Low-level community-serving caster

[Balor01]

So ... I am thinking of introducing low level casters that are not combat oriented into my setting, but help people with improving ordinary lives.

I'd like some advice on:

- what sort of feats would be useful for these (so far i have brew potion?)

- what sort of spells would you recommend as being useful for this?

So, generally a magewright or adept - but with what sort of spells? (or wizard, cleric, etc.)

Character max lvl is 3.

thanks

[Saidoro]

There was an old third party pdf called the practical enchanter (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/51242/The-Practical-Enchanter) which had this:
Hedge Magic (General)
You can channel your power into a wide variety of minor practical magics and create minor Conjures for household and village use.
Prerequisites: Ability to cast first level spells
Benefit: You may prepare or spontaneously cast a wide variety of household magics according to your magical style. These spells never exceed level two and few of them are really useful for adventuring Consider the samples below typical.
L0) Light, Mage Hand, Message, Prestidigitation, Call Domestic Animal (one
domesticated animal comes to you), Cure Hide (cures one pelt), Check Edibility (checks for natural poisons, not flavor), Oven Gauntlets (hand-held forcefields for touching dangerous stuff), Unplug Drains (obvious), Sharpen Blades (also works on tools), Butcher (makes it much easier to cut up a dead body), Contraception (24 hours), The Good Cook (improves the flavor of a meal), Extract Butter (from milk), Clean Clothing (obvious), Create Water, Purify Food and Drink, Mystic Blanket (keeps users warm at night), Air Mattress (makes hard, cold, bumpy ground warm and comfortable), Soothe Infant (keeps an infant dry and happy for up to 12 hours), Umbrella (keeps rain off for up to 6 hours), Dry (dries food or cleans up spills), Check Health (gives a basic evaluation of the health of one creature), and Mill (converts up to a large bag of grain into flour).
L1) Alarm, Unseen Servant, Tarp (puts a tarp or basic tent over a small area), Remove Lice (or other minor parasites/pests/skin problems), Preservation (keeps things from spoiling very fast), Child Ward (keeps a kid out of trouble for 24 hours), Dowsing (look for water, fish, etc), Relieve Illness and Relieve Poison (reduces the severity and discomfort of any one disease or poison), Dentistry (fixes teeth), Expel Parasites (mostly stomach and intestinal worms or things which burrow under the skin), Unburn Meal (for those who left things in the oven too long), Deodorize House (fairly obvious), Sheer Sheep (takes the wool off of a sheep neatly and quickly; related spells include Card, Spin, and Weave), and Scarecrow (basically a specialized Unseen Servant which chases pests out of a field for 24 hours; it works whether or not you leave it; similar variants turn cranks, pump water, and so on).
L2) Spring Cleaning (cleans and straightens up throughout a small house), Hearthfire (makes a small fire which burns without fuel or smoke for up to 24 hours), Ward versus Vermin (keeps normal rats and pests out of the warded area for several weeks), Continual Flame, Train Animal (teaches a domestic animal basic good behavior and helps teach it useful tasks, such as herding sheep; this does not help teach it to fight), Herb Mastery (effects equivalent to Goodberry, but use a variety of herbs), Find Stray (animal or child, fairly nearby), Harvest (gathers the harvest of a small field), Weedkill (kills weeds in a small field), Turn Soil (loosens and turns soil in a large field), Tree to Lumber (turns a cut-down tree into useful boards), Sow (scatters and tamps in seeds evenly over a field), Render (extracts and purifies fat), Thresh (converts a steady stream of rice, grain, corn on the cob, or similar, into separate streams of prepared seed and husks), Fountain (creates up to 50 gallons of water per level), and The Laborers’s Word (does an hour’s simple work, such as shelling peas or chopping wood, as if the caster was doing it by hand).
Conjures are minor enchanted items made with such spells. They’re usually made with the Ambient Magic limitation, and tend to be bulky, fragile, and a bit awkward to use. They’re considerably cheaper to make than more combative devices. If there’s some need for an exact figure, use 50% of normal costs. Typical conjures include child and livestock-locating charms, boxes that keep food fresh longer, and charms against bugs and vermin getting into the granary.
Normal: There are no practical mages. Mages are good at killing things and not much else.
Special: Anyone with a level or two of sorcerer and this feat becomes much more popular, welcome at family gatherings, and marriageable. Hedge Wizards
tend to be vital members of their communities.

In core most of the useful ones are cantrips, clerics have cure spells, a few orisons and really nothing else which is good out of a fight at low levels. Druids have goodberry, a few spells for dealing with animals and wood shape but they aren't all that much better. Wizards really provide the most community benefit, they've got enlarge and reduce person(Good for manual labor and all those things they used to use kids for because they were smaller respectively), mount(Think about how much a horse costs to feed, and you usually don'twork them more than a few hours a day anyway), unseen servant(free labor), Arcane Lock(No more Burglars), Detect Thoughts(Revolutionize the judicial system), Continual flame(!!! Words can barely express how this can revolutionize society), Levitate(Crazy useful) and whispering wind(Mail service, communication in general) and probably the most useful cantrip list too(prestidigitation is king, clean one object regardless of size every 6 seconds for an hour, yes please).

