The Chaos Mage handbook: God's mutated cousin.

[Elderand]

The Chaos mage handbook: God's mutated cousin

http://i231.photobucket.com/albums/ee265/Elrendil/d19e77de-bd04-4c57-8f15-21c32a479229_zps09b6c2c8.jpg

Because it's not real magic unless you mutate or go insane

Ah the chaos mage, the much despised 3rd party class from mongoose publishing. Reviled for its “OMG so abusable” nature with phrases like “wish at ECL 2”.
With this handbook I aim to provide a clearer image of what a chaos mage is, is not, can or cannot do based on more than vaguely remembered post made years ago.

This handbook use the following rating

Red: No just no
Purple: Maybe, if you got nothing better
Black: Average
Blue: Pretty good
Gold: Top of the line

[Elderand]

Foreword to the chaos mage handbook: how I learned to stop worrying and love the insanity.

This class, found in the quintessential chaos mage, has quite the bad reputation for being far too powerful and broken. Some of those worries are founded, others are not.
What I can tell you is this:

The good:
A chaos mage is far less broken than wizards, there are of course way to cheese it but that applies to everything.
At the end of the day the chaos mage, much like any official tier 1 class or some builds must be used with a gentleman agreement to not break the game.

Once you have an agreement however, you are left with a class that is flavorful and present the simplest freeform magic system for dnd I have come across.

The bad:
The class is third party and has a terrible reputation, getting a DM to agree to let you play it will be challenging at best, outright impossible at worst.

The ugly:
The initial book (encyclopedia arcane: chaos magic) is poorly edited, with vital informations being found all over the place and should always be used alongside it's errata (which is sadly difficult to find).
The balance of things is not always the best (but not the worst either).
The successor to that book, the quintessential chaos mage, is far better edited but a few things remain unclear. To get the best picture of things it is necessery to consult all three documents, with the quintessential chaos mage priming over the other two.

Now that all of this is out of the way, let's get down to business.

[Elderand]

Class features

The chassis
Chaotic only Alignment: We all know players are inherently chaotic anyway.

D4 hit dice: What did you expect? You’re a mage type, just one more reason to stay away from pointy thing and the peoples that carry them. Unlike other spellcasters this represents a very real limitation for a chaos mage.

Poor BAB: Not the worse news in the universe for a chaos mage.

Good will save: Standard for the caster types

Poor fort and reflex: Same as a wizard.

2 Skill points per level: Since Int is not a primary stat for chaos mage this represents a limitation, and unlike other casters you don’t want to try and compensate with spells.

Proficiency: You’re proficient with simple weapon, hurray for backup crossbow.

The actual class features
Chaos magic: This is what it’s all about, there are however limits on what can be achieved, limits that make chaos magic ultimately far less powerful than standard arcane magic. On the other hand you’ll never ever be whitout an appropriate spell to cast.

Chaos Familliar: Chaos familliars can be better than normal familiars, but present much more of a risk and the chapter on them raises more questions than it answers.

Multiple effects: Your spells will grow more complex and more interesting as you progress.

Countermagic: This, this makes the chaos mage the absolutle best thing ever when it comes to counterspelling. You can counterspell everything and anything. On the bad side, it can cause backlash. Use with moderation.

Purge chaos: If you survived long enough to get this class feature your odds of survival just grew exponentialy. You're not entirely safe, but you're safer.

The skills
Bluff: You're not going to be the party face, not with the path of chaos, but this might help you avoid akward inquiries.

Concentration: Vitaly important for a chaos mage, altough far less useful than it is for a traditionnal caster because the DCs you'll be facing will be astronomicly higher.

Craft alchemy: If you plan to create chaos magic infused object this will be absolutly vital. If not it's purple.

Knowledge Arcana: This is what you tolerate the bard for (that and eye candy, possibly). There is little reason to bother with it.

Profession: Using an option in the book allow you to use profession to reduce the cost of creating magic item. All other professions are red

Spellcraft: Quite useless for a chaos mage, you never need to identify a spell to dispel it.

