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Amechra
2011-08-17, 12:20 PM
Essentia Puppets
The soulmeld necessary to raise a corpse as a necrocarnum zombie is well known; less well known is this technique.

Rather than raising a corpse from the dead, this technique allows the user to "possess" the target with essentia, resulting in complete and utter control of these "puppets" by those who chose to use this horrific methodology.

New Feats:

Essentia Puppet [Vile, Essentia]
Prerequisites: Undead Meldshaper, Charisma 15, Character level 6
Benefits: Once per day, you may invest essentia into this feat.
For every 2 points of Essentia invested, you may apply the Lesser Essentia Puppet template to one helpless creature as a touch attack; this process takes 1 minute, and divests this feat of 1 point of Essentia.
Special: You may only have a number of Essentia Puppets under your control equal to your Charisma modifier times your maximum general Essentia capacity. If you try to control excess Essentia Puppets, you automatically lose control of the oldest Essentia Puppets you own.

Puppetmaster of Souls [Vile, Essentia]
Prerequisites: Undead Meldshaper, Charisma 15, Character level 11, Essentia Puppet
Benefits: Once per day, you may invest essentia into this feat.
For every 1 point of Essentia invested, you may convert a single Lesser Essentia Puppet into a Greater Essentia Puppet; this takes 1 minute. At any one time, you may not have more Greater Essentia Puppets than the maximum amount of Essentia you may invest in this feat.
Special: You may only have a number of Lesser Essentia Puppets under your control equal to your Charisma modifier times your maximum general Essentia capacity.

New Templates:

Lesser Essentia Puppet
Type: Does not change.
HD, Speed, Size, and Saving Throws: No change
Special Attacks: A Lesser Essentia Puppet retains all Special Attacks.
Special Qualities: A Lesser Essentia Puppet retains all Special Qualities, and also gains the following:
-Mindless: See the SRD.
-Semblance of Prior Identity: The main benefit of an Essentia Puppet is the fact that they can easily escape notice; as such, they still have a remnant of the mind they formerly had, so as to more easily fool friends and family.
The creator of the Essentia Puppet may treat any interactions with anyone they interact with using the Essentia Puppet as if the Essentia Puppet had automatically succeeded any Disguise checks and related Bluff checks.
They have a virtual intelligence score equal to their Intelligence score prior to gaining this template; this is only used to determine whether or not they can use spells, powers, mysteries, or similar.
In addition, they receive any feats they formerly had as bonus feats, and gain a racial bonus to any skills they have ranks in equal to their ranks in that skill. They do not automatically fail intelligence checks; instead, they simply receive a -5 penalty.
These changes only apply while the master of the Essentia Puppet is using Direct Command.
-Direct Command: The Master of the Essentia Puppet always knows where the Essentia Puppet is, and can telepathically take control of the Puppet. While in this state, the Master's body is considered helpless, but the Essentia Puppet gains access to the Semblance of Prior Identity ability. The Master may only use this ability on a single essentia puppet at any one time.
-Steadily Declining Body: An Essentia Puppet no longer benefits from natural healing; in addition, they do not regain any per day abilities that they may have (So an Essentia Puppet that was a 1st level Barbarian would only be able to Rage once, and an Essentia Puppet that was a Wizard would no longer be able to prepare spells).
Ability Scores: Int -
LA:-

