When it comes to supplement books to the Dungeon & Dragons game, players and Dungeon Masters alike must learn to pick and choose their battles. I say this because while many D&D books can prove to be quite viable in introducing new material into the game (e.g., new spells, character feats and options, monsters, and adventures), others can be a tad redundant and perhaps even useless to a given campaign. Luckily, Magic of Incarnum--released back in the September of 2005--is of the former eventually and not of the latter, as the idea it introduces into the core D&D game is one that neither TSR, Inc., nor Wizards of the Coast had ever tried before until this past year.

See, Incarnum is the soul energy that manifests itself within living beings. Anyone and everyone who either lives in the present, has ever lived in the past, and will soon be born in the future has a touch of this substance within them, although certain beings are more blessed by and intuitive about it than others are. The human-born azurin, for instance--one of the four races introduced in Magic of Incarnum--are especially aware of that which composes their very essence and utilize it in their careers as adventurers, aiming to either right the wrongs of the material world or subjugate the masses to their will to fulfill more malignant objectives. Similarly, there are the wild, gray-skinned dusklings, whose ties to incarnum blesses them with an innate knowledge about it and the knack for manipulating the energy of their spirits in an effort to mimic the powers of mystic beasts via the Totemist Character Class. The final two races presented in this manual--namely, the rilkans and the skarns--are offshoots of an ancient reptilian race called the mishtai that, when they existed, aimed at attaining "perfection of form" via a philosophy that espouses both physical and mental discipline and development as well as the use of incarnum. Unfortunately, the mishtai failed in this well-meaning yet lofty goal of theirs and eventually became extinct, hence spawning these two peoples and the bitterness they have toward one another as the result of the polar opposition of their general personalities (the nimble rilkans being friendly, outgoing, and daring and the skarns being studious, strictly disciplined, and somewhat scornful of those races they think are beneath them).

More important than the new races, however, are the three Character Classes this book introduces, all of which allow participants to utilize incarnum to aid them in their adventures within their home realm. The aforementioned Totemist, for instance, uses incarnum to forge different artifacts of magical power called Soul Melds that enable her to mimic the properties of the many magical beasts that populate the typical D&D world, from unicorns and blink dogs to manticores and chimera. The Soulborn, in contrast, uses his inner soul energy to bolster his martial prowess and smite those who oppose his moral philosophy, which can be noble or wicked in nature. Finally, the incarnate--the book's focal Character Class--is the very embodiment of law, chaos, good, or evil for her people and is the most adept of the three Classes in using incarnum to form Soul Melds that bolster her fighting skill, rend her foes asunder, or aid her and her fellow adventurers in various other ways. There are also plenty of Prestige Classes for PCs to attain once they reach higher levels, such as the noble Incandescent Champion, the arcane Soulcaster, the mage-hunting Witchborn Binder, and the sinister Necrocarnate. Throw in fifteen keen new monsters, numerous spells and psionic powers for magic- and psionics-wielding PCs (including the Incarnum domain for clerics), a full list of Soul Melds for incarnum-wielding characters, numerous additional feats for PCs and NPCs alike, and three campaign adventures centered around the presence of incarnum, and you've got one impressive book.

To summarize, while there exists the occasional Dungeons & Dragon supplement that just doesn't live up to its potential, there also exists that one manual that proves its worth within every page. Such is what Magic of Incarnum is in its success to provide D&D players with a new take on their favorite pencil-and-paper role-playing game. Indeed, it's the one book by Wizards of the Coast that gets one thinking in more ways than one, which is precisely what an RPG supplement is supposed to do. If you can find this manual, grab it. It's worth every penny!

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.

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.

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!

Like the vast majority of books Wizards has offered us this year, this book is pretty formulaic. We get a new magic system, some new classes, new prestige classes, new feats and some new monsters. I do like the theme of this new magic system. I find it to be along the same lines as the Warlock found in Complete Arcane, but its different enough that I'm sure players would enjoy it. As a book its useful, but only if you plan on embracing Incarnum in your campaign. If you only plan to dabble, I don't think it'll work. Again a good book, but its not as good as some books like Heroes of Battle, for me the standout Wizards book of 2005.