Hung Over Review: Magic of Incarnum

[Kaelik]

The classes themselves mostly serve as pointers to powers that are on lists that haven't appeared in the book yet. So it's really hard to evaluate the classes while reading this chapter. Starting at 4th level, a Soulborn gets to have Soulmelds off the Soulborn Soulmeld list. And starting at 8th level, they get to start binding them to crown or foot chakras. Is that good? Fuck, what flavor does it have? What are Soulborn Soulmelds even for? At this point in the book, you have no idea. You know that as a Chaotic Good Soulborn, you aren't allowed to take Soulmelds that have the Law or Evil tags, but you have no idea what Soulmelds are for, or whether ones with the Law tag are meaningfully different from the ones with the Chaos tag. I'd say it was all a black box, but the box (like everything in this book) is in fact blue.

Doesn't this same argument apply to basically every class in core?

I mean replace "What is a soulmeld" with "What is a spell" and the exact same arguments write themselves.

I can understand the statement that having the races section at the beginning is bullshit, since this is a splat book and we have other races already...but the classes appearing before the powers that they access is pretty much standard. Not sure why that got so much flak here.

That is true of the core classes, because inherently in a connected game you have to read everything before you can read anything. But look at for example, the Warlock, the Beguiler, the Dread Necro, ect. Most splatbook classes pre Orcus previews at least had the decency to include limited explanations like the short versions of spells, or they were based on real spells.

Imagine if the tables in the Soulmeld section of the book (or even better, something like that also explained binds) was right after each class instead of only in Chapter 5?

And hey, since it is a splatbook, they could have started with all the soulmelds first and then showed classes. And for god sakes the part where feats comes before Soulmelds, which Frank will get to, is just dumb stacked on top of dumb.

[Seerow]

Except that spell is kind of something people have an intuitive handle on, since people in literature, myth, movies, and the corner new age wiccan bullshit shoppe claim as something they do.

Yet every one of those sources has a drastically different interpretation of what a spell can and cannot do. You have sources where spell translates to telekenisis and/or energy blasts, and sources where spells means turning people into frogs, bringing objects to life, etc. There are sources where casters cast their spells instantly, and sources where a real spell takes hours of preparation and incantations to do properly.

How on earth as you supposed to look at the Wizard class without first looking at the spell selection, and judge its capability?


edit:

That is true of the core classes, because inherently in a connected game you have to read everything before you can read anything. But look at for example, the Warlock, the Beguiler, the Dread Necro, ect. Most splatbook classes pre Orcus previews at least had the decency to include limited explanations like the short versions of spells, or they were based on real spells.

Imagine if the tables in the Soulmeld section of the book (or even better, something like that also explained binds) was right after each class instead of only in Chapter 5?

And hey, since it is a splatbook, they could have started with all the soulmelds first and then showed classes. And for god sakes the part where feats comes before Soulmelds, which Frank will get to, is just dumb stacked on top of dumb.

This actually makes sense, but even here you're saying to give the power list after the class. It seemed to me like Frank was wanting a big list of all soulmelds right away, with the classes using them appearing afterward, which made me go "wtf", because that's very non-standard, and while it could work, it could also be much more confusing.

Something like a handful of examples, or a soulmeld description table is definitely something I could see working and being much better for the book overall.

[Username17]

Chapter Three: Character Options


This is Lidda in the counterfactual reality where she spent some resources on Incarnum, allowing her to turn her eyes blue. Also it gives her a bonus to attack rolls.

The third chapter of this book is about skills and feats. They manage to waste an entire page explaining that there are some incarnum actions that require concentration checks to use in melee, but they won't bother telling you what the DC might be or whether those actions are things you might care about using in melee in the first place (generally speaking: they are not, but you won't know that until next chapter). Also that anyone recognizes shaped soulmelds with a DC 20 Spellcraft check. I would point out at this point that so far the only real flavor text we've gotten was a short little blurb where Jozan exclaimed that he didn't know what Incarnum was. Jozan is a fucking Cleric and has fucking Spellcraft. So actually, we're on page 33 and it is revealed that the only in-character fiction we've gotten was a god damned lie. Fuck this book.

