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It's been a few months now since Rifter #40 came out with my article on spell books, and I was wanting to get some feed back on it from players of the various PB games, if I could.

Specifically, have any of you incorporated spell books into your characters? Has your GM put them into your game as a part of a plot/NPC/villain/treasure yet? And most important, has it been fun for you?

I know how it works in my own group, but would like to know how it's faring in the -real- world. Thanks!

I liked the basic mechanic of allowing an additional spell per level to be learned if spellbooks were maintained; in fact, I think it's a bit better for spellcasters than my mechanic of allowing them to go over their notes for certain spells and cast them for greater effect (i.e. a 1 level boost). Your thoughts on the use of spell books (as notebooks and lab books) mirrors much of my own thinking on it.

Beyond the basic mechanic, I did not like the article. I don't like the investure of permanent PPE into spellbooks, nor the associated mechanics (such as spellbooks being inherrent amplifiers of a man of magic's magical aura, simply by being in their possession).

While I understood, even if I personally disagreed with, the restriction of "no computers", I thought the restriction that they must be in codex format (i.e. bound, with a spine) to be ludicrous. Long before there were codicies, books were scrollls, and there's no rational reason that a spellbook could not be one, as well; it would simply have an equivalent page count. These then tie into vague rules for how much fits into a spell book... between one and six spells, regardless of the size of the book. If I'm using a small diary I picked up at Borders for $9.99, it will hold as much as a codex the size of my thigh, because both are books.

Furthermore, your rules for learning new spells from a spell book (specifically, the expansions thereon) ignore some of the basics of learning spell magic; PFRPG put that learning a spell takes two days per level of the spell. The basic times you have listed make sense in this regard, as lacking a teacher, you must experiment on your own. However, cutting that in half with access to a teacher means you're actually learning faster from a teacher than you would... with a teacher. Similarly, doubling the time spent on study will, in some cases, drop your study time beneath that of having a competent teacher, and you don't address the impact of having Speed Reading; how much of that time is reading the material, and how much is learning to use it?

So, if I were to use spell books, I'd likely lift a single mechanic (learning an additional spell per experience level) from your article, and ignore the rest, using my own material, instead.

Thank you for writing that article. It came out in the Rifter about a week or two after I had introduced a book into our adventure. Unfortunately, the player who is/was playing the Ley Line Walker has been problematic. I intend to use it the future and test it out.