Beguiler 6 / Nightmare Spinner X. Fear me rawr!

[Torvon]

Hey there.

We are playing a thief campaign, lots of social interaction and not too much epicness. I'm playing a Lesser Tiefling Beguiler, currently level 5, and mostly took feats to increase my enchantment and illusion DCs, as well as get more spell slots or take better advanced learning spells.

Now, I'm pondering PrCs, and I like two very much:
* Fiend-blooded (at level 6)
* Nightmare Spinner (at level 7)

Unfortunately, fiend-blooded requires not only 2 rather useless feats, but it would be good to have a familiar on top of that, so make that 3 feats. On top of it, I'd have to cross class 8 ranks in Planes ... my DM would allow me to rebuild the character, but it would quite massively nerf the character right now, and make him stronger in the "late-game" (which we might never reach ... we don't play that often, and the last two campaigns stopped around level 12).

So I was thinking about Nightmare Spinner. More illusion spells, immunity to fear, and starting at level 2 I can actually reliably make enemies shaken for 1 round even if they save.

Now, since we're talking about fear, I wonder whether I should heavily invest in this. So I'm looking for suggestions regarding feats, skill tricks, etc that would go well with a Beguiler 6 / Nightmare Spinner. Cool build ideas. That sort of thing.

The PrC isn't exactly overpowered, as far as I understand, but maybe it's good enough? Other members in the group are a halfling rogue/cleric, a Hazokee (? ape-man) ranged damage rogue, a psion (mind-control/telepathy), and a half-orc melee city druid.

Thanks
Torvon

[Eldan]

You should look at a prestige class called Dread Witch. I think Heroes of Horror, but don't take me up on that. It goes very well with the Nightmare spinner and its main ability is to affect enemies that are normally immune to fear effects.

[Silva Stormrage]

^ Seconded, a beguiler doesn't have fear or the standard fear spells on his spell list but you might be able to convince your dm that fear should be an enchantment spell not necromancy (it really should be). There also was a fear handbook that you could use but I can't quite seem to find it right now.

[vhfforever]

You should look at a prestige class called Dread Witch. I think Heroes of Horror, but don't take me up on that. It goes very well with the Nightmare spinner and its main ability is to affect enemies that are normally immune to fear effects.

Thirded, and it is indeed in Heroes of Horror. Which is actually quite the good read, even if it does have the horrible Taint mechanics in it.

[Torvon]

"Dread Witch Requirements:
Ability to cast cause fear and scare"

None of these is on the Beguiler spell list. I think for a longer campaign it might be worthwhile to combine NmSpinner and DreadWitch, but for my purposes it might be better to just go with Nightmare Spinner.

Any feat or skill trick suggestions to make this rather average PrC a bit stronger?

Thanks

[vhfforever]

Hrm. I'm sure there's a Domain out there that has them, so you could add them onto your list through a Feat. But atm I'm drawing a blank.


"Dread Witch Requirements:
Ability to cast cause fear and scare"

[Torvon]

I have WIS10, so "arcane disciple" is out of the question unfortunately. Seeing that we play a thieving campaign (need some DEX) and I want at least some CHA and a little bit of CON, I went for
STR8 DEX14 CON12 INT18 WIS10 CHA14 (before modifiers).

[Psyren]

NS and Dread Witch don't go together quite as well as they seem to at first. DW's ability to bypass fear immunity only applies to spells with the fear descriptor, and counterintuitively, NS doesn't actually add the fear descriptor to its spells. Even Nightmare Phantasm only adds the phantasm descriptor.

Another issue is that the abilities of both PrCs are based on Cha, making them more suitable for Sorcerers than Beguilers.