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This is a tough one to review. I won’t be using this for the table, and certainly I wouldn’t burden my players with this guide. And while that’s true, I still think it’s just neat.
I love the idea. I applaud it. As a matter of fact, I search it out. Whenever a designer spends the time to come up with a fun way to diagram information or create a semiotic system for RPG games I tend to get giddy. So many RPG books sit on the shelf because the designer spent enough time to make some cool little game for GM to create a diagram that only someone who knew how to decode what they were looking at mean something. And this book is exactly that, a cool way to diagram spells, and only someone who knew how to break the code would be able to read it by looking at the symbol you’ve made.
It’s not opaque by any means, the author walks you through their idea, and has all the references necessary for making it work once you read the theory. With a dash of imagination, a few colored pencils, and some marks on the diagram, you could create a brand-new spell with this and have a custom diagram to go along with it. It’s a cool idea.
The best part of this for me really was getting to ponder attributes. Attributes define tangible effect and outcome of a spell on the game world, and the author doesn’t necessarily dig deep into this subject on purpose I suppose, but in all this it opened my imagination and allowed me to unearth some fun ideas about spell design purely from this perspective.
My major critique for this is really about presentation. The document is italicized the whole way through. And it’s in a display font intended to mimic cursive. While I appreciate the intent to have this document be presented as a sort of handwritten diatribe from some wizardly scholar on how to diagram spells, it also is a burden to read in this presentation.
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