Most of the rest of the chapter is taken up with feats. These feats are mostly not geared towards incarnum characters or even interacting with incarnum abilities. Most of the feats are actually alternate essentia sinks. Where if you have Essentia for some reason and you don't want to put it into real Incarnum powers (or have no real incarnum powers), you can set your essentia on fire and get a bonus instead through your feat. What you get for setting your Essentia on fire is really variable in quality. So one of them gives you +1 damage when smiting for each point of Essentia (which is something you won't do that often and the bonus isn't worth wiping your ass with), and another one gives you +2 to-hit with sneak attacks for each point of Essentia (which is something you will be doing several times a round and is a pretty big bonus).

Some of the feats are worth taking, most of them aren't. But the real bottom line is that in almost all cases, taking any of these feats requires you to essentially opt out of the entire Incarnum thing. If you take Indigo Strike, you're going to set all your Essentia on fire to get a big to-hit bonus, and then you aren't going to have any Essentia left over for any other Incarnum feats or soulmelds or any of that shit. In virtually every case, finding a thing you want requires the you cash out all the currency that would let you use anything else in this book.

With the spending of feats you can also cherry pick soulmelds and chakra bindings off of any of the lists. Which again is simply a way to cash out on one incarnum thing and then ignore the entire rest of the book. It's very puzzling. They haven't even told me what the powers do and they are already telling me several ways I can get one thing out of the book in exchange for being barred from ever benefiting from anything else written on any of the pages. It's like they don't even want people to read the whole book.

The latter part of the chapter is given to racial substitution levels. These were a thing they were really pushing at the time, and they take up an enormous amount of page space. I mean, it seriously spends half a page giving a minor alteration to the Incarnate class progression that you can take if and only if you are a neutral good Gnome Incarnate. It spends a whole page telling the reader about how an Azurin Cleric of 4th level can make their weapons glow blue and count as if they had cast align weapon on it. A whole page. For special effects that kick in if you are both an Azurin and a Cleric. Not only are these things covering less than 1% of the play space, they are also generally effects that you don't even care about. Now, in the fullness of time, there have been some overpowered substitution levels written up, but I honestly can't be fucked to go through these things to find if any of them are in this book. My give a fuck levels are simply not high enough.

And that's the chapter. It's short and it's also bullshit. Next up we start actually talking about how the system is supposed to work.

[Kaelik]

With the spending of feats you can also cherry pick soulmelds and chakra bindings off of any of the lists. Which again is simply a way to cash out on one incarnum thing and then ignore the entire rest of the book. It's very puzzling. They haven't even told me what the powers do and they are already telling me several ways I can get one thing out of the book in exchange for being barred from ever benefiting from anything else written on any of the pages. It's like they don't even want people to read the whole book.

Actually, Totemists taking Shape Soulmeld for a good Incarnate Soulmeld is better than most other people taking the feat.

[Lago PARANOIA]

My favorite racial substitution level(s) was the one in Races of the Wild for the elven wizard. You get generalist wizardry. That is, you gain an extra spell slot per level that you can fill with any spell. And you don't have to give up any of your schools to boot. What did you trade for this ability? ... the ability to specialize in a school.

The other one was that you got to double a familiar bonus to a skill, save, or hit points. No questions asked, the bonus is just doubled. Well, you give up the familiar's ability to deliver touch spells and speak with animals of its own kind, but who really cares about that?

I'm genuinely surprised that generalist wizardry feature didn't come up more often in optimization discussions. It's just free, undeserved power for no good raisin that you get at first level and is relevant for the rest of your career.

[ubernoob]

My favorite racial substitution level(s) was the one in Races of the Wild for the elven wizard. You get generalist wizardry. That is, you gain an extra spell slot per level that you can fill with any spell. And you don't have to give up any of your schools to boot. What did you trade for this ability? ... the ability to specialize in a school.

Only the highest level. You still don't get as many total spells per day as a specialist wizard, but you do get extra spells known and the bonus spell at your highest level (which is where most of your combat winning effects are anyways). But yeah, dragonborn grey elf with otherworldly taking the elven wizard substitution level and the complete champion spontaneous divination is like the best wizard you could possibly create before talking prestige classes.

