School of Illusion A D20 System supplement from Fantasy Flight Games Rating:

First of all, you know that the illusion school is subdivided into five types: figments, glamer, patterns, etc. "School of Illusion" further subdivides illusions into nine disciplines, which mix and overlap with the five types. These disciplines are avoidance, deception, disguise, fascination, invisibility, message, shadow, terror and true illusion. I feel that this step needlessly complicates the school of illusion without a remarkable payoff for the effort.

This book is above all a compendium of prestige classes, spells and magic items. Illusion magic is not very much discussed as a subject on its own; rather it is portrayed through these prestige classes, spells and magic items.

A new core class (20 levels), the Devoted Illusionist, describes the apotheosis of the illusionist: he can only cast spells from the school of illusion and gets heightened caster level and can use metamagic feats without his spells taking higher level slots. He eventually becomes immune to illusions. He masters some of the nine disciplines and can spontaneously cast spells from those disciplines the way a good cleric casts cure spells.

Nine new prestige classes describe specialists of each of the nine illusion disciplines. Some of these are pretty interesting and unusual. About half are considerable for PCs, the rest can make interesting NPCs but are too focused and limited to specific abilities to be much fun to play as a PC on the long term. It is a remarkable asset of the book that these classes will work absolutely fine even if you use them without the nine disciplines subdivision suggested here.

Let me give you an give an idea of the content: a prestige class called The Dread Lord focuses on the terror discipline and generates a fear spell-like effect, and also makes creatures' reaction to fear worse within a 60' radius (shaken to frightened to panicked). The Deceiver prestige class creates short-lived magic items and replicates magic phenomena with successful bluff checks. The Unseen Master becomes more and more undetectable, by any means, and gets better bonuses for being invisible (miss chance for being hit increases from 50%).

On another note, the prerequisites for these prestige classes are strange as far as I can tell. Most of them require of characters wanting to join them to have 8 ranks in skills that are cross-class for wizards and sorcerers (usually Bluff, Hide, and Move Silently) and be able to cast at least two 3rd level spells. It means multiclassing. I wonder if this is purposeful or erroneous; the numbers seem strange to me.

The meat of the book is some 60 new spells. I have strong reservations about these spells. Some of the 0 level spells are definitely more powerful than they should be. I am suspicious of "Bard6, Sor/Wis9" spells in terms of game mechanics. And I do not like the tendency to create spells that should be of the evocation, divination, abjuration or enchantment school and call them illusion spells, which the book does a lot, to let illusionists do things that they should not do as illusionists. In this respect, this book is no better than the Mongoose book about illusionism, which I liked even less than this one, but of which I will not write a review, so I thought I'd let you know. Some of the spells in "School of Illusion" are pretty cool, but as far as I am concerned, the material is too unpredictable and lopsided to be introduced wholeheartedly in my campaign. That is the main reason why this books only gets two Valet hearts.

The part of this book I like best is the non-magical equipment section which describes all sorts of material that let an illusionist make the DC to disbelieve his spells higher. Explosives help evocation-replicating spells seem more realistic, miniatures help the caster create more realistic illusions, and that sort of thing.

Let me conclude by saying that as far as I am concerned, the definitive book on Illusionism for the d20 system can still be written.

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