A fun set of rules for "grittier" magic for the Pathfinder game, including a system for spell failure, spell critical fumbles and hits, methods for increasing the chance of success, magical areas with "charges" that bestow benefits to spellcasters, rituals, an alternate method of magical skill progression, spell poisoning, and a Scholar class with appropriate skills and feats.

This resource reminds me of my own attempts, years ago, to create spell failure rules for AD&D (which itself was a pretty miserable fumble). The info contained is clear and straightforward, and most of it could be converted to many other RPGs easily. There is no art other than the cover, which just leaves room for more "grittiness."

In Pathfinder, magic seems fairly mutable. After all, there’s a plethora of spells already, and if you start looking at PF-compatible products, that amount skyrockets dramatically; surely whatever magical effect you’re looking for is easily found somewhere, right? Well yes, if you’re looking for a given spell effect…but not so much if you want the actual method of casting to be different. In that case, your options shrink dramatically. If you want magic to be a rare, dangerous thing that’s corruptive and unpredictable, then there isn’t much out there for you…until Eridanus Books came along with Grittier Magic, a sourcebook that puts the risk back into your magic. Let’s take a look inside.

Grittier Magic is a sixteen-page PDF file, including a page for the cover and a page for the OGL. It has no bookmarks, which I frown on but isn’t a big deal given its page-count and that it has a table of contents. It also has very little artwork to speak of; while the cover image is quite cool, the only other piece of work is a black-and-white version of the cover character about halfway through the book.

It should also be noted that Grittier Magic is complementary to Eridanus Books’ other supplement, Grittier, but does not reference it. The two are separate sourcebooks that don’t reference each other at all, letting you use them independently, though they do work very well together. Like its predecessor, Grittier Magic is broken down into various sub-sections that each cover a different idea, being fairly modular in design. You can take what’s in one section and ignore the next, for the most part.

The book’s first section covers changes to actually casting a given spell. This introduces a Spellcraft check in order to successfully cast a given spell. I liked this, but I wasn’t sure about the method used for calculating the DC – I couldn’t think of a better way to set it up, but really it’s going to be pretty much a foregone conclusion that you’ll succeed at the roll when you hit the higher levels.

Beyond that, you can have a critical or fumble on this check, despite it being a skill check, if you roll a respective natural 20 or 1, with accompanying tables for the randomly-determined effect of the crit or fumble. Finally, there’s a table of actions you can take to increase your chances of making a successful Spellcraft check, which range from the innocuous (spend a full round casting it) to the rather brutal (make a human sacrifice). Again, I did like this, but the options to sacrifice your own hit points or ability points were too easily overcome; saying they can’t be cured until after the spell is cast isn’t so much a restriction as it is a speed bump, since “after the spell is cast” will generally mean after your turn in the initiative count.

It should also be noted that, much to my enjoyment, the book is peppered with sidebars offering commentary on various parts of the work here. I quite enjoy those, as these “behind the curtain” sidebars are always interesting. Knowing why the author did what he did lends greater insight into the book.

The next section of the book deals with magical areas – these are various “power spots” where a certain school of magic has bonuses to Spellcraft or Use Magic Device checks on spells/magic items associated with it (such as for spellcasting as detailed in the previous section), and all other schools take a matching penalty. The level of power these bestow is also measured in charges; you can use up a power spot, though they may recharge over time.

Of course, if that’s all there was to magical areas, they’d be rather boring. Following this are various rituals that can be done in certain spots. These are all long (taking hours to enact) and have various costs to invoke them, along with requiring a successful Spellcraft check, but success can have various effects depending on what ritual is used. You can enhance your own spellcasting powers or suppress another creature’s, for example, or even drain someone’s life force to recharge an area. There are only a few rituals described here, but they’re nicely evocative.

The section on schools of magic is notably short, being only a page long. It basically lays down that arcane spellcasters only gain access to one school of magic starting out, adding another every so often as they gain levels (it treats Universal as a separate school, which I disagree with since Universal has so few spells). If you don’t have access to a given school, you can’t cast spells from it, simple as that (though you can use magic items from them, albeit with a penalty). There’s also alternate rules for selecting the same school of magic multiple times to gain bonuses to it, and being able to take penalties to keep casting spells from known schools even after running out of spells for the day.

