By 2006, D&D‘s third edition had been out for more than half a decade, and as such Wizards of the Coast was experimenting with ways of pushing the boundaries of their system. Really, the question was what could still make people buy books, as pretty much everything you could need for D20 roleplaying had already been made, either by Wizards or a multitude of third party publishers (and it’s weird to remember that during this period, Paizo was still a second party closely linked with the market leader). The results of these experiments varied wildly in quality, but one thing Wizards seemed particularly interested in was trying some sort of non-Vancian magic system. They first attempted this in 2005 with a very-forgotten book called Magic of Incarnum, which was more or less a bust—I for one have never heard of anyone else using it, let alone used it myself. Less than a year later, Wizards published another attempt at radically altering the game’s magic system with Tome of Magic: Pact, Shadow, and Truename Magic, which is a strange book co-written, co-designed, and co-edited by a heaping pile of practically all of  Wizards’ D&D staff. As can be surmised by the title, it’s ultimately three separate books crudely duct-taped together. The quality of each of these thirds differs wildly, but two of them have new planar content, so it’s worth considering the work altogether, even if the book as a whole remains a strange, largely unsuccessful relic.

I’ve seen it postulated online that Tome of Magic was more or less a test case for the game’s fourth edition. The designers were still unsure what exactly that edition was going to look like, particularly in its magic, but they in no way felt the need to keep the Vancian system, which had been a core part of D&D since its inception, intact. In many ways, I admire just how willing the designers were to throw away everything that D&D had been built on for the past 40 years, though at the same time… well, I suppose we’ll get to more of fourth edition’s follies in time. Regardless, each of the three magic systems included here could be seen as almost like the Unearthed Arcana test packets being used for D&D Next (i.e edition 5.5, which Wizards hates when you call either Next or 5.5 for branding reasons) today. As a result, it doesn’t seem… fully formed, and is in fact a messy book filled with balance issues and at times baffling organization. Only one part of it seemed to catch on at all, and even this one not too much likely because the work as a whole resisted the sort of power creep that characterized most other splatbooks. If you use any of these types of magic in your game, you’re doing so because you want to roleplay, and even for these purposes you’re going to have to jump through a lot of hoops. Is it worth it? In the case of the first new type of casting, pact magic, it just might be.

D&D has toyed with the idea of receiving magic and spells from demons and other supernatural entities ever since its original edition, but this source of power tends to not quite function as hoped. Clerics can gain their spellcasting abilities from gods, but actual Faustian bargains have never really worked mechanically. Pact magic creates a new character class whose powers derive entirely from these pacts, though in order to do so the game needed to add something new to its cosmology, as presumably if demons and gods and whoever else had been able to grant these powers they would’ve been doing so all along. These new beings are called vestiges, and they exist outside of the known multiverse, though I don’t mean that they’re in the Far Realm, instead they’re just… not around. Cosmologically this feels nonsensical, but conceptually it still largely works, and the vestige concept as a whole is something the game actually continued with, at least for the rest of this edition. Pact magicians end up being more like voodoo practitioners than sorcerers, and they bind these vestiges for brief periods into their own bodies, at times even being controlled by them. What’s more, they can eventually learn to call multiple at the same time, and switch between entities daily (or even more frequently than that with a certain feat).

If that sounds like a cool concept to you, well, you’re right. Binders seemed to get played more than the other two classes included in Tome of Magic combined. They offer a ton of new roleplaying opportunities, and don’t feel like any other class in the game, either before or since (fourth edition’s Warlock pretends at the same concept as the Binder class, but it plays identical to all fourth edition classes because that’s how fourth edition rolls). Were it not that they’re on the weaker end of the class spectrum, far closer to bards than to wizards, they probably would’ve received even more traction. As it stands, they’re a cool addition to the game, and should fit in well with any campaign uninterested in min-maxing. 

As far as planar material goes, the addition comes in the form of the vestiges. Despite their importance, how they work remains undefined, and this is the best we’re given to explain them:

A pact magic practitioner gains his power by bargaining with entities called vestiges—the remnants of once-living beings now trapped beyond life and death. Whether they were mortal souls strong enough to shatter the cage built by death, wayward outsiders too willful to cease existence, or dead deities unable to lie quietly in their astral graves, vestiges are the outcasts of the cosmos. They dwell in a place no one can reach and exist in a manner no one truly comprehends. This eternal distancing from reality drives most vestiges mad and twists their views of all beings—even themselves.