[Elderand]

Races

Human: humans make for good chaos mage, like they do everything else.

Dwarf: The increase in constitution comes in handy for chaos mage.

Elves: A malus to constitution is really not acceptable given the mechanic of chaos magic, pass.

Gnomes: Bonus to Con and small size makes a chaos mage happy. A bonus to craft alchemy is also quite excellent

Half elf: Half elves are meh, now and always.

Half orc: Worse than meh but not as bad as elves.

Halfling: Halfling are okay chaos mage, no specific bonus to push them into blue territory, unless they are strongheart.

Non core race of choice:
Anthropomorphic bat: +6 to wisdom is absolutly delicious.

Ability scores

Str: Dump it Unless you go for many chaos magic items.
Dex: Useful but not necessery
Con: Even more important to you than to other spellcasters
Int: Somewhat okay.
Wis: This is your primary stat. Max it.
Cha: Not really useful to you. The path of chaos makes you not want to dump it though.

[Elderand]

Chaos magic an overview

It's impossible to discuss in detail every possible combination of elements possible. I shall not attempt to do so. instead I will discuss important informations that are found hodge podge through the books.

Chaos spells
Chaos spells are, for all intent and purpose, arcane spells. they have spell failure, they have somatic and verbal components, they provoke attacks of opportunity. They do not function in an AMF.

The casting check

To cast a chaos magic spell a chaos mage must pass a check rolled with 1d20 + chaos mage class level + wisdom modifier.

The spell DC

A spell DC is the sum of the DC of all the elements comprising the spell. This DC influence several things.

First how easy or hard it is to cast.

Second it influence concentration checks to cast defensively or under duress. Normaly such a concentration check calls for a spell level but chaos magic doesn't have such levels. It therefore uses the spell DC instead. This mean concentration checks quickly becomes incredibly high.

Third: for every 5 points of DC (DC 5, 10, 15 and so on) you take a point of damage, lethal in case you fail your casting check, non lethal if you succeed. If you are ever staggered or unconscous due to spellcasting (and only spellcasting) you cannot cast anymore spells until you have rested 8 hours. Your HP therefore defines the limit of your spellcasting very sharply.

Backlash

If you ever roll a 1 on your casting check you suffer backlash. The first time it happens you start on your path of chaos. From then on when you roll of 1 on your casting check you get to roll a d20, if the result of that roll is equal or lower than your number of steps in the path of chaos, you take one more step. The tenth step is always lethal and it is impossible to come back from it. Resurrection of any kind never purge you from those steps.
Concretly what it means is that the very first step is incredibly easy to take. Subsequent steps are less likely.

This informations lead to a few rules a wise chaos mage follows.

Never use chaos magic if an alternative exist.

Cast your powerful spells from safety. If you have to cast under duress keep it as simple as possible.

Never cast a spell that would stagger you unless you are absolutly certain to get 8 hours of rest immediatly afterward.

Cast your spell slowly if you can, you can lower the DC by ten by taking a full minute to cast.

Use triggers if you can, triggers are essentialy contingency and you get to have 1 per 2 level in chaos mage. They also make the spell easier to cast.

The limits of chaos magic.

Asside from being limited by DC and health chaos magic has several limitations.
Divination, healing and summoning are impossible for a chaos mage, these limitation extend even to the wish level reality altering power of a chaotic reconstruction effect.
Instantaneous materialisation effects do NOT work like conjuration (creation) effect. They need a duration or whatever you may have materialised vanish as soon as it appears. No non magical magical orbs working in AMF for you.

On the nature of casting elements and why some of them are horribly unbalanced

Direct damage
A few things to note on damage effect. By default this damage is force damage. On the very rare occasion where something might be immune to force damage you can change the damage type to fire, cold, acid, electricity or sonic by increasing the DC by 1.

Persistant and degrading damage effect need not be associated with a duration element. It comes prebuilt in the effect.

Trick: At first level don't use raw damage, use persistant damage. You're going to be inflicting only 1d8 in one round anyway but the DC is 5 instead of 10.