[TiaC]

My favorite racial substitution level(s) was the one in Races of the Wild for the elven wizard. You get generalist wizardry. That is, you gain an extra spell slot per level that you can fill with any spell. And you don't have to give up any of your schools to boot. What did you trade for this ability? ... the ability to specialize in a school.

The other one was that you got to double a familiar bonus to a skill, save, or hit points. No questions asked, the bonus is just doubled. Well, you give up the familiar's ability to deliver touch spells and speak with animals of its own kind, but who really cares about that?

I'm genuinely surprised that generalist wizardry feature didn't come up more often in optimization discussions. It's just free, undeserved power for no good raisin that you get at first level and is relevant for the rest of your career.

This is because the flavor of elves says that they are amazing wizards, but they are actually crap at it. So, they had to give them a large amount of free power to make elf wizards a thing that people play.

[Mistborn]

This is because the flavor of elves says that they are amazing wizards, but they are actually crap at it. So, they had to give them a large amount of free power to make elf wizards a thing that people play.

ahem

[Koumei]

Yeah, Wizard Generalist with an Octopus Familiar was part of the Grapplemancer build, where at every point in your life you make everyone else feel small in the pants in the "chokeslamming foes through tables" department.

I actually paid real money for a physical copy of Magic of Blue. I hope I lost it somewhere. Part of me thinks it was sponsored by Nintendo (Megaman is blue and steals enemy parts, Blue Mages use enemy spells).

[Username17]

How on earth as you supposed to look at the Wizard class without first looking at the spell selection, and judge its capability?

The thing is, in the PHB they actually do have little introductory blurbs on the classes. Before the classes even start, they give each one a one sentence description. Things like "Ranger: A cunning, skilled warrior of the wilderness." or "Cleric: A master of divine magic and a capable warrior as well." Then, within the classes, there's a little section on "role" that gives you a few hints:

Role: The wizard's role depends somewhat on her spell selection, but most wizards share certain similarities in function. They are among the most offensively minded of the spellcasting classes, with a broad range of options available for neutralizing enemies. Some wizards provide great support to their comrades by way of their spells, while others may focus on divination or other facets of wizardry.

That isn't perfect or anything, but for a new player that's actually pretty helpful. It tells you that as a Wizard you select spells from a big and versatile list and people will expect you to blow up and/or neutralize enemies with your spells. That's fairly accurate, and a decent one-paragraph description of what is in store for you if you select Wizard.

The Incarnum classes get nothing like that. Before you get to Soulmeld chapter, there is literally no explanation as to whether you're getting stat buffs, death rays, defenses, divinations, or what. You get a head's up that Totemist soulmelds are themed off of magical beasts, you can predict some of them, but the Incarnate and Soulborn tell you nothing at all about what you can expect your powers to do or what other players can expect you to accomplish once you have some. It's actually a remarkable achievement. Nearly fifty pages go by without even a single paragraph spent giving the reader a synopsis of what the book is actually for or about.

-Username17

[NineInchNall]

Only the highest level. You still don't get as many total spells per day as a specialist wizard, but you do get extra spells known and the bonus spell at your highest level (which is where most of your combat winning effects are anyways). But yeah, dragonborn grey elf with otherworldly taking the elven wizard substitution level and the complete champion spontaneous divination is like the best wizard you could possibly create before talking prestige classes.

I vote for dragonborn fire elf with Otherworldly (or Greyhawk Method / Collegiate Wizard if not in FR), taking the elven wizard sub level, then Spell Mastery (yuck!) and Uncanny Forethought (yay!) rather than the spontaneous divination thing.

[Echoes]

Only the highest level. You still don't get as many total spells per day as a specialist wizard, but you do get extra spells known and the bonus spell at your highest level (which is where most of your combat winning effects are anyways). But yeah, dragonborn grey elf with otherworldly taking the elven wizard substitution level and the complete champion spontaneous divination is like the best wizard you could possibly create before talking prestige classes.

I vote for dragonborn fire elf with Otherworldly (or Greyhawk Method / Collegiate Wizard if not in FR), taking the elven wizard sub level, then Spell Mastery (yuck!) and Uncanny Forethought (yay!) rather than the spontaneous divination thing.