Umm, neat. I guess maybe that means they’re not even planar in nature? Whatever, it’s still an addition to the multiverse, even if it’s a particularly odd one. Just as important is that the vestiges are each described in detail, as they aren’t just a wellspring of powers, they’re individuals with weird quirks and unique histories. Many of them are quasi-famous, like Acerak or Geryon, and just as many are newly created, but as a whole they tell us a great deal about the history of this world, as well as filling us in about new developments with the returning characters. 

I’m not going to go through every vestige, as if you want that you can read the book yourself. But there are a few particularly noteworthy vestiges I’d like to highlight. Amon, for instance, is “what remains of the personality of a god who died of neglect millennia ago. Once worshiped by thousands, Amon eventually lost his faithful to more responsive deities. His will was strong enough, though, to resist eternal sleep on the Astral Plane.” So apparently becoming a vestige is another possible fate for dead deities, and Amon isn’t the only ex-God to make the list. Just as interesting is Balam, one of a few angels who ended up a vestige due to the ridiculousness of the supposedly good deities of the Upper Planes; I always appreciate the binaries of this world being broken down. Vestiges can even lead to new planar locations to visit—Chupoclops is a world-ending entity who failed at his job of, you know, ending the world, and as such is hanging around as a vestige because he’s a dick like that. Likewise, his corpse is for some weird reason in the Ethereal Plane, I think just because he can.

Ok, I’ve started just listing vestiges even though I said I wasn’t going to, simply because I find quite a few of their backstories noteworthy. There’s no such thing as a typical vestige, and as such you learn quite a bit about the multiverse’s past from reading through them. One vestige is a titan, one is from the Far Realm, one is an obyrith, and another is a conglomeration of three deities stuck together in a trenchcoat. Not every story is good, but they’re all short enough that this isn’t a problem, and I found myself enjoying reading through them and the whole vestige concept enough that I tracked down and read through every other one added to the game, of which there are a surprisingly large number. I get the sense that I’m not the only one who liked Binders, and so new vestiges cropped up until the very end of the edition. Here’s a list of where else they can be found:

• Dragon Magic – Ashardalon, Pyre of the Unborn (from Bastion of Broken Souls – turns out he’s still hanging around, at least in this semi-alive form) 
• Cityscape web enhancement “Urban Magic” – Astaroth, Unjustly Fallen; Desharis, the Sprawling Soul
• Mind’s Eye web article, “Three Psionic Vestiges” –  Arete, the First Elan; Gorn–Rujsha–Mintar, the Triad; Abysm, the Schismed
• Class Chronicles web article, “Binders” – Zceryll, the Star Spawn (notoriously unbalanced when used as strictly written, but the fix is easy—just make the summons function as per the spells. Why did this confuse people so much?)
• Dragon Vol. 341 – Primus, the One and Prime; Kas, the Bloody Handed
• Dragon Vol. 357 – Astaroth, the Diabolus; Cabiri, the Watching Master; Ansitif, the Befouler
• Dungeon Vol. 148 – Ahazu, the Seizer (just stats, it assumes you can get the backstory from the adventure)

Two of these entries are particularly noteworthy. Dragon #341’s write-up of Primus tells us a bit about what happened to the modrons after The Great Modron March concluded, information that I believe is entirely new, and also tries to give an in-universe explanation as to why modrons were for the most part removed from the game:

With the loss of their god and leader, a member of Primus’s most immediate lieutenants—the secundus—took up the mantle of the Supreme Modron. This new Primus, seeing its people crippled, its cathedral invaded, and its magic corrupted, turned its race’s attentions inward, calling all modron survivors back to Regulus and sealing the borders. Since that time, few modrons have been seen throughout the multiverse and their current actions remain mysterious.

Yet despite the former Primus’s apparent destruction, a being whose consciousness stretches across planes cannot so easily be destroyed. From the minds and memories of thousands of tormented modrons in contact with it at the moment of its destruction, a vestige of the old Primus arose. While logic, law, and a structured multiverse once dictated its every action, a new directive now inspires this methodical ghost of order: the destruction of Tenebrous and all similar beings of chaos. 

