Hung Over Review: Magic of Incarnum
Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2013 10:23 am
Magic of Incarnum
A New Source of Power for Your D&D Game
This will be in the style of an OSSR or drunken review, but I started it while hung over. So this will be a “hung over review.” Having spent 16 hours drinking all the beer and all the Jameson and Coke, I don't think I intend to drink any more during this reading. We're setting the wayback machine to 2005, which means we aren't quite doing something “old school,” but are instead drinking and ranting about a transitional fossil: something that served as a waypost on the way to the catastrophe that was 4th edition D&D. In 2005, we now know, the WotC design team had begun working on a ground-up redesign of Dungeons & Dragons, codenamed Orcus. And while it is historical reality that Orcus appears to have been kind of cool, Mike Mearls convinced them to scrap it in favor of making a new new ground up redesign that had daily power use limits front and center. Ironically, Mearls then grabbed some of the stuff they had been working on with Orcus, converted it in a half-assed manner to 3rd edition rules, and released it as Tome of Battle, which got rave reviews and is the most popular book Mearls ever worked on.
But in 2005, that hadn't happened yet and WotC had just come up with the idea of focus grouping ideas for 4th edition by making books with more radical ideas in them and then selling them for real money. Essentially, they were charging people to give them 4th edition feedback. And this manifested as three books: Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and the first release of the series: Magic of Incarnum. Magic of Incarnum did terribly enough that it probably was used as ammunition by Mearls when arguing that the entire project should be scrapped and they should start working on a system that was much more “Vancian” to be more “D&D like.” So by the time Tome of Battle actually got released, they were in essence charging people money to playtest an idea they had already decided that they weren't going to use – which made their marketing really weird in 2008 after it was clear that the Book of Nine Swords stuff they had shit canned was actually relatively popular. The double-think message of the day then was that they had learned from Tome of Battle – although apparently “learning from” in this case meant that they had fired the main designer and allowed Mearls to sell off pieces as unfinished hack work.
Magic of Incarnum itself is probably the most radical of the alternate system idea books. It's not actually clear if they just started with the craziest one, or if they self censored on the others because Incarnum had faired so poorly. The core idea is that they were going to make an underlying association between magic item slots, magical buffs, and character level. And that they were going to make a relationship between item & buff power and character level as well. In short: that they were going to fix “wealth by level” by making the amount of power you get from magic tongue studs and buff spells at any level be a hard coded thing. In abstract, that sounds really cool and I can see how someone would have approved this book based on the one paragraph pitch. However, in actual reality it had James Wyatt at the head of the design team, Andy Collins at the head of the development team, and seemingly no one anywhere who really had any idea of how to fit a mathematical progression.
Magic of Incarnum credits sixteen people on the writing side. There are Designers, Additional Design, Development Team, Editors, Editing Manager, Design Manager, Development Manager, Director of RPG R&D, and Production Managers. Not a single person is actually credited with writing any of this fucking thing. I assume the three guys on “design” and one guy on “additional design” actually wrote it (their names are on the front cover, after all), but I have no idea why they would need six people who were managers or directors for a book hacked out by only four people – nor do I know what the “development team” was supposed to be doing other than drawing a paycheck.
The credits page gives thanks to past editions of D&D and also says they are using some stuff from Bastion of Broken Souls, Planar Handbook, Manual of the Planes, Monster Manual II, Fiend Folio, Miniatures Handbook, and Frostburn. That list probably seems pretty eclectic to you, but it basically means they name checked a bunch of monsters from books you may or may not have heard of. The book is 221 pages long, so I guess we'd better get started.
Introduction
Shit just got weird.
The introduction is three pages and tries to set the tone for the fluff of the book and get across the core concepts of Incarnum. This is really bad. From a game mechanical standpoint, the concept is really just that higher level people can use more magic items, and also that they get more juice out of the magic items they have, and finally that they can trade their magic item slots for level appropriate buffs. I just stated the whole mission statement in one sentence, and it probably sounds like a pretty good idea because it's a pretty good fucking idea. Unfortunately, this book came with some really wonky fluff and more importantly it had far too many moving parts and was flat designed poorly. So it never really caught on.
The first part of the introduction is a third of a page story about Lidda and Tordek running into a guy who is a “Pentifex Monolith” who then tells them that there is Incarnum going on. 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. You start not knowing what the hell incarnum is, and you end still not knowing what it is. On the next page, they have a picture of the dude from the story and assure you in the caption that they will bother to tell you what the fuck a Pentifex Monolith is on page two hundred and fucking nine. I will try to not ruin the suspense.
