I’ve been talking about Magical Theorems & Dark Arts / Dark Pacts for many years now. I started working on it in Open Office on my linux system back in 2009 and finally took the steps to make it into a book in the last month.
Magical Theorems Cover Mockup
At heart, Magical Theorems & Dark Arts / Dark Pacts is my revised rule book for Labyrinth Lord spellcasters. Emphasis on “my”. It reprints the Magic-User and Cleric (well, with a few minor tweaks that are hardly worth mentioning), and then piles on a bunch of other spellcasting classes along with their spell lists and spells. I also end up renaming the Magic-User as the Wizard because I use the term Magic-User as an umbrella for all arcane spellcasting classes.
Chapter 1 – Classes
- Cleric (warrior-priests)
- Wizard (classic magic-users with 10 levels of spells)
- Elven Swordmage (elves from the core rules – arcane warriors)
- Elven Warder (wilderness elves, guardians of their kin)
- Enchanter (artists, con-men, and masters of… duh… enchantments)
- Fleshcrafter (twisted magic-users that work with flesh)
- Healer (compassionate and tough hearth-healers)
- Inquisitor (ecclesiastic investigators and master intimidators)
- Merchant Prince (elite merchants with spellcasting support)
- Necromancer (you know exactly what these guys do)
- Pact-Bound (magic-users who sell their souls for power)
- Theurge (divine casters who learn from liturgical texts)
- Unseen (thieves with an innate knack for magic)
Chapter 2 – Spells
All the spells for all these classes are included in the book – including reprinting all the core spells from Labyrinth Lord because just about every one of them can be cast by one or more of the new classes. But overall there is roughly a 100% increase in the number of spells available in this tome.
Chapter 3 – Magic Items
28 pages of new magic items generally aimed towards spellcasters (with a few sneak ones thrown in for the Unseen). I specifically avoided weapons and armour and put them into another file for a second book aimed towards fighters and thieves and other non spellcasting classes.
Chapter 4 – Creatures
Just a few monsters in this short chapter – ones referenced earlier in the book and my rules for summoning / conjuring alternate types of elementals (wind, crystal, dungeon, wave, moss, thorn, smoke, zephyr and so on).
Finally there’s a little section on using this book with the Advanced Edition Companion. 99% of this book was written using only the core Labyrinth Lord rules without referencing the AEC at all, and therefore there are some suggestions for mixing these rules with the AEC ones – primarily adding AEC spells to the existing spell lists, and the revised hit dice for the various classes if using the optional AEC hit dice.
In all, the book is the same size as Dyson’s Delves – a 6 x 9 inch trade hardcover coming in around 160 pages in total thickness.
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
I’m gonna assume the Elven Swordmage is the merely pretty cool “traditional” elf with a sword and wizard spells, rather than the Nightcrawler-with-sword-&-spell 4e version. 😦
Still sounds like it’ll be a cool book though, lots of neat stuff to steal.
Indeed.
I’m unaware of the 4e version, and will now do some reading on it to see what I can pinch from it. 🙂
Very loosely, it’s based on the idea that a swordmage shouldn’t just be a standard wizard who can wave a sword around, but a wizard whose spells are devoted to swordplay. They’re also a Defender, with three main styles – they mark an enemy and when that enemy attacks one of their friends they either put up a magic shield on their friend, teleport to the enemy and stab them in the back, or… well, I never played the third one, as they were introduced in a splatbook. They’re called “Ensnaring Swordmages”, so I guess they do that.
Swordmages, being Defenders, tend to be tougher than their friends, so one particularly fun way to play is to mark the biggest, baddest monster around, then run away and stab one of its weaker friends. If it attacks your friends, you get to stop/stab it. If it doesn’t, it’s forced to move away from your allies and chase you down. It’s one of the classic “give the DM a nasty no-win choice” ways that 4e Defenders work, as opposed to MMO-style taunting.
Some of this may have to be toned down for LL/Basic, yeah, but StabWizard Nightcrawler is a perfectly good concept for a character even if they’re a bit less teleporty.
(for some reason, this wiki has some swordmage spells from the first three levels: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Swordmage_spells – the two first-level Aegis spells are the defining powers for Assault and Shielding swordmages, respectively)
(sorry for the length of all this nonsense – my favourite editions are B/X (I prefer the actual B/X to Labyrinth Lord, but pff, close enough to be awesome) and 4e, and I can’t help but ramble on about them)
Oh. Right. The relevant thing that might help you. The Swordmage is in the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide, if you know someone with a 4e library you can borrow from.
Awesome. Really looking forward to this one!
very cool
Where and when will this go for sale? I really like my copy of Dyson Delves. I enjoy your content for my old school gaming.
Keep it coming,
Ian