Adept is actually pretty bad at this, they've got Cure light and minor wounds, endure elements, light, create water, mending, and purify food and drink. And apart from maybe the last two none are available in large enough quantities to really help the community. Don't know about magewright.

[nedz]

You should think about this in terms of economics perhaps ?
Unfortunately the spell systems are configured around combat, so this is not always apparent.

Spells which increase crop production or reduce spoilage would be the most useful: Purify Food and Drink, Create Food and Water, Repel Vermin.

Spells which increase manufacturing: Unseen Servant, Mending, etc.

I think Clerics have medicine sorted, but these spells would be useful too.

[manyslayer]

Feats: precocious apprentice (access to a 2nd level spell, but not always reliably), Sudden Extend, Inscribe Rune, Craft Wondrous Item

Spells: Bibgby's Helping hand (PHBII), Comprehend Languages, Create Water, Scholar's Touch (RoD), Sea Legs (SS - for such a caster on a ship that takes on passengers), Tenser's Floating Disc, Unseen Servant, Wieldskill (MoF), Healing Lorecall (CA), Locate Object, Lore of the Gods (CC), Make Whole, Master's Touch (PHBII), Mechanus Mind (PlH), Wood Shape

[ravagerofworlds]

Yeah, I'd echo prestidigitation as the all purpose magical helper. Cleaning with a mage is so much safer than say, small children losing fingers to factory bobbins.

Unseen Servant can also be useful for dangerous tasks (such as bringing the first cable of a rope bridge across a chasm). Alternatively, Animate Rope can do the same task. But Unseen Servant can do so much more and is more versatile.

Tenser's Floating Disc- when a mule is not available, or you need to bring dangerous liquids from one building to the next... this is your spell.

Alarm- great for bank vaults.

If you have low level casters available for 2nd level spells...

Continual Flame is perfect for streetlights.
Resist Energy is ideal for firefighters.




These have all been suggested as spells, I'm just giving them context.

[nedz]

Tenser's Floating Disc as a crucible in a smelting works.

[dextercorvia]

Spells that middle class or above customers may pay for, or that give the caster a unique salable talent.

2nd level spells:
Whispering Wind
Locate Object
Detect Thoughts
Minor Image (A friend of mine once said that almost as soon as any communication technology was invented, it was immediately subverted for vice. We then had a fun time speculating what the first thing Bell actually said into the telephone.)
Command Undead (Depending on the setting, but skeletal labor is generally accepted in a tippy-lite verse).

1st level spells:
Unseen Servant
Comprehend Languages (Makes you better than most translaters -- one way though)

0th level spells:
Amanuensis (Why yes, I can copy a book in a day.)
Arcane Mark (Magical engraving service)
Detect Poison
Prestidigitation
Message

[Urpriest]

Craft Wondrous Item in particular allows access to magic traps, with all their potential community-breaking goodness.

[ericgrau]

At 10-60 gp a pop it would be hard to find spells that are worth the cost. Compare an unseen servant to a 3 sp hireling.

Your main customers would have to be the wealthy, and you need to do things that a servant or other cheap source couldn't do.

0: detect poison
1: Alarm, endure elements, comprehend languages (only for languages not known in the area)
2: arcane lock (only if you yourself stay around to manage the vault), obscure object, detect thoughts, locate object, magic mouth to leave messages keyed to the right person, phantom trap, whispering wind
Spell compendium probably has a million more with all the strange options it contains. I like the amanuensis suggestion, btw, for when a scribe simply isn't fast enough.

Clerics would mostly fix afflictions without the pesky long hospital stays and limited medical skills of their doctors.

[dextercorvia]

At 10-60 gp a pop it would be hard to find spells that are worth the cost. Compare an unseen servant to a 3 sp hireling.

Your main customers would have to be the wealthy, and you need to do things that a servant or other cheap source couldn't do.

0: -
1: Alarm, endure elements, comprehend languages (only for languages not known in the area)
2: arcane lock (only if you yourself stay around to manage the vault), obscure object, detect thoughts, locate object, magic mouth to leave messages keyed to the right person, phantom trap

Not worth the cost listed, but worth more than day labor.

[ravagerofworlds]

For those quoting the 'cost per spell level' to hire a spell caster... people seem to be forgetting the context of these prices.

The costs in the PhB for instance, are one shot casting costs. Essentially, the caster is brought in as a consultant, and may only have the one job (a level 2 spell). Consider then that a low level caster with a steady job... probably is working for salary, and not on a "how many spell levels did you expend today?"

Please see the DMG for prices of keeping a low level caster on retainer, and double it if they are casting their maximum spells every day as a common day laborer, include vacation, and perhaps some health benefits. This job sounds like a white collar job.

[ericgrau]

Makes sense, but even with a bulk discount 10s of gp is way larger than sp. Even a single spell costs more than getting a dozen laborers. For a fraction of the cost of a single spell they could replace all the unseen servant spells you could possibly prepare.

[Coidzor]

Have you seen the Gleaner (http://www.giantitp.com/articles/gk7uKJeF296jRcx1NJw.html)?