It presents additional base classes, prestige classes, and feats. It also contains additional rules and character ideas based on belief and the afterlife, as well as a chapter on magic items based on the original D&D pantheon gods/goddesses.
New base classes
Shugenja
Updated from Oriental Adventures, the shugenja utilizes primal energies, and tapping into the earth to cast spells. It is a charisma based sorcerer-style divine casting class, with a spell list biased towards elemental spells.
Favored Soul
Updated from the Miniatures Handbook, the Favored Soul is a spontaneously casting divine class, with a couple of additional divine abilities closely tied to his or her deity.
Spirit Shaman
The class has a fairly narrow divine spell selection. The spirit shaman cast spells as sorcerers do, but they change their spell selection each day by sending their Spirit Guide into the spirit world. The shaman also has a special abilities that affect spirits (incorporeal undead, fey, elementals and creatures defined as spirits in other texts). The Spirit Guide is a purely mental/spiritual creature, incapable of affecting the world, though it does grant the spirit shaman the feat, "Alertness", as well as justifying certain class features. Ultimately, at 20th level, the spirit shaman becomes a spirit (fey) himself, much as a 20th level monk becomes an outsider.
David Noonan explains the designers' approach to preparing material for the book: "In each section, we first decided what we wanted to pick up from previous D&D sources such as Defenders of the Faith and Faiths and Pantheons. That meant a lot of meetings and a lot of feedback from the fans. Then, especially for the spells, we looked for niches we hadn't filled yet. For example, there's a lot of design space left for high-level druid and cleric spells, so we tilted the balance of the spell list a little toward the upper levels."[1]
Reception
Viktor Coble listed the entire Complete series - including Complete Adventurer, Complete Divine, Complete Warrior, Complete Arcane, Complete Champion, and Complete Mage - as #9 on CBR's 2021 "D&D: 10 Best Supplemental Handbooks" list, stating that "These books took a deep dive into specific class types. They expanded on what it meant to be that kind of class, gave informative prestige classes, extra abilities, and even new concepts for playing them."[2]