Domination
Domination effects are, by default, mind affecting and therefore suffer the weakness of being largely useless once immunities to mind affecting comes into play.
The book does mention that it is possible to create domination spells that aren't mind affecting if the DM agrees. But I imagine the odds of that to be rather low.

Materialisation
Materialisation effect need a duration element or they disappear immediatly, nothing created by such effect persist.
Materialisation covers illusions, which are considered mind affecting.
While a chaos mage cannot summon he can create chaos construct with a materialisation effect. But generaly those construct aren't really good.

Movement
Movement effects are confusing and contain a bewildering array of potential effects.
The most basic effect of the movement effect is the ability to teleport. The book is however silent on a few things concerning this teleportation. Namely does it require line of sight and what happens should you teleport into a wall or other solid object.
While the books do not give a clear answer to this it appears that the intent was to allow a chaos mage to teleport anywhere he pleases whitout needing line of sight. Likewise a chaos mage would be shunted to the nearest open space if necessery.

The problem of duration: The book is not very clear on how to apply duration. Here is therefore two exemple to help you grasp it.

A level 10 chaos mage casting a moderate movement effect with a by round duration.

Using the first option where the movement occur slowly our chaos mage could travel a total distance of 200 ft over the course of 10 rounds. He therefore travel at a speed of 20ft per round. This method does not allow flight but does not require any action either. Once you started moving you'll keep moving until you travelled the full distance. Moving around obstacles as needed. The great benefit is of course being able to move whitout using an action to do so.

Second option, rapid movement, allows for flight. For ten round our chaos mage can move a total of 200 ft, he can spread this movement however he might decide, but once he travel 200 ft the spell ends even if the duration is not completely gone. Should the chaos mage decide to move 200 ft in one round the spell end after this one round. He could also levitate 199 ft up and stay in the air for the full duration and then float back down safely.

Movement effect also allow for the equivalent of the following spells: sanctuary, haste, slow, spider climb, the ability to prevent someone to enter or leave an area, mage hand, apporting, hold portal and so on and so forth.

Transformation
Transformation effect, much like materialisation, need a duration element.
Luckily transformation effect have a very strict limitation of one transformation effect in effect at a time. So while a chaos mage can render himself immune to one school of magic, he can't make himself immune to all of them, or do so and benefit from increased AC.
Augmenting ability score, granting special vision mode, alter self, polymorph, increase and decrease in size are all transformation effects.

The wish problem: A chaotic reconstruction effect allow a chaos mage to replicate the use of wish. A very powerful ability that a clever, lucky and optimised chaos mage could use fairly early in his career. There are however a few things to keep in mind. The effect will always be limited in time.
To keep it from abuse a DM could rightly rule that even chaining wishes will have their effect end when the initial one stops.
For exemple you could use a chaotic reconstruction to make a ring of three wishes appear. And then use that ring to grant yourself wishes. A DM would be well whithin it's right to say that the effect of the wishes from the ring stops when reality reassert itself and the chaotic reconstruction end.
In the end chaotic reconstruction is the one effect where a gentleman agreement must come into play.

Stacking elements
An important note, at higher level a chaos mage can combine multiple elements into one spell. This has limits.
First of not all elements can be of the same type.
If you can combine 3 elements you cannot have all 3 be damage effect. You could have 2 damage and 1 movement.
Also you are not allowed to use the exact same effect.
Of our two damage effect mentionned above for exemple, you cannot have them both be raw damage effect. You could have a raw damage and a persistant damage.

Overcoming spell resistance
Wheter it is easier to overcome spell resistance directly or do a normal caster check depends on several factor, your wisdom bonus, the DC of the spell and the spell resistance of the creature.

For exemple, a venerable anthropomorphic bat level 7 chaos mage with a periat of wisdom +2 for a total of 30 wisdom is better off bypassing the spell resistance of a succububs if the DC of his spell is 9 or less. In that case he need only roll a 10 on his casting check for his spell to take effect normaly.
Compared to needing an 11 on a caster check needed after he succesfuly cast his spell.

