Dread witch/Nightmare spinner spells

[Persychan]

Hi, I need your help: I'm going to start playing in a 20° level, future epic, campaign and I have to do the spell list for my character, a Sorcerer 10/Dread Witch 5/Nightmare spinner 5. Any advice, must-have-spell?
All manuals are allowed and dragon magazines with moderation and DM ok.

[Sith_Happens]

First off, is Epic Spellcasting going to be allowed? Because if so, it matters not one bit what non-epic spells you have.

Anyways, the 9ths are easiest: Gate, Shapechange, and Time Stop. Because if you can't solve the problem by Gating in solars while being a solar, you can't solve it at all.

As a side note, I am perplexed by the presence of those latter five sorcerer levels.

[Zaq]

No-save spells with Fell Frighten attached are extraordinarily useful for a Dread Witch. Even the lowly Sonic Snap cantrip is useful when it triggers nearly irresistible Shaken. Other good ones are Magic Missile (for when you want to apply Shaken to five people at once) and Hail of Stone (for when you're worried about that pesky SR). You'll want a few different spells to use Fell Frighten with, just to circumvent any pesky rules questions about multiple instances of fear from the same source. (Two Fell Frighten Magic Missiles might count as the same source and thus not go above Shaken, but a Fell Frighten Sonic Snap and a Fell Frighten Magic Missile are clearly two sources, so they stack up to Frightened.)

Now, those are all very low level spells. You're capable of casting much stronger ones. But it illustrates a good principle for you—stuff that you can tack Fell Frighten onto is a great way of doing double duty with your spells.

You're not by any chance a gnome, are you? Because if you are, five of those Sorcerer levels could be replaced with Shadowcraft Mage levels. That would let you turn Silent Image (and similar figments) into damage-dealing spells with the [Shadow] descriptor. Why is this cool? Well, in addition to offering insane versatility, it plays very nicely with Nightmare Spinner's Nightmare Phantasm ability, which triggers off of casting [Figment] spells. Basically, you can cast a [Figment] spell that functions like a [Shadow] spell, choosing to mimic a damage-dealing spell—it does damage, so it triggers Fell Frighten, and it's still got the [Figment] keyword, so it triggers Nightmare Phantasm, letting you stack two levels of fear on a single spell, plus the effects of the spell you're mimicking in the first place. And since you're a Dread Witch, your spells ignore immunity to fear, so you can even do this to a Paladin. (Shadowcraft Mages can go crazy with this ability, making [Shadow] spells that are more than 100% real, but you don't have to go that far to have a lot of fun with the ability.)

Even if you don't go for Shadowcraft Mage, you'll obviously want a few good [Figment] or [Glamer] spells to trigger Nightmare Phantasm (it's really Nightmare Spinner's signature ability). Unfortunately, without Shadowcraft Mage, you're going to have a very hard time making those [Figment] spells trigger Fell Frighten, unless your GM rules that Spirit Chill's nonlethal damage counts for Fell Frighten's "spell that deals damage to foes" clause.

Do you know if your GM is going to let Dread Witch's "ignore immunity to fear" ability work for ignoring immunities that include fear? In other words, are you going to be able to scare stuff that's immune to mind-affecting, even if it doesn't call out separate immunity to fear? If so, you're in pretty good shape, but if not, there's going to be a lot of stuff out there that's immune to your fear tricks simply by being immune to mind-affecting abilities. (At high levels, immunity to mind-affecting is more common than immunity specifically to fear.) So you're going to want some spells that aren't fear-based, just to make sure that you're not totally useless against undead things and other things with blanket mind-affecting immunity. Any high-level caster should have a high-level dispel available, but that's doubly true for you, since you need to be able to get past Mind Blank. (It also never hurts to make sure that an enemy is less magical than you are, regardless.) You'll need to decide how much you want to devote to your thematic fear abilities and how much you want to devote to stuff that will work all of the time, and that will depend in no small part on your GM and their habits. It would be very easy to go overboard with the thematic spells and leave yourself very vulnerable to things that can get around your tricks, but it's also important to stay true to the character's theme and not just make them Generic Sorcerer #53. You might use mainly the low-level spells I mentioned to apply Fell Frighten (and thus Shaken), using your high-level spells to deal with things that are immune to mind-affecting abilities. And of course, you should always pick up a good suite of defensive spells, no matter what flavor of Sorcerer you're playing.

So yeah. Are you going to be able to punch through immunity to mind-affecting? That's probably the number one question to ask here. Pretty much everything else will hinge on that.