Magic of Incarnum

Magic of Incarnum offers up an alternative magic system, in the vein of how psionics is also an alternate magic system to the standard arcane/divine spellcasting system. It's not a full-on campaign setting, but it does provide some ideas on how to integrate this new system into a campaign. It makes use of monk/ninja/eastern concepts of chakra and soul energy to power their effects.

Chapter 1 presents 4 new races, three of which are just human-variants. I find them somewhat unimaginative (in terms of flavour/lore) so wasn't interested in any of them at all.

Chapter 2 presents 3 new incarnum-based classes: incarnate, soulborn, totemist. This roughly corresponds to “wizard”, “paladin”, “druid”. They wield incarnum via “meldshaping” and chakra “binding”. It's basically like attaching your choices of effects to areas of your body where you'd normally equip magic items. Not that I've actually tried gaming with this, but it would seem great at the lower levels, where you wouldn't have access to a lot of magic items. But once you do, then it becomes less flexible, since you can't quite change your melds on the fly. Overall, I didn't feel that these classes were more powerful than any of the core classes.

The character options in Chapter 3 are interesting, as they provide more flavour to the core races on how to tie them to incarnum. The feats are of a good variety in making use of the new system.

Chapter 4 goes into the meat of things - basically explains the terminology and how things work, and the “soulmelds” themselves (i.e. the “spells”). Visually, I find that these souldmelds will look odd - it's essentially like a bluish hologram that gets overlaid across different parts of your body. If that's your thing, you might like it, but I just think it makes your character look really weird (especially when you start combining very different-looking soulmelds). The soulmelds themselves have a good variety, enough to cover most some bases of what an incarnum-based character would want to do, both in combat, and outside of it. While the descriptions are nice to read, some of them are misses when it comes to tying the effect to flavour. Also, when going through this, I just thought that this will add quite a bit of tedium to tracking all of these mechanics on paper.

Chapter 5 offers up traditional spells, albeit with an incarnum twist, allowing a subtype of spells to get “powered up”. I feel like there's nothing special here, basically a bunch of spells that allow spellcasters to interact with incarnum effects (a lot of them are recognisably just variant spells).

Chapter 6 is prestige classes. They're not bad; it's just that I found them to be somewhat generic and uninteresting- nothing “prestigious”. Not much to say here, except that some of these classes are mostly just hybrids that you can predict - mixing incarnum into a “traditional” role.

The monsters in chapter 7 seems to fall into the same problem. There's not much surprise here. There's a incarnum dragon, an incarnum giant, an incarnum construct, an incarnum familiar, an incarnum summoned creature, an incarnum undead. I guess it's unfair to bemoan this, because some of this is somewhat needed to give it a D&D feel I suppose.

Chapter 8 has some good stuff. I liked the incarnum terrain-based encounters/locations as well as the worldbuilding bits. It also contains a moderately-elaborate incarnum-related organisation.

Overall, I think I can see that certain aspects of incarnum system might appeal to some people, but not for me.