The other supplemental vestige I want to highlight is actually a pair of them, as you might note that there are in fact two listings for Astaroth in the list above. This is a name that’s always been confusing in D&D lore because it refers to at least two beings. In a sidebar, Dragon #357 has a cheeky note about this, which helps to clear up some obvious confusion as to what’s going on here. 

Pact Magic’s third of the book may seem a bit messy and confusing, but it’s by far the most ordered of the three sections. As an addition to the planes it’s odd and a bit shifty, but still manages to work well, even in a plane-hopping adventure. Shadow Magic, on the other hand, is both the most cosmologically relevant and also the most difficult to make function in a planar campaign. As you’d suspect from its name, this magic draws its power from the Plane of Shadows… which means that it’s only relevant if you’re on the Prime Material Plane, the Plane of Shadows, and, if you’re generous, the Ethereal Plane. This obvious factor goes completely ignored by the article. Cosmological problems like this tend to get forgotten in third edition, but in this particular case, with hundreds of references to the Plane of Shadows and its importance for this spellcasting, that feels particularly egregious.

The mechanical concept for shadowcasters is that more powerful spells have prerequisite less powerful spells. However, on the whole their spells aren’t quite as good as normal wizard ones, or are at most as good as them in order to avoid power creep, which leads to the question as to why you’d want to play another type of Vancian spellcaster but with extra limitations. Third edition kept trying to make fetch the Plane of Shadows happen, but it never did, and this plane remained dull for at least the next couple of years. That’s all I have to say about the class itself, though I have a few more notes about this section of the book. 

For instance, the Dark Creature template included in the monsters section (oh yeah, each third has its own bestiary because this edition’s monster listings weren’t already fiddly enough) clutters up the game with yet another type of shadow creatures, despite the fact that there’s already a shadow template, which is even noted right in the book. There’s also a new shadow genie added, which is truly something no one asked for. However, my least favorite part of this third—somehow even moreso than how the chapter places prestige classes right after the primary class but before its abilities—is its organization the Tenebrous Cabal, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Tenebrous despite the fact that he was profiled as a vestige something like 60 pages earlier. This aligns with the inconsistent ordering of the chapters themselves in signaling that these thirds were developed singularly and there wasn’t an overriding editor making sure the whole work fit together. 

Let’s not end this on a negative note, though, as there is something I quite liked about this section. Even though the “Darkness” issue of Dragon seemed a bit obscure, it’s treated as canonical here, such that the book pulls the Nightshade Covenant from that source and contains references to the city of Balefire. It also includes two new locations on the Plane of Shadow, which could always use more considering that it’s so dull. These are Nightwatch, a neatly mapped outpost of that same covenant set near Balefire, and the Black Spire, a tower run by the Votaries of Vecna who for some ineffable reason use a symbol of Acererak and have a backstory linked with Return to the Tomb of Horrors but prefer the god instead for their name because, ummm… who even knows?

I’m not going to go into nearly as much depth with the final third of Tome of Magic, Truename Magic, both because it has little to do with the planes (though at high levels it allows you to create a demiplane for some reason), and also because it’s a confusing mess of a system that’s miserable to read through and aligns poorly at best with the history of name-based magic in the real world. It even added word archons and logokron devils to the game, so it has that to answer for as well—and these are just the planar additions, trust me that other new monsters from this third are somehow even stupider. Suffice to say, no one liked this system, including me, and it was never really seen or heard from again. 

Tome of Magic is a weird book in that if it had been just its first third I would recommend checking it out, but given how much dreck there is I instead want to warn people off. If you’re still interested in it, the Binder class and vestiges remain an interesting footnote in the game’s history, and the backstories both here and within the supplemental works paint a fuller picture of the multiverse. However, given its release at the end of the edition, this book had little actual effect on the multiverse and for the most part was retconned out of existence just a year later. I like the vestiges, I think they add something to the game and would be happy to see them return in some fashion in fifth edition, but at the same time it’s not a huge loss, and even I find it understandable to remove yet one more confusing part of an already overly complicated cosmology.