Spell Compendium by Matthew Sernett, Mike McArtor, Jeff Grubb, 0786937025, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

Another Ronseal Book

Let's examine the title.
Spell: a means of defeating or circumventing problems
Compendium: a collection.

This book has literally thousands of spells from books that even I have never heard of for situations that I didn't realise I could use spells for. My DM has 'Borrowed' my copy after I spanned a raging river with an illusion spell and so ended the session (and very nearly the role play, he had banked on my not being able to cross said river)

The spells are useful at all levels for all spell-casters.

I need to replace mine to give my DM one of those headaches again...

Top Hole

Excellent, supreme, superb and all the rest. This book is an absolute must have. Certainly every group should have acces to a copy, really every player - it's just that good. Thousands of spells from sources so diverse that no one person could ever posses them all - until now. Between the PHB and this Compendium a caster has spells for near any concievable situation. Not only that, but there is a wealth of Domains for Clerics too. The Compendium has taken a page from the MM and includes a sensory descritpion for each spell - describing what it looks, feels or even smells like to cast the spell.

Some of the spells have been modified - Greater Mage Armour for instance no-longer requires a material componant, but generally these are sensable modificatiosn and the wise DM will probably rule that the SC takes precidense over other sources of the same spell, where disparitties occur.

The only slight gripe is that the Compendium does not contain spell lists for non-core classes, such as the Wu-Jen or Hexblade.

Nevertheless, buy, beg, borrow or steal your copy today.

Quite useful...if you need it ;)

Spell Compendium is, as promised, a compendium of spells from many gaming sources.

Updated material (updated to v.3.5 that is) comes from Dragon magazines articles, Wizards of the Coeast's website, magic of faerun, savage species and manual of the planes. Other spells come from MORE recent manuals (exlcuding the Player's Handbook, which was a wise choice).

Spells are both Arcane and Divine, and for all classess (some notes on prestige classes and new classes presented in the Complete... series are also included, but only the assassin and blackguard have their own spell-lists).

The negative points of the manual are:

- Some unecessary renaming of spells (I especially hated Aganazzar's Scorcher renamed to Scorcher for example). But newer players shouldn't worry about this.

- It would have been nice to know each spell from where it was taken or updated.

- The exclusion of my favorite spell 'Choke' (2nd level of Wiz/Sorcerer) only presented in the third edition on 'Blood & Magic'. But this is just a personal rant ;)

Other than that expect lots of spells from recent manuals. If you are expecting something different, you will be disappointed.

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