Libram of the First Language: Truename Magic Reborn (2014)

From publisher blurb:

In the eyes of the universe, a rose by any other name is simply not a rose at all!

There are those who claim that the universe was not created by eons of divine toil. The Allfather did not forge each of the first dwarves and set them in the mountains as one would precious gems. Nature was not woven as one would weave a tapestry. Instead, a booming voice called out unto the void at the beginning of everything. It named the earth and sky. It named the winds and water. It named the grasses and the fish, the trees and the and birds. It named everything, and everything came into being. Granted, the very idea of an alternate beginning makes a number of religions very upset and more than a little uncomfortable. Those who make these claims are the truenamers, and, moreover, they claim to have found the First Language that made it all happen.

The Libram of the First Language is a reboot of the concept of codified truemagic. First introduced to the d20 system back when version 3.5 of Dungeons and Dragons was officially supported, the original truenamer was the original skill-based caster, a brilliant idea in theory, but was plagued by mechanics that forced a specific playstyle on both the player and the Game Master. Any deviation from a campaign wherein monsters had a CR that was exactly equal to the party level resulted in either an overpowered or totally useless party member. This almost always resulted in a creatively-starved GM, a bored player, or both.

Remastered herein, the truenamer is, as always, a flavorful, alternate approach to magic, but now features mechanics that do not force specific behaviors on the entire game to make it work.

• The truenamer features a skill-based casting system based on the level of the spell to be cast, not the HD of the target to be affected. This removes the lingering uncertainty of whether or not the next combat will include an enemy that is effectively impossible to cast upon.
• Checks made to cast spells resemble concentration checks rather than skill checks, thus eliminating the need to build in safeguards against players who find ways to get +50 to skill checks by level 10. There is no longer the inherent need to be a powergamer or be useless.
• Inflections, the system's metamagic equivalent, do not simply add +20 to the skill check needed to cast the spell. Instead, the DC increase is more modest, but the DC of that particular spell increases sharply for the rest of the day. Players must choose whether they want a few boosted uses of their favorite spells or many unboosted uses, thus making every round potentially very important for the rest of the day.
• Reversible spells, the absolute coolest part of the classic truenamer, have been salvaged and are present in the largest two of the four codices presented in this product.

• The truenamer base class, remastered to work within any campaign framework.
• The orator archetype, which focuses on what politicians would be like were they able to make their claims come true
• The truescribe archetype, who specializes in writing the First Language, weird tonality and all
• The verminspeaker archetype, who specializes in using the First Language to elicit an effect in mindless creatures
• 10 feats, including a chain that can help counter a truenamer in play
• 210 distinct spell effects in four codices: the Codex of Heart and Mind, the Codex of Artifice, the Codex of Far-Flung Spheres, and the Codex of the Realized Vision
• The speaker of the word prestige class, a divine caster who has found the Truth in the First Language
• The willshackler, a specialized truenamer who studies proper nouns in the First Language
• The wordsworn defender, a martial truenamer who specializes in tower shields