The introduction then spends a page and a half defining the terms they intend to use in this book. There is Incarnum, Soulmelds, Essentia, Chakras, and Chakrabinds. That's five new terms they are asking you to memorize, and all of them sound like they mean the same thing. In fact, “soulmeld” and “chakrabind” literally mean the same thing, so people had a lot of problems trying to learn this system. Much more problems than they would have if there were any linguistic clues at all as to what was a slot and what was a thing that went into a slot. There are of course additional extremely important terms that they don't bother to give headings or even definitions for in the introduction. It casually mentions that you have ten different chakras and can access them for binding purposes in some order based on your level – but the terminology of what that is actually called is not mentioned here. We are assured that the full rules for using this shit will be in Chapter 4 or perhaps Chapter 5. I'll try not to ruin the surprise.
While we're on the subject of the ten different fucking chakras, I just want to emphasize how fucking terrible it is that you have ten different fucking chakras. That is not OK. Ten slots to keep track of would be kind of much to deal with at a real table. Ten numbered slots would be a total pain in the ass. Ten slots where one of them is specifically a “crown” slot and another is a “brow” slot and it's supposedly extremely important which is which? Fuck that. I am a god damned doctor and I couldn't tell you what the difference between glowing blue energy coalescing around your crown and glowing blue energy coalescing around your brow is. Those really sound pretty similar to me. Although as you read this book, you do realize that the glowing power energy in this book is very definitely always blue. They only hint at this a little bit in the introduction, which is weird because it's so ingrained into the rest of the book that people call the book “magic of blue.”
The last page or so of the introduction is a bit on using “as much or as little” of the book as you wanted. Which is to say that rather than nutting up and actually putting down some hard and fast rules about how the game was supposed to work (like say, the “eight item limit” that K and I championed), they try to make the book be a dim sum menu that you can pick and choose things off of. This is a catastrophe. What it ends up meaning is that the only way this book ever got used by anyone is to cherry pick some really tiny part of it and graft it onto a character. I mean, did you know you even had a “brow slot” or a “heart slot?” If not, would you like to trade one of them for real and measurable power?
So Magic of Incarnum was already telling you pretty much straight up that it was over two hundred and twenty pages of obscure crap to sift through in order to dumpster dive yourself real but probably minor power upgrades even before you were done with the intro. It made lots of DMs reject this book out of hand. Between the vast complexity and the fact that it was essentially billed as pointless power creep (hell, even the front cover says it is a “new source of power”) meant that few DMs were tempted to learn how the system was supposed to work. But how did it work? The answer was really “not very well,” but I guess we should wait for the chapters that actually explain that shit.
A New Source of Power for Your D&D Game
This will be in the style of an OSSR or drunken review, but I started it while hung over. So this will be a “hung over review.” Having spent 16 hours drinking all the beer and all the Jameson and Coke, I don't think I intend to drink any more during this reading. We're setting the wayback machine to 2005, which means we aren't quite doing something “old school,” but are instead drinking and ranting about a transitional fossil: something that served as a waypost on the way to the catastrophe that was 4th edition D&D. In 2005, we now know, the WotC design team had begun working on a ground-up redesign of Dungeons & Dragons, codenamed Orcus. And while it is historical reality that Orcus appears to have been kind of cool, Mike Mearls convinced them to scrap it in favor of making a new new ground up redesign that had daily power use limits front and center. Ironically, Mearls then grabbed some of the stuff they had been working on with Orcus, converted it in a half-assed manner to 3rd edition rules, and released it as Tome of Battle, which got rave reviews and is the most popular book Mearls ever worked on.
But in 2005, that hadn't happened yet and WotC had just come up with the idea of focus grouping ideas for 4th edition by making books with more radical ideas in them and then selling them for real money. Essentially, they were charging people to give them 4th edition feedback. And this manifested as three books: Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and the first release of the series: Magic of Incarnum. Magic of Incarnum did terribly enough that it probably was used as ammunition by Mearls when arguing that the entire project should be scrapped and they should start working on a system that was much more “Vancian” to be more “D&D like.” So by the time Tome of Battle actually got released, they were in essence charging people money to playtest an idea they had already decided that they weren't going to use – which made their marketing really weird in 2008 after it was clear that the Book of Nine Swords stuff they had shit canned was actually relatively popular. The double-think message of the day then was that they had learned from Tome of Battle – although apparently “learning from” in this case meant that they had fired the main designer and allowed Mearls to sell off pieces as unfinished hack work.
Magic of Incarnum itself is probably the most radical of the alternate system idea books. It's not actually clear if they just started with the craziest one, or if they self censored on the others because Incarnum had faired so poorly. The core idea is that they were going to make an underlying association between magic item slots, magical buffs, and character level. And that they were going to make a relationship between item & buff power and character level as well. In short: that they were going to fix “wealth by level” by making the amount of power you get from magic tongue studs and buff spells at any level be a hard coded thing. In abstract, that sounds really cool and I can see how someone would have approved this book based on the one paragraph pitch. However, in actual reality it had James Wyatt at the head of the design team, Andy Collins at the head of the development team, and seemingly no one anywhere who really had any idea of how to fit a mathematical progression.