[Elderand]

Chaos Familiar

Before any discussion of the chaos familiar can take place it is important to note the several shortcoming of the book when it comes to familiars.

The type: The book never explicitly tell you the type of creature the familiar is. The closest the book ever come to mentionning it is when they call the familiar a sentient construct.

The book is also ambiguous when it comes to the HD of the familiar, whether or not those are real HD and therefore allow the familiar to gain skills/feats.

It is important for you to work with your DM to solve these questions.
What I can offer is how I would rule it.

Type: Chaos construct as detailled under chaos construct effect with the caveat that familliars have no spell resistance.
HD: UTheir HD are not real, they merely count as having the listed HD for the purpose of effects based on HD. They therefore gain no feats or skills.

The real interest of the chaos familiar lay in his special abilities.

Special abilities

Bolster save: Not a bad choice
Bolster will: the reason why you got the familiar in the first place.
Brainburn poison: avoid it
Breath weapon: maybe if you got nothing better
Damage division; Since you want bolster will you want to avoid this one.
Damage reduction: could be useful.
Extra movement type: Probably not necessery
Increased attack bonus: You really don't want your familiar into battle.
Invisibility: Useful, but less so at later level.
Resistance: Not that useful.
Spell conduit: Can be a good way to save on DC based on range.

The incredibly high penalty for having your familiar die on you mean you really don't want them to be sent into battle if you can at all help it.
In fact unless you really want bolster will it's probably a good idea to not have a familiar at all.

Chaos items

Chaos mage, like normal casters, can create magical items to help them, and others in their lives. However chaos items function differently from normal magic items.
Below I shall list the pros and cons of chaos items when compared to magic items.

Pros

No feat investement: A chaos mage only need have ranks in craft alchemy and gold to make a chaos item, saving on precious feat slots that others would have to spend on crafting feats. With one possible exception I shall detail in the cons.

No XP investment: Chaos magic items requires no XP cost to create,a good news given that a chaos mage will want to spend his XP toward purging himself of chaotic paths.

Very cheap: As a rule of thumb a chaos magic item will end up costing 10 times less than a magic item filling the same function. With sufficient investment in profession (Miner, tanner or herbalist) the price can be further cut in half, making chaos item potentialy 20 times cheaper than magic items.

Faster to create: Given their reduced price chaos magic items tend to be completed in less time than comparable magic item, generaly taking only a fifth of the time.

Slotless: Unlike normal magic items, chaos item can be made slotless at no cost. While the intent may have been to limit some properties to certain items in practice the book make no mention of such and therefore any properties can be put on any item whitout a need for a slot to be used.

Cons

Limited properties: While classic items can present a huge variety of special properties and powers, chaos items are exceedingly limited in what they can accomplish. I will give details on these properties later.

The need for attunement: Before a chaotic item can offer it's benefits to a potential wielder it needs to be attuned. This process present the more serious drawback since attuning means that a chaos mage who created the item will lose a point of ability in one of his physical score that cannot be healed by any means as long as the item remains attuned. Further, this loss is not determined by the number of items but by number of infusions (IE special properties).
Worse still, people other than the creator of the chaotic item attempting to attune with the item will need to succeed on a will save and will lose not one point but two points per infusion.
This penalty can be reduced to a single point per infusion and no will save if the chaos mage who created the item took the attune other chaos feat.

Chaotic decay: Chaotic items will degrade over time unless the person attuned to them can make a will save to prevent it. This decay manifest itself as a loss of hardness. Once that hardness reaches zero the item will explode. The good news news is that the will save is relatively low.
Chaotic items with multiple infusion will also cause much more damage when they explode.
It is possible to make an item permanent by permanently losing a point of ability score rather than temporarly doing so with attunment.

Properties

Augmentation
Augmentation provide an enhancement bonus to attack rools, damage roll, armor class or ability score. This bonus is limited to 4 per chaos mage level for a maximum of +5. This makes a chaos item used to enhance ability scores strictly less efficient than normal magic items. The separation of attack rolls and damage rolls as two separate properties also proves less desirable than traditionnal items.

