[3.5] Favored Soul PrCs?

[Dralnu]

A player in my campaign is currently a level 8 favored soul and was wondering what good prestige classes are available to him. Are there any cool PrCs out there that you guys can suggest?

[Zaq]

Favored souls make excellent skypledged (Races of the Wild), but that's race-specific. Now, raptorans are quite a nice race, but if your friend isn't one already, that gets tricky.

Favored souls have a hard time getting into PrCs because they lack most of the usual divine prereqs (no Turn Undead, no Knowledge: Religion). Ruathar is a decent way of picking up K:Religion if you can stomach the godawful fluff (who wants to be a friend to the elves? Eww.), or you can ask nicely to swap K:Arcana for K:Religion. (There's an article somewhere on the WotC site that explicitly makes this an option, but I don't have the link on me. I think it's called "Dead Levels," if you feel like trying Google.)

Also, "PrCs" should not contain an apostrophe. It's an initialism in which the last letter is capitalized.

[Dralnu]

I should mention that the character in question is a lawful evil favored soul of Nerull. I'm also the DM so certain things can be refluffed and pre-reqs reworked so long as the class isn't overpowered.

I've been told that a bunch of options aren't available to the favored soul because many good divine prestige classes require turn undead class feature. Could I just ignore that requirement without any issues or would that effect the PrCs balance?

Also fixed the original post.

[Zaq]

I should mention that the character in question is a lawful evil favored soul of Nerull. I'm also the DM so certain things can be refluffed and pre-reqs reworked so long as the class isn't overpowered.

I've been told that a bunch of options aren't available to the favored soul because many good divine prestige classes require turn undead class feature. Could I just ignore that requirement without any issues or would that effect the PrCs balance?

Also fixed the original post.

I note with some irony that since the bolded bit is possessive, it should have an apostrophe. (PrC's if singular, PrCs' if plural.) I only mention this because your willingness to edit the first post indicates to me that you actually care about language, which makes me happy.

But anyway, it's really just a case-by-case basis. A lot of PrCs that require Turn Undead use TU to fuel class features, so those class features need to be tweaked before they can be used. Otherwise, if you want to just view the prereqs as "level X divine caster," it's unlikely to make an enormous difference.

[Murmaider]

I've been told that a bunch of options aren't available to the favored soul because many good divine prestige classes require turn undead class feature. Could I just ignore that requirement without any issues or would that effect the PrCs balance?

Some Cleric PrCs, most of which have the turn undead rquirement, give domains, which the favored soul probably not was intendet to get.

On the other hand: a favored soul with domains is probably still inferior to any cleric, who's able to use turn/rebuke undead. So, not too much of a balance issue.

[Thurbane]

Here's some I like, though getting into them can require jumping through a few hoops (and will be tough at level 8, unless retraining is on the cards).

Hexer
Knight of the Raven
Sacred Exorcist
Sand Shaper (requires arcane SLA caster level)
Moonspeaker
Human Paragon (not technically a PrC)

Futher reading:

[3.5] Favored Soul tips, tricks and general discussion (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152070)
[3.5] Increasing the FS Spells Known (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=175398)

[mikau013]

I found two decent threads dealing with favored souls and thus I'll link them here if you are interested

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152070

http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=5804.0

[Kobold Esq]

I remain convinced to this day that the Knowledge (arcana) in the Favored Soul description is a typo which was overlooked repeatedly to the point were WotC is too embarrassed to admit it.

Considering how low the editing quality was for Complete Divine, this seems the most plausible explanation.

The alternative is they were trying to actively punish players who took the class.

[Thurbane]

While I tend to agree, Knoweldge (religion) wasn't present in the original FS writeup in Miniatures Handbook either. It was also never corrected in errata.

There is, however, an online WotC article that lets the FS select either Knowledge (arcana) or Knowledge (religion) as a class skill at 1st level. There should be a link in one of the threads linked to above.

Link: Knowledge Specialty (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cwc/20070227x)

[navar100]

Don't mean to be crass, but why not just create one? People often forget you can design your own prestige class. For a single class character to go into a prestige class usually means specializing in something, either making a class ability stronger or something new that is thematically appropriate to the base class. For the Favored Soul it would me the latter since class abilities don't really suggest anything to improve in greater detail. (Obviously the prestige class would ideally increase spellcasting progression.)

Talk with your player to get an idea of what thematic aspect he would like to focus on then build a prestige class that carries it out.

[EarthTremor]

Stormlord has some naf feat requirements, but it isn't particularly OP and seems to combine better with favoured soul than it does with cleric. Might require some generous adaptation in your case, however.

[sonofzeal]

Also, "PrCs" should not contain an apostrophe. It's an initialism in which the last letter is capitalized.
I tend to favour the apostrophe for all acryonyms to avoid ambiguity. Not that anyone's likely to misunderstand here, but the modern world has too many acronyms already and I like to make any additions to neologisms as distinct as possible, even it means bugging some grammar nerds. It's the same reason I favour the Oxford Comma, and also why I put the punctuation outside the quotes unless the quoted material had the same punctuation.

There's something to be said for clarity over pedantry...

[Amphetryon]

Favored Soul has a pretty easy time getting into Sacred Exorcist, overall. While it's not necessarily the best end-point for a Favored Soul, the immediate access it grants to Turn Undead basically opens up a huge world of Divine-focused PrCs. There's nothing wrong with Sacred Exorcist 10, really, either.

[Psyren]

My favorite option is to turn them into super-paladins - Fist of Raziel from BoED works nicely for this.

And yes, the WotC variant that gives the Know (Religion) is both official, and practically mandatory if they want to PrC.


EDIT to include a build: FS 8/Sacred Exorcist 1/PrC Paladin 1/Fist of Raziel 10 gets you 9th-level spells, martial weapons+heavy armor, bonus spells from Cha and lots of smitery. Or drop the capstone of FoR for PrC Paladin 2, and you get Divine Grace as well.