I purchased this product on advice from a friend who wanted to play a specific Spellstaff Prestige Class. How often in fantasy literature do the characters throw away their magical items? Rarely, if ever, right?<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: Items becoming more powerful as a character progresses.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Prestige Class requirements being linked to the Staff as well as to the Prestige Classes themselves.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

Now a character can have a cool staff that the character earns. It gets more powerful as he does. No more need to replace your staff when you need a better one.<br><br><b>LIKED</b>: An interesting way to earn a signature item of power<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Spending levels on a magical item? What if it is lost or destroyed?<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

I liked this product a lot ... it is very creative and complete!

I bought this and Swords of our fathers after being intrigued by the options in Unearthed Arcana. I was not disappoited, this is an idea that has been needed for a long time. No longer will your players just drop their magic sword when a new one shows up. With weapons that grow with your character your weapon will never be outdated.

An interesting book, and a great starting point if you want to introduce the idea of having truly legendary weapons in your game (a la most fantasy novels as opposed to the typical D&D flavor of characters owning stacks of throwaway +1 swords).

I guess my only complaint was that I didn't really like the idea of having to take levels in a class entirely dedicated to your weapon. On one hand the weapons are typically better -- in power and in flavor/interest -- on the other hand you figure you could have taking a PrC and just bought a better sword when you needed one.

I still give it 4/5 since it was nevertheless a pretty good book, with plenty of background for each weapon. Even if you didn't like the class levels idea you could use the weapons anyway and just dole them out at appropriate points in your campaign.

Ultimately, I find that the basic mechanic suggested fails. The idea is to take levels in a 'Scion Class' to slowly uncover the potent abiltiies of legendary staves. It brings about an exaggerated reliance on said item, and worse severly limits the spellcaster's class options, pigeon-holing him into a specific role. I think there are better mechanics to do this.

The staves themselves I found to be rather unimpressive and unispired. I bought this after buying Swords of Our Fathers and expected magic items of the same caliber. I was sadly disappointed.

Its nice to a piece about a magic item that doesn't always get the center stage like the sword does. Staves was well written. Highly recommended.

Pretty good; adds new flavor into your magic items.

Like I stated when I reviewed Swords of Our Fathers, I think it's a little silly to want to take levels in a prestige class to gain the powers of a magic item. The concept is unique, and it has merit, but just doesn't appeal to me at all.

This was ok. Nothing Super though the idea is very very intriging. I just wish they better explained how and why the mechanics work. They give you a bunch of sample prestige classes but I just felt it was lacking in clarification to create my own for my game.

Now since they made this they have but teh Staves and Sowrds together in a print for mat and I did buy that hoping for more clarity and more options but sadly I was disappointed.

This is a neat idea but not carried off super well, just ok.

Staves of Ascendance is the second book in The Game Mechanics' legendary items series. The first book in the series, Swords of Our Fathers, introduced us to the concept of legendary weapons that stick with a character rather than simply being traded in for something "better" next time around. Like SoOF, this book focuses on providing rich backstory and numerous adventure hooks along with the basic game information needed to run the weapon, making this book more than simply a collection of magic items and crunchy bits.

The first chapter of the book contains both good news and bad news. The bad news is that much of the introduction is almost identical to that presented in SoOF. However, given the nature of the book and the need to explain certain basic concepts, this is understandable. The good news is that this makes the book a completely standalone tome and does not require the reader to have purchased the first book in the series. If this is your first time picking up a book in this series you won't be baffled or left out in the cold, which means that you don't have to spend more money. It's unfortunate that this material takes up so much of the book, though. In all honesty, this is the only reason this book gets a 4 instead of a 5. It would have been nice if they had padded the book with new information equal in size to the reprinted info; that way, readers of both books get equal amounts of new material while new readers can jump in at any point. There's even a Web Enhancement on TGM's site that details how to create new magic staves for spellcasters. Why couldn't this information have been included in the book? Sure, you get it for free anyways, but it seems like it would have made the book itself that much more well-rounded and would also have benefitted from the formatting of the book. It just seems as though we lose page space to reprinted material that could have been made up for with a longer supplement. After all, more pages doesn't mean a higher printing cost in this case. The chapter also includes some changes to the scion prestige classes that help delineate the differences between the wielders of swords and those that choose staves, particularly by adding bonus feats like Two-Weapon fighting so that the bearer gains full use of the weapon.

The second chapter really shines, though. Despite the fact that there are less staves overall than there were weapons in the previous book, there seems to be no lack of original and inspired material. Once again, each weapon contains not only game mechanics and crunchy bits but also a rich, vivid history and a plethora of adventure hooks. One of the great things about this section is that it draws upon a shared game world when developing histories; there are a number of references to backstories and legends from SoOF that help DMs flesh out intertwined backgrounds. In fact, one would imagine that as more books in the legendary items series comes out, intertwined histories can be used to logically give an entire party legendary items without it seeming like each one is completely random. Shared backstories are good! Another neat thing is that there is a large section devoted to the creation of staves that benefit a particular school of magic. Since these staves will be more likely to be wielded by arcane magic users, it makes sense to dedicate this kind of section to spellstaves. The neat thing is that the section details information on building staves for each of the schools of magic while providing examples for the Divination staff, meaning that you essentially get multiple staves for the price of one. Additionally, this chapter covers rods in addition to staves, thus making the selection a little more diverse.

One of the great things about this book is that the guys that crafted the PDF have done an outstanding job of addressing the complaints I had about the first PDF. The PDF contains both front and back covers, is indexed with bookmarks to easily jump from one section to another, and still remaind a decent filesize. With these changes to the PDF file, any points I took away from the first book have to be given back. It makes the file much easier to read, and still maintains a high level of quality. Well done!

I reccommend this book just as highly as SoOF, though buyers of both should beware rehashed material. The book does a lot of things right, and offers a lot of great ideas for DMs wishing to make magic items in their game more meaningful. As this series progresses, the diversity of items should prove to be useful so as not to have entire parties wielding legendary items of one type. TGM's high quality presentation of these weapons is worth the price of the file if only for the inspiration that the book incites in readers.