INSIDE BOOK OF THE ARCHON

The Book of the Archon is our latest Pay-What-You-Want release (with a suggested price of $0.00). It is basically a whole new spell book for Sertorius and I want to talk a bit about what people can expect from it. 

First this is a completely new list of spells. There is as much magic in here as there was in the core game and you can use this to compliment those or as a replacement for them (up to you). 

Each book of the Archon will have a theme or tone for the new spells. For book of the Archon I we tried to go as over-the-top as we could, and make magic that was more awe-inspiring and flavorful than the we have in the core rules. In our core game we wanted something much more balanced because this was our initial release of the game and the core system. With Book of the Archon we allowed ourselves to experiment more and leaned on the random spell acquisition method for the balancing factor (you don't have to use the random method for Book of the Archon but we recommend it in this case because there are differences in power level from spell to spell). 

THE SPELL TABLE
(Column III is All category so repeated)

We deliberately designed some spells to be more potent than others, giving every spell an unofficial ranking of 1-10. We knew going in how may 10s we wanted and how many 1s we wanted. The point was to open up more possibilities by allowing for lower power spells that do interesting an flavorful things and for truly epic spells. To balance this out we focused more on the Random Spell Table during character creation. 

The end result really worked in our own campaign. The general consensus was these were by and large more entertaining and exciting than the spells in the core game. 

I think this was partly due to the approach we took (where we allowed randomness to smooth out the balance). But it was also a product of being more comfortable with the system and understanding arrived at from regular play (I think when we started Book of the Archon we had been playing with the original spells for two years and we had a full year after that to play with the new spells). 

My personal feeling is the spells are just a lot more flavorful. One of my personal favorites is the Pestilent Smile of Tiresias, which can cause a lethal plague of joy. I also like spells like Awakened Death (just a solid undead producing spell). Aperture of Po was another one that people really liked. 

THE PESTILENT SMILE OF TIRESIAS

It is a free product so there are fewer bells and whistles than the core book. However we still tried hard to make it look nice and to make sure the content was solid. People who want to contribute to the line in some way can pay if they choose but we recommend $0.00 for the price. Incidentally if you do decide to pay more than zero and are unhappy with the product, send me an email at BedrockBrendan@gmail.com and I will give you two free PDFs of your choice. 

We are going to do something similar with Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. However Ogre Gate is being funded more like the core game and going to have a lot more art (it will also be released as a print book). 

If you are interested in checking it out, you can find Book of the Archon here: BOOK OF THE ARCHON: THE SCROLLS OF NICODEMUS.