Insight
Insight provide an insight bonus to a skill with a maximum bonus of +10.

Resistance
Resistance grants an enhancment bonus to a saving throw with a bonus of maximum +5.

Storage
Perhaps the most useful property, the storage infusion allows a chaos mage to create a reserve of points that he can call on at any time to grant himself an enhancment bonus to his casting check on a 1 to 1 basis. Making the casting of truly powerful chaos spell possible with relative ease. It does not however help with backlash.
These points can be refilled and I would advise doing so before draining the last point to avoid weakening the hardness of the object.
There is no maximum to the amount of points an item can contain.

Luck
The luck infusion allows a chaos mage to place a reserve of points that will grant a circumstance bonus to any roll. There is no limit to the number of points that can be placed in an item but only three can be used on any one roll.
This property can be a gigantic trap if your DM is sadistic as any points used means the DM can inflict a penalty of the same value on any one roll he wishes the next day.
You can be assured a particularly vehement DM will do so to ensure you suffer from backlash much more readily.

Unconventionnal use for chaotic items
The multiplicative nature of the damage inflicted by an exploding chaotic item makes them a useful, if costly, bomb.
When a chaotic item explode the wielder suffer 1d12 damage multyplied by the strength of the infusion and everything in a 10 ft radius suffers 3d6 damage.
While the book says that the radius damage is fixed in both size and power it is still multiplied in power by multiple infusion.
The exemple given in the book also seems to imply that the size should be multiplied as well and could also be multiplied by the strength of the infusion and not just multiple ones.
As with many things in that book, ask your DM. BUt he should he rule that strength of the infusion becomes a factor in the radius damage you now have the effective means to create a rather impressive nuke.

[Elderand]

Feats
Adjusted and normal existing feats
Augment summoning: The good news is that the conjuartion focus prereq is not there for the chaos mage version. The bad news is of course that chaos construct aren't that good.

Combat casting: As a chaos mage you'll want all the concentration you can get this make this feat far more useful for a chaos mage than it ever was for a normal caster.

Skill focus: concentration: You might also consider this, but the bonus is less interesting than combat casting. You're probably better off with a custom concentration magic item.

Spell mastery : Lower the DC of a specific spell by 3. Not an effect, a spell. Honestly if you find yourself casting the same spell over and over again, you should play something other than a chaos mage.

Spell Focus: Since chaos magic doesn't really have spell whitout saves this could be useful. A whole element getting a +2 to save is nice, equivalent to an increase of 5 to the casting DC. The limit of it not applying to mixed element could be an issue unless you take the feat for every elements.

Spell penetration: On the one hand, chaos mage do not have spells that ignore SR, on the other they have two ways to beat SR and it's easier to raise caster level/wisdom than the cost opportunity of spending a feat.

New feats
Attune others: The only viable way to make chaos item useful to others. But it' still chaos item and therefore less useful to other peoples anyway.

Blood of chaos: a whooping one less point of damage suffered when succesfuly casting a chaos spell with a minimum of one point anyway ? How about no ?

Body of chaos: Same as above whitout a minimum damage and work on casting even if you fail. Better. Still a pidling amount of point.

Casting focus: +1 to caster level, horrible prerequ and easier to suffer backlash ? I'd rather cut off my own arm with a rusty spoon.

Chaos Corrona: Interestingly this end up making a better damage reducer than blood and body of chaos if you cast several spell in quick sucession.

Chaos healing: Horrendous prerequ for the ability to heal an average of 0.5 points more per level. When after the first level you generealy end up using magic to heal anyway. No, just no.

Enhanced familiar: Just not worth it.

Immutable will: Now that right here is awesome in a bottle. Half XP price to get rid of chaos ? Yes please. Take it no matter what.

Locked in chaos: Every step of chaos is locked but you progress along those steps slower. Good. Cannot take immutable will with it ? Bad, very very bad. You are better off taking split path to slow down your progress than this.

Luck of the damned: +2 floating bonus to skill or save, nice. Last until you fail, less nice. -1 to said skill or save once you do fail. Makes it strictly meh.

