The perfect book to create a new flavor for your magic system.

Sweet. THIS is the kind of material that PDFs should be covering - giving players and DMs more flexibility in options... and I'm not talking about reams more prestige classes or feats (I'm sick to death of them).

Awesome work and well worth the money.

Very original ideas! Makes play like novels and movies, but I modified the generic system outlined to create my own homebrew version. Using the 20 elements outlined you can create all kinds of interesting spells. Tired of fireballs and magic missiles? Then this is the book to revolutionize your campaign. It brought my magic system into a whole new renaissance!

Great system. It does have some flaws/exploitable areas but all in all it is a great product.

This product is great! A must for anyone looking for a magic system with more "flavor".

At first when I looked at it, I said, "Whoa, this is really changing the game!". But then, change can be a good thing.

I don't plan to run clerics, druids, rangers, or paladins with this book, but I can see running an arcane spellcaster with it. For bards, I would recommend checking out the Book of Eldritch Might 2 by Malhavoc Press.

That said, it looks like it makes wizards/sorcerers the way that I wish they were in the first place. It makes them cool. No more memorizing your spells. Instead you get spell points (a lot like psionic power points). In such a campaign you could drop the divine and psionic powers altogether.

After I get used to the system I plan to come up with a few more spell lists (i.e. when I notice that I want a given spell effect).

This book makes me excited to play a mage again!

Though not active on the ENWorld boards, I hang around (an dread them obsessively). Until it came out, I was chomping at the bit to get it, and now that I have and have had some experience in my game with the rules, I figured I should review.

Overall, they are much simplier to use (to me). My players, on the other hand were daunted by the charts and complained of a steep learning curve. Once they got over themselves, it worked very well; the novice player is actually much better at remembering the progressions and such than our resident rules lawyer. My group consists of a classic black mage (HADOKEN!), a polymorph-oriented mage, a fighter, a PHB cleric, a rogue, and monk/red mage.

The main problems you'll run into with this are the learning curve for those players (and DMs) who are already well entrenched in the system as presented in the PHB, the inability to use other spell expansions without modification into a spell list, and holes in what the spell lists can accomplish (I think specifically of the language oriented spells). I believe there's another coming out sometime (hopefully soon), and that's on the top of my to-buy list.

Despite all the seemingly horrible things I've said about it, it is an amazing, well-balanced product that works well for myself and my group. For a more complete and in depth review, see Adam Schmidt's review.

I had been waiting for Elements of Magic to be released ever since I had first heard about the project. I've really wanted an alternate magic system that gave the feel of mages and wizards I'd read about in books and seen on the big screen. Bottom line, Elements of Magic presents a system that is much, much closer to that feel than anything I've seen previously in D20 but unfortunately falls short on just a few points.

The artwork is good but not up to the standards of Wizards or Mongoose. I wouldn't say the art is bad... it's just not great. Fortunately, it's not overused and gives the book a more comfortable feel than straight text.

The layout is well done with convenient sidebars to make useful information stand out on the page. The only problem here is that some of the sidebars have textured graphics as backgrounds which can make them hard to read in the full-color version.

At 98 pages (including cover and OGL) it's reasonably hefty for a PDF and it's got plenty of crunch to it. There's nothing inside that gave the feel of padding the text and at the same time, other than adding even more spell lists (as if there aren't plenty as is) I can't think of anything the book lacks.

As is becoming standard, there's both a pretty, full-color version with the aforementioned art and a printer-friendly version with the page frames and some of the art removed. I say some of the art because only some of the pictures were removed and where they were removed, the hole in the text where they were is still there which makes for a slightly odd look on the printed page.

We get a good introduction to the new ideas in EoM. There's an overview of the new magic system, a good description of the 20 elements, and some general information on blanket rule-changes. I really like the elemental side effects... things like fire making things burn is obvious but to have rules for just how much smoke (and therefore concealment) is put out by an Evoke Area Fire spell (similar to a fireball) is pretty cool. And to have this for all 20 elements is wonderful. The only negative thing I could come up with is the name for the nature-oriented element... Biomatter. Literally my first house-rule is that I'm changing the name to the element of Nature.

