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Ivellius
2015-12-31, 02:25 PM
The Daimonologist Class

A robed human faces down her demonic foe. She calls flames from the heavens to pierce the creature’s resistances, burning it with celestial light. As it shrieks in pain, her next bolt of energy strikes with even more holy force.

A dragonborn roars with excitement, breathing fire as it rides by on a nightmare. The summoner’s steed looses a terrifying scream, lashing out with fiendish hooves and trampling the kobold tribe.

A tattooed orc lifts his staff and crushes a small stone in his other hand. Immediately a wicked imp flies from an infernal portal, ready to serve its new master. Joined by his new servant, the orc utters a curse and a wave of poison sweeps over the hydra’s snapping heads.

Daimonologists are arcane casters who through heavy academic study have learned how to wield the energies of celestial and fiendish planes to achieve their goals. Lacking better terminology to describe the more spiritual creatures who inhabit both good- and evil-aligned planes, they call these otherworldly creatures “daimons” as a group regardless of alignment. Although not quite as versatile as wizards, their command of ritual casting and employment of the minor magical constructs called spiritstones give them an array of magical effects that tap into the power of the outer planes.

While other arcane casters frequently bind familiars in their service, daimonologists take this trend to an extreme and can even sacrifice their familiars to empower their magic. Skilled daimonologists have an almost unparalleled knowledge of summoning and binding extraplanar creatures and are among the first called when celestial or fiendish assistance is required.

“One should never conjure what one cannot control.” – Magister Leswa Dexard’s Charter of Daimonology

Created for the "Light and Dark" class contest (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?471755-Base-Class-Contest-II-Light-and-Dark-5E) by JNAProductions, the daimonologist is an attempt at what is essentially a variant wizard making more of a class-based focus on familiars, rituals, and extraplanar influence (both celestial and fiendish). Spiritstones are an additional class resource that gives the class some extra utility and hopefully makes it more distinct as well.

You can find the class mechanics here (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Byxku3D-MjK3bzM5OXVZZVVSdWc). I will note that I prize balance above all other considerations, so its features are deliberately similar to other 9th-level spellcasters (primarily the Wizard). Three variants are in the document--the damage-focused Conflagrationist, familiar-focused Diabolist, and debuff-focused Hexer. The tuning is probably not ideal when it comes to several of its distinct class features and their interaction with the rest of it--namely, Blood Recovery, Otherworldly Ally and the Diabolist school in general, and Ritual Conduit as a capstone. I would be happy to focus on spiritstones as more of a mechanic for its class and subclass features if there are any ideas for how to integrate them more thoroughly.

sephorth
2016-08-16, 02:37 PM
Dnd needs more classes like this! Love it