Specialised focus: Oh look, it's casting focus with more drawbacks and less benefits.

Split path: You effectively double your survivability to backlash with this. Excellent.

Subtle chaos magic: You can still only remove somatic or verbal components. But now it's easier to do so. Nice but not great.

Symbiotic familliar: Gain slightly less XP but your familiar gain skill points. Sound like a deal to me.

Touch of chaos: This is attune others in reverse. If you are a chaos mage it's only useful when you find a permanent chaos item.

Twisted insight: Half your wisdom bonus instead of int bonus to int skill. Not really worth it.

Multiclassing and prestige classes
The chaos mage is a class that is at least 12 level long. If you do not get the ability to purge chaos you are going to get in trouble sooner or later.
Therefore your ability to multiclass or PRC out are sadly limited.
First thing to note is that you cannot take level in any class that grant any sort of arcane casting. You're limited to divine caster or non casters. (Psionic is okay though).
I can't give advice on every possible class combo. So I will limit myself to those presented in the quintessential chaos mage. I won't lie, they're bad.

Bloodcarver: Circumstance bonus to caster level in exchange for hp, that cannot be healed by magic. A losing proposition.

Chaotic fist: this is actually worse than taking monk levels. Quite a feat.

Chaotic specialist: Become really good at using one element (damage, materialisation, ...) but only half casting progression. In the end you're better off staying a generalist.

Doom ringer: Offer a way to avoid suffering the damage from spellcasting. You will however need a lot of corpses. There are better options to avoid damage.

Fractured jester: Slightly better armor, damage, initiative, and skills in exchange for being unable to ever use domination effects. Granted dominations effects are easily twarthed but still. that's harsh for not much.

Lord of change: Again, loss of domination but this time with real benefits, spells of materialisation and transformation effect last much longer.

Twisted King: Lose damage AND movement for longer domination and slightly better social skills ? Hell no, even if chaotic creatures are considered friendly.

[Elderand]

The paths of chaos
The paths of chaos are varied offering bonues and maluses, mixed blessings and outright curses. There isn't in my sense any path that is clearly superior to the others.
There is little else to say other than a chaos mage would be well advised to purge himself at the earliest opportunity.

Chaos mage duels
Chaos mages should be loath to enter into spell and counterspell games of rocket tags with each other. For one the ability to dispel each other at will makes it pointless except for the ever increasing chances of backlash.

Chaos mage duels should be favored as much as possible, the rolls are easier to keep track off than the possibility of calculating spellcasting DC, less or no chance of backlash and such duels evoke quite well the flavorful contest of will seen in fiction when two mages chose not to engage in real battle.

Afterwords: Chaos based it may be, but better rules it needs

There you have it ladies, gentlemen and indefinite creatures from the 7th dimension, the chaos mage.
The class can be fun but require heavy houseruling (dear god that familiar section) and gentleman agreement to function.
The thing is though, as bad as it can be, it's no worse than what a tier 1 class is capable, sometimes far far less. With a chaos mage you won't have to worry about time shifted demiplanes astral projecting spellcaster outclassing everyone else at everything.

The price of chaos magic, especialy concentration check, conspires neatly to keep the chaos mage in the place that was envisionned for mages by new players everywhere. The realm of mobile artilery piece and/or mysterious workers of wonders at a price no decent folk would pay.

You probably came here dreading the horrible stink of cheese and I hope you left with less worries over it.

[malonkey1]

I gotta say, it seems really incomplete.

This joke only made sense when there was nothing here.

[Renen]

Where's chaos mage from? O.o

[Anlashok]

...The quintessential avatar of chaos' primary stat is the stat used to represent sanity? That seems backwards.

Still good to see a guide for this thing.

[ChaosArchon]

Please tell me this is 3.5e... I would love to play a chaos mage :smallamused:

[Doc_Maynot]

Oh, with Quintessential it is updated to 3.5e. Back in 3.0 it was Cha based though.
I hope you finish this, it's an all-in-all fun class.