The spell poisoning section follows, and offers an interesting idea. Basically, magic is treated similarly to radiation – the more of it you’re exposed to, the more it clings to you, and can even infect the people around you. Carrying magic items or being the subject of a spell will cause you to have higher spell poisoning (expressed in an escalating spell radiation score) and casting spells will quickly make this shoot through the roof, though you can let it dwindle away over time.

Handy charts note what magical effects (e.g. spells, magic items, etc.) cause what level of spell poisoning, while another lists the effects of it. And it was here that the system went off the rails…the chart listing spell poisoning effects were all beneficial, contrary to the flavor text. Yes, some of the listed effects could conceivably be bad, such as having a detectable aura of magic, or having your type change to aberration, but being able to use a random low-level spell and gaining bonuses to saving throws against magic aren’t bad things. I can understand why the table has these effects, but as listed nothing on it is bad or even harmful…spell poison isn’t a poison so much as a series of minor boons to a character. This table needs some reworking so that characters will actually be afraid of raising their spell poison score instead of deliberately trying to ratchet it up.

The penultimate section of the book deals with the new scholar base class. This class is, as the name suggests, meant for characters who want to focus on various forms of skill mastery. In fact, the scholar gains a truly sick amount of skill points per level, spread across a fairly wide array of class skills (not as many as the rogue, but still quite a lot). The scholar also gains a vast array of skill-based class abilities, and in particular at every even-numbered level can take a secret lore ability, which like a rogue talent is a list of various abilities which can be chosen by the character. Here, they’re broken up into various disciplines (such as alchemy, engineering, occult, etc.) but there’s nothing to say you can’t dabble across multiple fields so long as you meet the prerequisites.

While I liked the scholar, there were some parts of it that could have used some tightening up. For example, the Skill Expertise ability, which lets you reroll a skill check as a free action, is ambiguously worded about how often you can use it; if you can use it every round then it’s pretty damn powerful (and makes some secret lore abilities somewhat redundant). Likewise, having the DC for secret lore abilities be Wisdom-based when this class seems Intelligence-based is also a little odd (though maybe the author did that on purpose to keep the class from being too narrow).

But what’s really going to make people think twice about using this class is that it has the lowest base attack bonus EVAR. This guy won’t get to make multiple attacks per round unless you lay him to the absolutely highest levels, it’s that low. A sidebar addresses this, and I personally applaud Eridanus Books for departing from the standard fare here, even if it does pigeonhole the class somewhat as the skill monkey and nothing else. Still, that’s quite clearly on purpose, as the flavor text and sidebar make it clear that this is the guy who does the research that no one else can, but stays the heck away from a fight unless he’s already got it all planned out beforehand.

The book closes out with five new feats, four of which are based around slowly the accumulation of spell poison, and the last one is meant for the scholar. These are perfunctory, but still nice that they round things out a little more.

Overall, Grittier Magic does introduce some good options for spelcasting that’s narrower, more dangerous, and more subject to outside forces than standard Pathfinder fare. The addition of the scholar helps to reinforce the idea of having occult knowledge without being a spellslinger, though they may have dabbled a tiny bit. Campaigns that introduce all of these options will see their spellcasters being more akin to mortals tampering with forces that they have to wrestle for control, rather than executing a precise science. That said, I do wish the spell poison effects were revised to make them far more harmful than they are now – that’s the book’s only major flaw at this point, and largely the reason why I knocked a star off. Still, if you overlook that, Grittier Magic may be just what you need if you want magic to be something used cautiously rather than as a tool.

I'm not a Pathfinder player and haven't played D&D for years, but this supplement piqued my interest. I love the idea that magic is dangerous. I like the way it's implemented in this supplement. Having each spell cast come down to a Spellcasting roll is great, especially as the caster has options and sacrifices they can do to boost the possibility that the spell will succeed. I was slightly disappointed in the Rituals, as they basically come down to a single Spellcraft roll and GP expenditure. I would have liked them to be a more involved process. I would also have liked to see more dangers inherent in spell poisoning. While I love that someone suffering from it can poison others, I would expect more magical mutations. All in all, I love this supplement. It just may be the book that gets me to play Pathfinder.