Arcana Unearthed

Yeah. I guess you could use this book in place of the D&D 3rd edition Player's Handbook. That's what Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed (Monte Cook) promised on the back cover - "What if there were a whole new player's handbook, presented just like the original, but with different character classes, races, skills, feats, and spells?" 

And I can definitely answer that hypothetical. The classes would be all right. The races would be pretty good. The skills, feats, and spells would be largely the same, with a few newcomers, but mostly just subtle tweaks with new names. But it would all be perfectly workable. You could pick up this book in lieu of the PHB and have a perfectly functional fantasy roleplaying game. Mission accomplished, Mr. Cook.

The temptation in these situations is to pit the books against each other. "Okay, you've acknowledged that both can get the job done, but which is better?" But I think in this case, that's a fruitless approach. Arcana Unearthed doesn't appear to be coming onto the Variant Corebook scene with any particular axe to grind. It's not trying to work in a different genre, or to revolutionize D&D's basic gameplay loop (and, in fact, still uses the standard Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual), or even to fix any broken rules or bad mechanical assumptions. It's just different for the sake of being different. Sometimes obnoxiously so (The D&D spell "Fly" is listed here as "Flight" and there are enough differences between the two to justify being different spells, but it's also clear that Flight was created by taking the Fly spell from the SRD and substituting one number and one sentence while leaving the rest of the text untouched), but never in a way that implies the original core book was doing anything wrong.

I suppose the magic system is overall improved. Arcana Unearthed eliminated the arcane/divine split, though only the Witch class does anything interesting with the new combined spell list. The big innovation is a variant of Vancian casting that would later become the default in D&D 5th edition - you ready a certain number of spells in advance and then you have an entirely separate pool of spell slots that you can use to cast any of your readied spells. It was enough to send me running to the credits page of the 5e PHB (he's on there, but it's unclear what degree of influence his ideas had on the final design). It solves one of my main problems with 3.X prepared casters - having to second-guess the DM while determining your spell loadout - but I still can't shake the feeling that getting 8th and 9th level spells is dramatically better than anything any other class gets, and even low-level casters have enough utility to crowd other classes out of their own niches.

However, I'm not sure how much that actually matters in the context of Arcana Unearthed as a whole. Because the class list doesn't have a designated Rogue class. The closest thing is the Unfettered, who lean into the "swashbuckler" interpretation of the class. And they get half the skill points, a weaker sneak attack, and no automatic stealth/infiltration utility (instead, many of the best rogue features got changed into feats, which the Unfettered has no special access to).

There is another skill-focused class, the Akashic, which gets 8 skill points per level and has every skill on its class list. They could be built like rogues, but it would be a flavor clash (their deal is that they access the world's collective memory to give themselves access to skills and information they would otherwise have no way of learning).

So it's not as clear a case of the casters stepping on the non-casters' toes. The toes in question have largely been withdrawn. However, I can't really call that a triumph of design, because you've still got characters getting the equivalent of 5th-7th level spells, once per day, at a level where the casters are getting access to things like Greater Dominate and Immortality. 

However, if you ban the Greenbond and Magister and just focus on the non-casters and 3/4 casters (generally, they have mid-BAB and cap out at 7th-level spells), then you get a system that is not quite a well-balanced C-tier-only experience, but which gets closer than anything in 3.X before or since.

On the balance, I quite liked Arcana Unearthed. It somehow does something different with the "D&D fantasy" genre without ever actually moving the needle on the genre even a little bit away from the center. The biggest change in flavor comes from its unconventional race lineup - you can play a giant or a sprite or a lion-person or a jackal-person . . . among others. And just the novelty of not having any of the PHB alumni (humans notwithstanding) was enough to avoid some of the most tired worldbuilding tropes, but you've still got ancient empires, mysterious ruins, and high-level magic users getting into shenanigans. Like I said earlier, I'm not ready to call it better, but I can give it credit for being distinct.

I think I'd have a stronger opinion about this book if I'd bothered to pick up The Diamond Throne campaign setting. Throughout the lore-heavy early chapters (and a bit in the magic chapter), there were numerous intimations of a well-worked-out world that, due to the Variant Player's Handbook format, was being kept tantalizingly out of reach. And the more I think about it, the more I think that all the Diamond Throne stuff should have been in one volume that used the regular PHB in an irregular way. Despite the blurb on the back, Arcana Unearthed makes a much stronger case for itself as a supplement than it does as a new core book.

Ukss Contribution: I am, in general, pretty down on this book's habit of taking a PHB spell, tweaking the rules slightly, and then renaming the spell to something that is not covered by the SRD. However, I did enjoy one of them. Mordenkainen's Sword became the nearly word-for-word identical MASSIVE SWORD (I thought it deserved to be in all caps).

Which just goes to show what a difference a single word can make. The Ukss version will probably play up the "massive" a bit more, but, yeah, I can picture it in my head - a sorcerer, confronted by their enemies, shouting, "Back off, or else I'm gonna summon a MASSIVE SWORD!" I can dig it.