Spontaneous Divination backdoors you into Versatile Spellcaster, though. It's like being a slightly more limited version of the Trollman/Suliin Sorcerer when you need to be and a normal wizard the rest of the time.

[ubernoob]

Only the highest level. You still don't get as many total spells per day as a specialist wizard, but you do get extra spells known and the bonus spell at your highest level (which is where most of your combat winning effects are anyways). But yeah, dragonborn grey elf with otherworldly taking the elven wizard substitution level and the complete champion spontaneous divination is like the best wizard you could possibly create before talking prestige classes.

I vote for dragonborn fire elf with Otherworldly (or Greyhawk Method / Collegiate Wizard if not in FR), taking the elven wizard sub level, then Spell Mastery (yuck!) and Uncanny Forethought (yay!) rather than the spontaneous divination thing.

Fire Elf gets -cha instead of -str right? That's even better. I don't remember what Spell Mastery or Uncanny Forethought are, but the last time I played a wizard, we were using the RAW where spontaneous divination gives you access to other spell lists. Particularly the cleric list Guidance of the Avatar and Divine insight in order to spend two second level spell slots (hahahahah pearls of power mother fuckers) for "I make my fucking spellcraft check to persist shit as an incantatrix"

Edit: +35 (only 10 points is even scaling with CL; 5 flat insight, 1-10 scaling insight up to CL 10, and 20 flat competence) to any skill check out of combat for two second level spells is just too good. I remember using it to just win all the social encounters with intimidate/diplomacy/bluff even though I only had a point or two in each of those skills. Just the fact that you get to break the entire RNG spontaneously for every skill makes it pretty much the most game breaking alternative class feature. I could outshine the fighter by being a better fighter (thank you buff spells), rogue (thank you cleric spells), and still be a wizard on top of it. I was seriously banned from playing wizards after bringing this character to the table. Pretty lulzy campaign though.

[NineInchNall]

Fire Elf gets -cha instead of -str right? That's even better. I don't remember what Spell Mastery or Uncanny Forethought are, but the last time I played a wizard, we were using the RAW where spontaneous divination gives you access to other spell lists. Particularly the cleric list Guidance of the Avatar and Divine insight in order to spend two second level spell slots (hahahahah pearls of power mother fuckers) for "I make my fucking spellcraft check to persist shit as an incantatrix"

Yeah, guidance of the avatar + divine insight is pretty crazy. Unfortunately they errataed that away. So now you have to get your RNG breaking from the party cleric. Aw, well.

But yeah, fire elf is like a better grey elf.

And Uncanny Forethought is the shiznizzle:

When preparing your daily allotment of spells, you can reserve a number of spell slots equal to your Intelligence modifier. As a standard action, you can use one of these slots to cast a spell that you selected for the Spell Mastery feat. The level of the slot used must be equal to or greater than the level of the spell you intend to cast.

Alternatively, as a full-round action, you can use a reserved slot to cast any spell that you know. The spell is resolved as normal, but for the purpose of the spell, your caster level is reduced by two. The level of the slot used must be equal to or greater than the level of the spell you intend to cast.

[Username17]

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.

[OgreBattle]

The best boobs of Wayne Reynolds were in Incarnum

[ubernoob]

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.

As far as I can tell:

Also, two soulmelds can't occupy the same chakra at once (with some exceptions).
At the same time that the meldshaper chooses which soulmelds to shape, he must also choose which soulmelds (if any) to bind to his chakras. The specific chakras and the number of chakra binds available to the meldshaper depends on his level. Two soulmelds can’t be bound to the same chakra.
Once he has shaped a soulmeld (and bound it to a chakra), he can’t change these decisions until he unshapes it and shapes a new soulmeld.

That said, this book is exactly as confusing as you are stating it to be.

[zugschef]

That's even better. I don't remember what Spell Mastery or Uncanny Forethought are, but the last time I played a wizard, we were using the RAW where spontaneous divination gives you access to other spell lists.

You really should read errata...

Page 52 –Spontaneous Divination - Benefit [Revision]
The first sentence should instead read, “You can spontaneously cast any spell you know from the divination school by sacrificing a prepared spell of equal or greater level.”

