Opinions on Mongoose Encyclopedia Arcane Star Magic & Constructs?

[VirgilCaine]

The Quintessential series didn't impress me much, but there are good reviews of "Constructs" and "Star Magic" on Enworld's review section.

Does anyone have firsthand experience with these products?

Constructs is a toolkit for making constructs, but I would like a balanced toolkit, with appropriate costs for appropriately powerful creature abilities. Is it balanced?

Star Magic seems cool--but is it balanced?

Help?

 

[Crothian]

Constructs is 3.0 and Constructs did change a bit to 3.5 other then that pain I've had a lot of fun using the construct book. Star MAgic is cool sounding and I like the idea but I've never found a way to bring it into the game that didn't seem like I was forcing it and the players never had any interest in persueing it.

 

[Turjan]

'Constructs' was one of my favourites from the Encyclopedia Arcane series. At its time, it was a very interesting concept on how to make constructs much more fun. It's quite balanced, although the quartz constructs might have been a bit on the good side. I'm not 100% sure whether the book is still state of the art today, though. There were quite a few changes to constructs between the D&D editions, and there have been many publications expanding on the possibilities of constructs in the meanwhile. This means it will be more of a historical buy, if you get it today. But I still like the book .

As far as Star Magic goes: I have it, but never tried it. Can't comment on whether it's balanced.

 

[philreed]

For constructs you may want to try The Artificial Hero's Handbook by the same author that wrote Mongoose's Constructs product.

 

[VirgilCaine]

'Constructs' was one of my favourites from the Encyclopedia Arcane series. At its time, it was a very interesting concept on how to make constructs much more fun. It's quite balanced, although the quartz constructs might have been a bit on the good side. I'm not 100% sure whether the book is still state of the art today, though.

That's fine, I plan to use a hybrid 3.0/3.5 game with some houserules thrown in when I get past my learning stage of DMing.