There's one main spellcasting class presented, the Mage. In addition, we're given five subclasses as examples of specialists. The Black Mage (an elementalist), White Mage (working with life and death magic), Green Mage (excellent replacement Druid), Grey Mage (focused on death and earth magic), and Red Mage (concentrating on Life and Air magic). Beyond that, we're given alternate classes for the Ranger, Bard, and Paladin. The Ranger is a definite improvement over the PH version. The Bard feels a bit lacking without the Bardic Music abilities... they've been converted by and large to spell lists. The Paladin gets a well-deserved boost in player choice but somewhere in the mix, turning undead is lost.

In fact, turning undead leads me to the big thing I didn't like about the classes... their handling of clerics. All of the spellcasters from the Player's Handbook could be replaced with their EoM counterparts pretty easily except for the cleric. The closest class presented is the White Mage who doesn't turn undead, doesn't get bonus domains from their deity, gets a d4 hit die, and can't wear armor... but can cast life and death magic at the same time? So here's my second house-rule where I'll be creating a cleric class that uses spell lists.

Finally counterspelling seems useful! An excellent set of rules for dispeling magic and counterspells as a skill which draws on the caster's magic points. Several years of gaming in 3rd edition without ever seeing a player actually use a counterspell may finally be over. Equally good is the conversion of divination to a skill-based system similar to the scrying system (which gets several needed enhancements). Intuit direction gets boosted as well by making the detect spells a magic point fueled skill check. Virtually everything in this chapter is long overdue for 3e and I'll be happily suggesting it to my players.

Really this is a nice essay on magic in fantasy worlds including sources of power, the impact of magic on society, and help for DM's in bringing magic into a world and making it feel special. In addition, we get 50 character ideas several of which are really incredible. Great for sparking the imagination. And last we get several sample characters with spell information, appearance, history, and more to give you a good feel for just how this system works in creating a character.

A nice brief template for elementals of various sizes which lets even a 1st level caster summon an elemental.

Ah... the part we're all waiting for. Right up front they tell you that the spell lists give generic names and should be replaced in game to reflect the specifics of the spell... so that Evoke Fire 3 might become Sunbolt of Ra or Hirak's Heat Ray. But generic as they are, these spell lists can easily duplicate the effects of 80-90% of the spells that have ever been published for 3rd Edition.

Variant rules are presented for things like defiling magic, magic from a summoned patron (such as a demon, elemental, or spirit), magic based on living sacrifices, rune magic, wild spellcraft, and spellsongs.

The spell lists themselves are amazingly flexible and often surprising... have you ever thought what a 1st level Wish spell would look like? How about a cantrip version? It's in here and I have to admit, it's seriously cool. Even if you don't implement the full magic system into your game, this chapter alone is worth the cost of the PDF just to have the guidelines for creating new spells. There's 47 spell lists presented (by my count) and about 75% of them are specific to a creature type or element so the actual count is well into the hundreds if not thousands of spell lists... each with 10 spells from 0-9th level.

I really like Elements of Magic and it's well worth the 7.95 I spent on it. I'll be implementing EoM in my campaign with a few alterations to correct those parts I view as flaws. Things in my opinion like the poorly handled Cleric class, the absense of bardic music, and the semi-bland Paladin.

While EoM is designed to slot into an existing campaign and even co-exist with Player's Handbook defined magic, it doesn't have much flexibility when it comes to slotting in Player's Handbook spells and the rich library of 3rd party spells (like the Books of Eldritch Magic) into their spell system. While comprehensive, there are some magical effects that EoM's spell lists can't duplicate and there's no method listed to incorporate them whether by creating new spell lists or alternate rules suggesting how to handle the situation.

Don't get me wrong... comparatively these are minor issues compared to the overwhelming improvements in the magic system EoM presents. The very few issues I found fault with will be house-ruled away and what I'll have is a vastly better magic system that really lets the players be like the mages they've read about and seen on screen. I've enjoyed each of the products from Natural 20 Press and this one certainly did not disappoint.