It's still awesome.

* * *

Nitpicking...

The story ends with Tordek asking “What in the Nine Hells is incarnum?” which basically means that there was literally no purpose whatsoever to the vignette.
[...]
I would point out at this point that so far the only real flavor text we've gotten was a short little blurb where Jozan exclaimed that he didn't know what Incarnum was. Jozan is a fucking Cleric and has fucking Spellcraft. So actually, we're on page 33 and it is revealed that the only in-character fiction we've gotten was a god damned lie. Fuck this book.
[Emphasis by me]

[Username17]

Chapter Five: Magic


With a few notable exceptions, most of the art in this book is pretty bad.

I know what you're thinking: we did the chapter that covered the rules for using Incarnum. This book is nominally about Incarnum. The book should be over now. Well, not quite. Granted everything that is actually relevant to the overly complicated subsystem explored in this book is complete, but the actual page count isn't even half finished. There's actually more to come than has already passed, and some of it is even slightly on topic.

But basically, it wouldn't be a 3.5 book if there wasn't a pile of spells for Wizards and Clerics to comb through for more evil power. So we get a list of incarnum spells. I would say that the general level of quality here is lower than in most collections of spells for this edition, which considering that there's crap like Complete Adventurer and shit is a pretty depressing claim.

Most of the spells interact with Incarnum in some way. The usual way for them to interact is to allow you to pump Essentia into them to improve their effects. Generally, these spells start at a level where they are noticeably below what you'd expect to get out of a spell of their level, and it's debatable whether they are level appropriate even with an Essentia or two popped in. Incarnum arc is demonstrably less bullshit than flaming sphere if you have it empowered with Essentia, but that's such faint praise that I really don't know what to say. When you pump Essentia into a spell, you get it back if and when the spell's duration expires, which is a third method of tracking Essentia that is totally different from the method used for Essentia feats or Essentia soulmelds. And I still don't fucking know what is supposed to happen if your Essentia totals drop to less than what you have invested into something that has an extended Essentia investment period.

Incarnum spells provide a number of ways of inflicting Wisdom damage. Which is not something you normally care about, but since you do win when your opponent runs out of Wisdom there are doubtless a number of monsters that can be most easily defeated by this method in the same way that dragons get pwned by shivering touch. I have no idea what they are, because monstrous Wisdom values are essentially picked out of a hat and follow no logic I can wrap my mind around. Somewhere, someone has probably compiled a list of monsters by Wisdom value and can tell you what monsters can be most efficiently dispatched by knocking them into incarnum walls. Frankly, I don't care enough to do that. Most insultingly, you have to spend a feat to be able to cast incarnum spells at all. As far as I know, no one willingly does that, so these spells frankly may as well not exist.

Special props go out to the spell “Channel the Mishtai” which gives you the ability to be possessed by an “Inbred moron of the late decadent period.” I am not making that up. That is really what it says. You will not in fact, ever cast that spell.

There are spells that give people open chakras and allow chakra binds for 24 hours. The spells really aren't that great, but they underline how fucking terrible all this soulmelding crap really is. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Oberoni while we were standing on a street corner back in 2003. The discussion was how very very terrible Fighters were, and his point was that he didn't think people would have a problem with a 9th level spell that just fucking gave you feats. And yet, simultaneously, these same people were content to argue that it was acceptable for a Fighter to get a feat every other level instead of real things like spells. As it happened, when WotC eventualy got around to printing his Fighter trolling spell, it was second level, but that's beside the point. The point is that if the Wizard can spend some portion of his spells to duplicate everything your class does, your class is less than a Wizard by definition. If the Wizard can do that and doesn't bother because he fucking has better shit to do, then you have bigger problems still.


Wizards get up pretty much every day feeling this way, and this book changes nothing.

This book makes a number of shoutouts to things you probably don't care about. There are some extra psionics, some new spells for the Hexblade class, and some new invocations for the Warlock. As written, you can repeat Incarnum Shroud for credit and gain hundreds or thousands of Essentia, but you still really don't care. Evidentally, the meager psionics offerings weren't enough, and there's a web enhancement of more psionic incarnum shit which I'll probably talk about after I do the last real chapter.

