The Genius Guide to Chaos Magic by Owen K.C. Stevens and Tracey Hurley is a role playing game supplement published by Rogue Genius Games (originally as Super Genius Games) for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.
The supplement is available from RPGNow at the regular price of $3.99 but was purchased at the greatly reduced price of $0.20 as part of a special bundle. This is an eighteen page PDF with two thirds of a page being the colour front cover and one page being the Credits and Open Game License.
This starts with an introduction to chaos magic and how it is often considered evil – partly due to users being insane or power-mad – is usually not appreciated in societies, due to its sheer randomness, and is rarely used in fantasy RPGs due to its (often unpopular) unpredictability and difficulty to balance, despite it being common enough in fantasy fiction.
Next are Chaos Surges. These are rules that are referred to in various other places in the supplement, and feature a d20 table of what can go wrong, which is then fully explained. These range from GM’s Delight – the GM decides what foes wrong – to how things can go wrong.
The next section is Bedlam and Chaos Spells, starting with the spell lists for classes and then the spells themselves. There are ten new spells but one, chaos surge, comes in varieties from level 1 to level 9. Chaos surge casters attempt to shape chaos forces into another spell known, including ones of higher level. All the spells involve chaos and some are rather random. Wondrous weirdness is a spell version of rod of wonder.
New Character Options has two new archetypes. Chaos Mages have power but there control is very erratic. This is perhaps close, deliberately so, to fantasy fiction chaos spellcasters. Spellstorms are slightly less dangerous perhaps, but can still erratically affect everyone around them as the chaos within bubbles out.
Finally, New Hazards has a single new hazard, Zone of Arcane Ataxia. This is essentially an area affected by the magic of chaos where all spellcasting can go amiss. These are formed in logical locations – defiled temples to gods of magic, graves of dead gods, destroyed academies of magic and battlefields where archmages duelled.
The Genius Guide to Chaos Magic in Review
The PDF is well bookmarked with all major and minor sections linked. Navigation is therefore good for a comparatively short supplement.
The text is in Super Genius Games’ old three column landscape format, which is easier to read on screens and larger tablets, less convenient on smaller tablets and inconvenient for printing. There are quite a few formatting errors – bold and italic text cropping up randomly and fonts changing in the middle of sentences or simply wrong – throughout; it could have done with a better proofreading run. There are a few illustrations, mostly colour, that appear to be stock and are not that well connected to the text. Presentation is substandard for the publisher.
As is stated – more than once – in the supplement, chaos magic and the level of randomness that gets added to a game as a result is not for everyone. Players that like the unexpected – ones who think items such as wand of wonder (and derivatives) are excellent – will probably get the most out of having spells, or a spellcaster, whose effects could go very drastically wrong, helping foes or having helpful spells accidentally become harmful ones when cast at party members. Those who do not like adding this degree of randomness will likely hate it.
Is it balanced? Inherently, chaos magic is unbalanced – the clue is in the name after all. However, it looks like a good attempt has been made to balance the chaos magic in this supplement, and there are notes as to things that could result in overpowered chaos users if care is not taken. Some chaos magic-influenced magic items would have been nice, but this can’t have been an easy supplement to write to try and make chaos magic interesting and as balanced as possible.
The Genius Guide to Chaos Magic is not for everyone but, despite the formatting errors, is interesting for those who like a degree of randomness and wild magic and it can be found by clicking here.
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