Greater Essentia Puppet
Type: Does not change.
HD, Speed, Size, and Saving Throws: No change
Special Attacks: A Lesser Essentia Puppet retains all Special Attacks.
Special Qualities: A Lesser Essentia Puppet retains all Special Qualities, and also gains the following:
-Semblance of Prior Identity: The main benefit of an Essentia Puppet is the fact that they can easily escape notice; as such, they still have a remnant of the mind they formerly had, so as to more easily fool friends and family.
The creator of the Essentia Puppet may treat any interactions with anyone they interact with using the Essentia Puppet as if the Essentia Puppet had automatically succeeded any Disguise checks and related Bluff checks.
In addition, they receive any feats they formerly had as bonus feats, and gain a racial bonus to any skills they have ranks in equal to their ranks in that skill.
They have a virtual intelligence score equal to their Intelligence score prior to gaining this template; this is only used to determine whether or not they can use spells, powers, mysteries, or similar.
These changes only apply while the master of the Essentia Puppet is using Direct Command.
-Direct Command: The Master of the Essentia Puppet always knows where the Essentia Puppet is, and can telepathically take control of the Puppet. While in this state, the Master's body is considered helpless, but the Essentia Puppet gains access to the Semblance of Prior Identity ability. The Master may only use this ability on a single essentia puppet at any one time.
-Steadily Declining Body: An Essentia Puppet no longer benefits from natural healing; in addition, they do not regain any per day abilities that they may have (So an Essentia Puppet that was a 1st level Barbarian would only be able to Rage once, and an Essentia Puppet that was a Wizard would no longer be able to prepare spells).
-Essentia Pool: A Greater Essentia Puppet has an Essentia pool of 2+1/4 their HD.
-Infused by Souls: A Greater Essentia Puppet may invest essentia into this ability. They gain a benefit based off of the following table:
{table=head]Essentia Invested|Bloodline Strength
2|Any Minor
3|Any Intermediate
4|Any Major[/table]
They do not take any of the normal penalties associated with a bloodline; note, however, that the abilities they gain from their bloodline are still affected by Steadily Declining Body.
Bonus Feats: Essentia Puppet
Ability Scores: Int 5
LA:-

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Just a quick idea I had; an inverse Necromancer!

Garryl
2011-08-17, 03:40 PM
The descriptor should be [Incarnum], not [Essentia].

Rather than divesting essentia from Essentia Puppet, just give one use/day/2 essentia. That way, you still pay the cost of investing in a 1/day feat, rather than getting it back in your Essentia Pool. Similarly, Puppetmaster of Souls should just work 1/day/essentia (unless there's some reason you need to improve all 2-4 puppets at once instead of one at a time).

Puppetmaster of Souls doesn't need the Special text talking about Lesser Puppets unless you're changing it from Essentia Puppet. That's covered by Essentia Puppet.

For the Lesser Essentia Puppet, rather than giving bonus feats and skill bonuses, just let them retain their existing feats and skill ranks (an exception to the norm for mindlessness), but they count as untrained for all skill checks (and you can remove the untrained bit when you upgrade to Greater puppets). Also note that the Wizard example for Steadily Declining Body is even more extreme. With an Int of --, the puppet Wizard can't even cast the spells he already has prepared when not being directly controlled (not that that's something that the ability has anything to do with).

Greater Essentia Puppet refers to itself as Lesser Essentia Puppet a few times. Rather than reprinting everything from the Lesser version, just specify that the Greater version can only be applied to creatures that already have the Lesser Essentia Puppet template. Then you only have to specify the changes. Also note that Greater Essentia Puppets lose their immunity to mind-affecting (since they aren't mindless any more), double their feats (they still have all the bonus ones from being a Lesser Puppet), and gain a whole new set of skill points on top of the bonuses that Lesser granted in place of their original skill points (although the -3 Int mod will usually make it only 1/level). Giving Essentia Puppet as a bonus feat is an interesting choice (they can make more puppets, but they can only do so once due to Steadily Declining Body, anyways).

Intriguing... The puppets are still living creatures (although ones that were converted while helpless due to unconsciousness at negative HP may take a little time to heal up). And when they're rendered uncontrolled (master dies, or just dismisses one to control a new puppet) they remain Essentia Puppets. What happens then?

Pyromancer999
2011-08-17, 03:50 PM
It sort of feels like this would work better as a soulmeld instead of a set of feats. Just saying.

Amechra
2011-08-17, 04:32 PM
Yeah, I might just change this to a soulmeld.