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This is a relatively short book that, ostensibly, describes the use of magic to construct buildings. There is only one internal illustration, but that's fair enough for the price, although the layout of the book is extremely basic, without any apparent effort having gone into it.
Still, for $4, that's forgiveable if the book includes some good and usable information. Unfortunately, this one really doesn't. There is some general discussion of magical architecture, but it's all fairly obvious and there's no detail about, for example, how much it would cost, and only a few vague statements about it being possible to do things with magic you can't do without it - all of which is fairly obvious.
The bulk of the book consists of a spell list for architect-wizards. Most of the spells fall into one of two categories. The first type allows you to draw architect's plans, which, presumably, could be done equally well with a quill and parchment. These spells are, to my mind, overly specialised, not very well described (I *think* they're putting an image from the wizard's mind onto parchment, but if so, why they only work for narrow sub-types of plan is beyond me - why can't I project an image of, say, a mountain scene?)
The second sort create invisible workers that actually do the construction, similar to an unseen servant, or make things like kilns. There are a few others, such as creating an illusion of the finished building.
The book finished out with more statements of the mostly obvious that it fails to elaborate on, and a reaction table for how annoyed non-magical masons get when they find out you're taking away their livelihood.
Well, okay, so the idea is presumably to have the construction process appear magical, and look cool in a fantasy world. But beyond that, why bother? Despite being told that it's possible to construct buildings this way that you couldn't otherwise, there's no indication as to why, and crucially, no explanation of WHAT you can do. Assuming your game doesn't focus on construction work, the finished product is surely what matters. What cool things can I have my magical building do, or even look like, that normal ones can't or don't?
I'm not going to give this a '1' because it is cheap, and it could have been worse. But it's hard to imagine what it would be useful for.
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Builder Magic is a d20 supplement from Castlewrks, focused on (as you probably guessed from the title) magic in regards to building and construction. The zipped file is not quite a megabyte in size, and contains a single PDF of the book, which is thirty pages long. Full bookmarks are present, and the table of contents is hyperlinked to the various sections of the book, which is nice.
Unfortunately, that pretty well exhausts what good things I can say about Builder Magic. Even a casual glance through the book showcases major problems. The most obvious one is the layout and use of space. Except for the book’s front and back covers, there’s only one illustration here, acting as a small header at the introduction. The rest of the book is devoid of any sort of illustrations or graphical content whatsoever. Now, unto itself, this isn’t a bad thing; I often prefer that PDFs err on the side of being printer-friendly. However, the sheer amount of unbroken white space here makes the product look slap-dash, a look that isn’t helped by how many blank and nearly-blank pages are here. There are a number of sections of the book that are really less than half a page, simply sacrificing the rest of the space to the endless blank whiteness of the page. Only the product name in the upper left corner, and the pagination in the upper right, break up the monotony.
By itself, this isn’t necessarily so bad. However, the poor layout only draws attention to the content, which in and of itself, is quite bad. Being that this product has the d20 logo, I expect it to have some d20 content that’s at least halfway decent, but Builder Magic didn’t even make it to the “halfway” part of that level. The only part of this book that deals with d20 statistics at all are the spells; all the rest of it, such as the descriptions for different types of mages, are just one- or two-sentence descriptions, with nothing else to back them up. The spells themselves show an incredible lack of understanding regarding the d20 system. Very basic things such as sub-schools for spells, “spell resistance” instead of “magic resistance,” arrangement of stats in a spell’s listing, and so many other problems arose here. Add into this the fact that the spell descriptions are very general and fluff-based – d20 is a tactical game by nature, and even non-combat spells should outline clearly what bonuses or penalties they give, what their parameters and limits are, etc. – and the spells here are virtually unusable. The last few sections of the book are similarly useless. The table regarding how a guild of mundane architects regard magic construction is a flat d% roll, with no bearing on any other factors. The section on terminology just lists shorthand nicknames for a few spells, and the other sections are similarly hollow.
Ultimately, unless you want to mine the spells listed here for ideas, there’s no real use for this product that I can see. The basic ideas aren’t bad ones, but the execution of those ideas are so poorly done, that they sacrifice all viability present in this book. There’s not even a copy of the OGL to be found, which is an absolute necessity for all d20 products (unless you want to get into the mire of the legality of copyright regarding game systems, which I don’t). Ultimately, Builder Magic is itself in need of serious reconstruction.
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