Complete Mage

This is the second pass at offering up options for arcane spellcasters, the first being Complete Arcane. From a presentation point of view, this sourcebook has a rather clean layout, with ample illustrations in full colour. The editing is typical, with your usual misspellings and/or missed grammatical errors scattered about.

The first chapter discusses the nature of magic. Specifically, the differences between arcane, divine, and innate (encompassing the warlock).

There's also a treatment being given to the traditional schools of magic as well as personality and prohibited school suggestions.

Next up are arcane archetypes - a very general look at what sort of roles arcane spellcasters can play, touching on recommended spells and feats. It's still mostly fluff up to this point.

Unlike Complete Arcane, which offered up three new core classes, the second chapter here provides magic-related alternative class features for core classes. Most of these are interesting options.

Next up are new feats. Most of these are arcane magic related, obviously. It has your typical general, tactical, and metamagic feats, as well as heritage and a new type of reserve feats. These latter ones are about holding a spell in reserve to give your character additional options or bonuses. At first impression, they give your spellcaster a lot more utility, but that also translates to a lot of potential for breaking the game.

The third chapter offers eleven new prestige classes, with at least one for each school of magic, as you might expect. They're not very interesting though, as they felt more like having to be checked off a checklist as opposed to being truly inspired.

New spells and warlock invocations come in chapter four. There's over a hundred new spells and over a dozen new invocations. They mostly feel like filling in some gaps in the arcane spell lists.

Chapter five are the new magic items aimed mostly at spellcasters. Nothing much to excite me here. There's a subsection on new alchemical items (that are essentially non-magical options of spell effects) and some special spell components.

The last chapter provides some tips or suggestions for arcane adventures, but there's not much meat here other than some adventure hooks. The chapter finishes off with fifteen magical locations that can be used as adventure rewards for arcane spellcaster.

Overall this is a good sourcebook, but arcane spellcasters are already quite powerful and this sourcebook offers up even more powerful options. Watch the power curve when introducing things from this sourcebook.