For those who like variation and trickyness This book is fantastic! Incarnum can be dropped into any setting easily with no changes. In fact, WoTC layed the groundwork for this system way back in Bastion of Souls. Basically, incarnum is "creation-energy". You draw upon the essence of the universe that is responsible for life - and the power of souls past. You don't draw power from others like a leech, you know how to use the stuff of the universe to create enhancements on yourself.
Incarnum is based around flexibility. Each day you get to decide upon your enhancments for the day, and moment to moment you decide how powerful any one enhancement is. This magic system ain't easy. Anyone expecting to pick a list of spells to throw will be disappointed. Anyone looking to use a techie class to help fill holes in a party with some fun variation will be rewarded.
For example, my party was going into a heavy combat zone, so my character built himself up to handle front line fighting. He had a xd6 electricity touch attack, and a xd6 fire based shield. Every time he scrapped with an opponent, the opponent took touch damage and then fire damage if they hit back. He cleared his way through a group of goblin worg riders while the cleric kept him standing. The next session was more exploratory so he wore a get up that removed all conceleament benefits so the party couldn't be surprised by shadow dwellers. The third session he took up the range attacker spot. He was doing 4d6 ranged touch attack damage with acidic spit, and a magically enhanced armor class.
Final example: I played the totemist with shark pounce and a blink dog shirt. He would pounce for massive damage, next round he would strike and blink away 10', and then next round pounce, repeat ad infinitum.
Incarnum requries knowing the rules well and manipulating the different abilities for max collaborative benefit. It can be tricky and functions differently than every other class in the game. It also has a learning curve as you explore and understand how it all really works together. An excellent way to add spice and variation to any campaign.
What am I supposed to do with this?? The psionics handbook works because there are races and creatures already in the game that use psionics, so more rules on psionics help clarify and add depth to something that was already there. There's even a whole psionic-heavy setting, Dark Sun, that nearly requires a psionics system to even really play it.
Incarnum however drops out of the sky from nowhere. There's no roots or hints that this new power was around before in any form. No setting has anything like it. In order to even use it, it seems every DM is going to have to throw some huge setting- changing event just to justify its existance.
A fair book. Cool sortova' mako energy Final Fantasy VII thing. It just doesn't fit. Create an Incarnum based setting guys, or give me some official storyline of how it came into the worlds I already play in and I may give this book a shot, but until then it's just too weird and not worth the headache to try to come up with a use for this system.Not perfect but very inspiring I was excited when I first read Magic of Incarnum (hereafter MoI) and two months later I still am. Incarnum as a form of "magic" has some very interesting and inspiring ideas. In 20+ years of gaming I don't think that I have ever seen a product quite like this one.
The basic concept of "soulmelds" powered by "Incarnum" seems very fresh to me and the execution of the idea is an inspirational one. The authors set out to create something new to DnD and I think that they succeeded admirably.
Incarnum as defined by MoI is essentially the energy of souls born and yet to be born. Individual living beings can tap into this power and gain pools of "essentia" that they can use to power feats or even solid incarnum creations called "Soulmelds." Soulmelds function like virtual magic items. They are "shaped" on a "chakra" point that is roughly analogous to an item slot. For a more potent effect the soulmeld can be "bound" to the chakra and actually prevents a real item from being used there.
The base classes are all interesting and all have some degree of ability to shape Soulmelds. The Incarnate is the soulmeld specialist can easily fill the role of trapfinder or skill monkey and give it a totally different feel than a rogue would have. The Soulborn is a minor soulmeld user much like a Paladin or Ranger&can fill much the same roles in a party. The Totemist is a flavorful class that can be a natural weapon damage dealer (think wildshaped druid) or something of a blaster though most wizards will be better at the latter. The Totemist Soulmelds are some of the most powerful and interesting in the book.
The Prestige Classes (hereafter PrCs) are exciting as well ranging from the good Incandescent Champion to the vile Necrocarnate and from the combative Totem Rager to the sneaky Unbral Disciple. I didn't see a single one that I would consider unuseable either in flavor or mechanic.
Many of these PrCs actually seem designed for non- MoI classes as do many of the feats in the book. Rogues, Wizards, Clerics, Fighters, Soulknives, and more can all benefit from material in this book without taking a single level in one of the new base classes.
The book is not perfect however. I found the new races less than inspiring. Maybe I've watched too much Star Trek but I'm well past the point where "looks human except for the scales around the neck" and such really seems novel or even needed.
The authors also made a poor decision in formatting the Soulmeld tables on pages 54-58 the way they did. Unlike many of the spell lists you cannot look at these tables and really understand what a given soulmeld does. I have seen several reviews elsewhere where folks were turned off by seeing that the "power of souls" grants a mere +2 to a skill or +1 to AC. If you just look at these tables I can easily see how folks would say "That's it?" You actually need to read the soulmeld descriptions to see what exactly you can do with it.
There are also some minor problems with the power scaling. Since a MoI class starts with access to all soulmelds the two basic factors governing how "powerful" he is are what chakra points he can bind soulmelds to and how much essentia he can power souldmelds or feats with.
Essentia investment is not very granular and thus it is possible to get a very strong effect at low levels with the right classes or feats ... and correspondingly difficult to have the effects scale well at higher levels for some classes and alignments.
The idea behind the chakra binding mechanism seems to be that more potent abilities will get unlocked at higher levels thus keeping them out of the hands of low level characters and giving high level ones a reason to keep advancing in a class that opens chakra binding points. They did a really good job of this with the Totemist. However the vast majority of the Incarnate soulmelds don't gain that much by binding them. In too many cases an Incarnate character will be better off with an item and an unbound soulmeld than he would be binding the soulmeld and taking up that item slot.
Still these imperfections were not enough to dim my liking of the book. I gave it 5 stars out of 5 simply because it is the one DnD book that I keep coming back to since my purchase nearly two months ago. Literally hardly a day has not gone by where I have not opened the book and thought about things I could do with it ... ranging from building a particular character to thinking about how I can work it into a new game world.
I realized, based on many reviews, that the flavor of MoI is very hit or miss ... but in my case they hit a home run!
