unbound?
No one fucking knows!
Mostly, things are just nerfed to fuck. Maybe someone somewhere was just petrified that they might actually make something that wasn't shit on a plate by mistake, but they sure went out of their way to make things suck with wave after wave of nerfs. Let's consider the Gorgon Mask:
OK, that's kind of awesome. And I don't just mean the boobs. But then you read the mechanics. First of all, you only get to spit murder gas if you have it chakra bound. Without a chakra bind, it just sits around giving you a bonus to resisting bullrushes. Secondly, despite the fact that it is very clearly a
mask, the writeup insists that that thing is attached to the
Throat, which means as a Totemist you don't get the opportunity to bind it to a chakra until
fourteenth fucking level. Thirdly, despite that being supposedly the murder gas of a gorgon, it only paralyzes rather than petrifies. Fourthly, it only affects a single adjacent opponent rather than being the cone of win that actual gorgons spit on people. And lastly, despite all these extensive nerfs, they
still felt the need to give it a separate charge limit where you can only breathe paralysis gas once per day.
Finding things that are worth using is incredibly hard, because by my count, at least four people came through and edited these soulmelds down to make them less useful before it actually went to print. Finding things that do things you expect them to is even harder. “Heart of Fire” attaches to your
Waist, and despite the fact that the description of the Kraken Mantle is “Incarnum forms into a mantle around your shoulders and torso...” it attaches to your fucking
Arms. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the people working in editing, development, and management, the disconnect between flavor and mechanics is almost 100% at all times.
It isn't just that iconic Incarnate wields a sword and the iconic Soulborn wields a morningstar despite the fact that Soulborns are proficient with martial weapons and Incarnates fucking aren't aren't. It's that
everything in this book is like that. Art was clearly commissioned several revisions before this piece of shit went to print, and flavor text never bothered to get adjusted to what the rules got changed to.
This book was headed by the Orcus I development team (minus Rob Heinsoo), and as soon as it came out they must have realized that they had something totally unworkable and brought in Robert Gutschera to make something not-shitty out of it. Unfortunately, they then took his designs and shit canned them. I do not understand how Wyatt and Collins got through Magic of Incarnum without getting fired.