After spells and shit there's a bit on magic items. The first part there is a half-formed idea about having magic items be bindable to chakras to get super effects. I can't really evaluate this, because it's actually unfinished. There's a bit on how “obviously” they don't have space to talk about what all the printed magic items would do, but maybe the DM would like to pull some bonuses out of his ass. There's maybe the beginnings of an idea here, although Andy Collins' repeated insistence of trying to make all the magic item slots on the body importantly different was a non-starter the first time he trotted it out in 2002.

Then there are a bunch of new magic items that you don't care about. Sure, there are some weird combos you can pull with some of this shit, but you are never going to get any of these items. Ever.

[Username17]

Chapter Six: Prestige Classes


Does this character look noticeably different from any other warrior to you?

Magic of Incarnum is a 3.5 product, and that means it has a pile of prestige classes in it. After all, it had been noted that prestige classes sell books. This book has 10 prestige classes, and this takes up fifty four pages. That is worse than one prestige class per five pages. It is literally a quarter of the book. I think this book actually represents the apex of space wasted on prestige classes – the physical embodiment of the decadence that consumed the edition.

Now, the specific 10 PrCs thrown around in this book are among the most fucking useless I have ever seen. Mostly that's because Incarnum doesn't really play well with other power sources, and the few ways it can be effectively combined can be plugged in with a feat. But also it's because Incarnum has shitty flavor. Even if you could figure out a way to fix these prestige classes mechanically, you wouldn't care enough to try.

The awe inspiring word count wastage is achieved on many levels. Each prestige class gets a page of fluff about the class “in the world” trying to make you give a shit about their Incarnum backstory, but of course that only brings us up to 2 pages per class. We also get treated to long diatribes about “playing” a member of the prestige class. These bits are particularly tone deaf, having no bearing on what might actually be effective tactics or strategies in 3.5 D&D. I don't know if these pieces of advice were written by people who just don't play the game or if they were intended sarcastically. Really, either one wouldn't surprise me. Their suggestion for the Umbral Disciple is that they sneak around and then make a sneak attack and then try to hide again. This is deeply absurd, and not how Rogues in 3.5 D&D fight at all. Honestly, it's not how Rogues or Thieves ever fought in any edition of D&D. But even that doesn't fill their copious page count. They provide sample characters at different levels, mysterious sample dungeons, ideas for encounters, and off-topic ruminations. It really looks like someone was being paid by the page and just shat whatever they felt like out to fill space however they could. I don't know anyone who has ever read this whole chapter, the fact that it's full of filler is so obvious from even a cursory examination is so obvious that people simply rebel.

What is interesting I suppose is that this chapter exists at all. This book exists because Andy Collins had a bug up his ass about fixing everything in D&D by trying to get people to really care about their boot slot and their goggles slot. In the earliest version of Orcus, before they brought people who could do math on board, they were doing something with magic item slots and scaling buffs and shit. And obviously, they had allowed that system to get way too fucking complicated, because when it came time to convert it to a 3.5 book to focus group the ideas on D&D fans, it got turned into this pile of garbage. But of course, all the Incarnum classes and fluff was patched in at the last moment – the draft they were working with had eight classes and one of them was a Swashbuckler and none of them was an Incarnate. So the Incarnum Prestige Classes are pretty much definitely as half assed and last minute as they appear at first, second, and third glance. They are geared towards combining regular 3rd edition classes with flavors and 3rd edition hybrid mechanics that didn't exist until late in this book's design stages. Indeed, they are so last minute that the chapter may have required padding to get the book up to the target pagecount. The rest of the book was probably short, leaving this chapter to take up the slack.

It seems weird to spend the least amount of time talking about the longest chapter, but there it is. You're never going to playa Spinemeld Warrior. You're never going to read all the fluff for the Spinemeld Warriors. You don't give a fuck about daily life in the Spinemeld Warriors, and their tactical advice for playing Spinemeld Warriors is so bad that I can't tell if it's intended as parody. This entire chapter was written in a paint-by-numbers fashion to disguise a clunky 4th edition playtest document as a 3.5 product so that people would buy it and give feedback. Nothing in this chapter was ever intended to be used in play, and probably only James Wyatt ever thought there was anything in this flavor that was cool enough for anyone to care about.