Just don't conjure antimatter. Or Teleport people into space... Or use Chaos Magic to traverse time.

[Elderand]

Did a very large section on elements for casting chaos spells with tricks, clarification and things to watch out for.

[Renen]

Is this a 3rd party class?

[Doc_Maynot]

Yes, from Encyclopaedia Arcane: Chaos Mage and Quintessential Chaos Mage, both by Mongoose Publishing.

[Gavinfoxx]

You need to say that, in the first or second line, this is a 3rd party class. That is very very very important.

Like, "Ah, the Chaos Mage, a 3rd party class from Mongoose Publishing, found in the infamous 'Quintessential' line of books, in this case most recently in 'The Quintessential Chaos Mage'. This character class has a bad reputation for being far too powerful and broken."

[Doc_Maynot]

The bad:
The class is third party and has a terrible reputation, getting a DM to agree to let you play it will be challenging at best, outright impossible at worst.


They did though

[Gavinfoxx]

I'd put it even before that.

[Elderand]

I'd put it even before that.

Done. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Aharon]

I'll just leave that (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=8611383&postcount=4) here...

[Elderand]

Added a section on familiars and chaotic items.

[Elderand]

Feat section And PRC done.

[Elderand]

Handbook is now complete. feel free to critique, ask clarification, questions or post suggestions.

[Aharon]

So, what's your take on instantaneous durations (the rules quirk I linked to above)?

[Elderand]

So, what's your take on instantaneous durations (the rules quirk I linked to above)?


Instantaneous
The spell energy comes and goes the instant the spell is cast, though the consequences might be long-lasting.


Instantaneous (DC +0)
The effect is applied immediatly and lasts but a split-second nefore evaporating.

These two things are different, but the only functionnal difference is the second part where the SRD tell us the effect might be long lasting.

There are however sevreal reason to use the second over the first.

First: Materialisation and Transformation elements have a clause included that say they need a duration of at least 1 round or nothing happens. Even if you consider the SRD to be primary source for instantaneous, the quintessential book is primary for the chaos mage elements. Instantaneous apply to many things, the clauses in the chaos mage elements only apply to themselves.
Therefore the chaos mage clause are more specific and specific trumps general.

Second argument: while both use the term instantaneous, they aren't the same thing. One is the general instantaneous rule and apply to everything unless noted otherwise, the second is instantaneous as it pertains to chaos magic only. Again, specific trumps general.

Even if you do not consider the primary source to work like I presented, or specific trumps general to apply, you still have the matter of RAW vs RAI. Unlike other part of DnD where the RAI must be infered in unclear fashion, here the RAI is painfuly clear. Slavish adherence to RAW therefore make little sense. Especialy when you consider that the odds of this class seeing play at all are marginal at best. Pulling stunt like these is just a good way to have it banned. There is no point to it. You could present it as theoretical excercise but it's never just that, it becomes a justification for not playing it.

Which is silly because people still play official tier 1 classes that are orders of magnitude more borked than the chaos mage will ever be.

[Elderand]

Looking over the chaos mage, I noticed something I never paid much attention to before.

As a major movement effect a chaos mage can duplicate the effects of Animate Object.
This makes movement the second way a chaos mage has to create minions.

I then asked myself the following: which is better ? A chaos construct or an animated object.
Here are my conclusions.

The only chaos construct that can be reliably compared to animated object is the Major chaos construct. The other two are too easily outclassed.
The chaos construct wins in 3 categories.
It has better saves, better attack bonus and SR.
Animate object wins in : Action economy, HP, Hardness and special attacks/abilities.

Given that a major chaos construct is a more difficult effect to produce than a major movement effect is, Animate object seems to have better application.

Do keep in mind that, unlike animated object, a chaos construct is capable of obeying more complex orders and can be commanded telepathicly.

In the end, whatever pseudo summon you use will be dependent on the situation you are facing.
Reach, speed, hardness and higher damage makes larger objects betterpseudo fighters (not very good ones though) while a chaos construct offer more tactical advantages, especialy when facing spellcasters.