Magic of Incarnum credits sixteen people on the writing side. There are Designers, Additional Design, Development Team, Editors, Editing Manager, Design Manager, Development Manager, Director of RPG R&D, and Production Managers. Not a single person is actually credited with writing any of this fucking thing. I assume the three guys on “design” and one guy on “additional design” actually wrote it (their names are on the front cover, after all), but I have no idea why they would need six people who were managers or directors for a book hacked out by only four people – nor do I know what the “development team” was supposed to be doing other than drawing a paycheck.
The credits page gives thanks to past editions of D&D and also says they are using some stuff from Bastion of Broken Souls, Planar Handbook, Manual of the Planes, Monster Manual II, Fiend Folio, Miniatures Handbook, and Frostburn. That list probably seems pretty eclectic to you, but it basically means they name checked a bunch of monsters from books you may or may not have heard of. The book is 221 pages long, so I guess we'd better get started.
Introduction
Shit just got weird.
The introduction is three pages and tries to set the tone for the fluff of the book and get across the core concepts of Incarnum. This is really bad. From a game mechanical standpoint, the concept is really just that higher level people can use more magic items, and also that they get more juice out of the magic items they have, and finally that they can trade their magic item slots for level appropriate buffs. I just stated the whole mission statement in one sentence, and it probably sounds like a pretty good idea because it's a pretty good fucking idea. Unfortunately, this book came with some really wonky fluff and more importantly it had far too many moving parts and was flat designed poorly. So it never really caught on.
The first part of the introduction is a third of a page story about Lidda and Tordek running into a guy who is a “Pentifex Monolith” who then tells them that there is Incarnum going on. 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. You start not knowing what the hell incarnum is, and you end still not knowing what it is. On the next page, they have a picture of the dude from the story and assure you in the caption that they will bother to tell you what the fuck a Pentifex Monolith is on page two hundred and fucking nine. I will try to not ruin the suspense.
The introduction then spends a page and a half defining the terms they intend to use in this book. There is Incarnum, Soulmelds, Essentia, Chakras, and Chakrabinds. That's five new terms they are asking you to memorize, and all of them sound like they mean the same thing. In fact, “soulmeld” and “chakrabind” literally mean the same thing, so people had a lot of problems trying to learn this system. Much more problems than they would have if there were any linguistic clues at all as to what was a slot and what was a thing that went into a slot. There are of course additional extremely important terms that they don't bother to give headings or even definitions for in the introduction. It casually mentions that you have ten different chakras and can access them for binding purposes in some order based on your level – but the terminology of what that is actually called is not mentioned here. We are assured that the full rules for using this shit will be in Chapter 4 or perhaps Chapter 5. I'll try not to ruin the surprise.
While we're on the subject of the ten different fucking chakras, I just want to emphasize how fucking terrible it is that you have ten different fucking chakras. That is not OK. Ten slots to keep track of would be kind of much to deal with at a real table. Ten numbered slots would be a total pain in the ass. Ten slots where one of them is specifically a “crown” slot and another is a “brow” slot and it's supposedly extremely important which is which? Fuck that. I am a god damned doctor and I couldn't tell you what the difference between glowing blue energy coalescing around your crown and glowing blue energy coalescing around your brow is. Those really sound pretty similar to me. Although as you read this book, you do realize that the glowing power energy in this book is very definitely always blue. They only hint at this a little bit in the introduction, which is weird because it's so ingrained into the rest of the book that people call the book “magic of blue.”
The last page or so of the introduction is a bit on using “as much or as little” of the book as you wanted. Which is to say that rather than nutting up and actually putting down some hard and fast rules about how the game was supposed to work (like say, the “eight item limit” that K and I championed), they try to make the book be a dim sum menu that you can pick and choose things off of. This is a catastrophe. What it ends up meaning is that the only way this book ever got used by anyone is to cherry pick some really tiny part of it and graft it onto a character. I mean, did you know you even had a “brow slot” or a “heart slot?” If not, would you like to trade one of them for real and measurable power?
So Magic of Incarnum was already telling you pretty much straight up that it was over two hundred and twenty pages of obscure crap to sift through in order to dumpster dive yourself real but probably minor power upgrades even before you were done with the intro. It made lots of DMs reject this book out of hand. Between the vast complexity and the fact that it was essentially billed as pointless power creep (hell, even the front cover says it is a “new source of power”) meant that few DMs were tempted to learn how the system was supposed to work. But how did it work? The answer was really “not very well,” but I guess we should wait for the chapters that actually explain that shit.