Frankly, fuck Spinemeld Warriors. They are stupid.

Next up: Monsters.

[Koumei]

Oh joy, the monsters. Didn't it have something like Incarnum elementals?

[Username17]

Chapter Seven: Monsters


This Dragon has Incarnum, and is ingeniously named the “Incarnum Dragon.” It has appeared in zero other books.

The first section of the monster chapter is a half assed discussion of what chakras creatures get when they aren't shaped like humans. This should have been a warning sign that this entire project was a fucking terrible idea, but Andy Collins kept demanding to go in this direction for four years after this book came out, so apparently the fact that someone had just had to write the sentence “A couatl or Salamander, for example, treats its tail as its feet chakra.” made no impact whatsoever on the people in D&D R&D. That the entire escapade was equal parts overly confusing and totally fucking pointless in no way deterred them because the guys at the head of WotC's D&D division were for some reason convinced that if they could really hack out the difference between magic items that go on your feet and magic items that go on your shoulders, that everything would work itself out.

The second thing they did was to create the Incarnum Subtype. It is a subtype that creatures have if they use any of the incarnum crap. It doesn't do anything, and there is actually no purpose to it existing. But if you take an Incarnum feat that gives you an Essentia point, you have the Incarnum subtype as well. You might think that spells would have used the Incarnum subtype to differentiate how they dealt with creatures that did and did not have Essentia to drain, and you'd be wrong. It's actually just completely fucking pointless. Someone started to write up a thing with subtype interaction to try to save word count, and then they just didn't fucking use it because they ended up needing more wordcount rather than less.

But really, this chapter is about monsters. There are fifteen monsters in this chapter, and it takes up 30 pages. That's one monster per two pages, which is an extremely shitty use of pagecount. Even worse, four of the “monsters” in this chapter are actually just NPC writeups of the four playable races we didn't give a shit about in chapter 1. Some information is just copypastaed from earlier in the book to use up space. You get an incarnum dragon, an incarnum giant, and incarnum ooze, a corporeal and incorporeal incarnum undead, a golem and non-golem incarnum construct, a native and non-native outsider, and a template. I'm disappointed that you don't get an incarnum plant, an incarnum elemental, or an incarnum magical beast. Those seem like they would have written themselves.

The incarnum monsters are, when you get down to it, pretty pointless. The ostensible reason for doing any of this shit was to regulate buffs and item upgrades as characters go up in level and monsters don't need to do any of that shit because they have arbitrary abilities and aren't being run by powergaming players. The Incarnum Golem doesn't even have any incarnum powers, it's just a golem with shitty stats and fast healing. What monsters do have soulmelds are (like the Totem Giant and Incarnum Dragon) far too complicated to actually use on the DM's side of the screen.


Plus the monsters in this chapter mostly look like a cat tried to eat too much incarnum.

There are little maps of caves and taverns and stuff to use up space. This is the shit that people unequivocally told WotC that they did not want taking up space in monster books, but despite the fact that Bill Slavicsek knew that people felt this way, from 2005 on they just crammed more and more of this shit in to use up page count. I don't know what the point of asking your customers whether they like you doing something is if you're just going to do it more and more no matter what they say.

Next up: Incarnum Campaigns. No one runs incarnum campaigns.

[Ancient History]

I think the only thing sillier than Incarnum was how they tried to "explain" Incarnum in the already-established settings. I don't remember how Eberron did it, but in the Forgotten Realms they decided to screw the Incarnum backstory and declare it a form of "heavy magic," calling back to the old Netheril box set.

[Antariuk]

Somewhere I read that Incarnum is used by the inhabitants some islands north-west of Xen'drik. I don't know if it was in SoX or somewhere else, but it felt like someone wrote it while browsing 4chan during lunchbreak. Apparently "If it has a place in D&D, it has a place in Eberron" didn't apply retroactively... but reading Frank's review, I think that is preferable.

[fbmf]

The Spinemeld guy art has sort of a Wolverine vibe.

Game On,
fbmf