Knight of the Blue Moon Mount?

[schreier]

The Faerun prestige class has a feature "Special Mount: At 1st level, you can call a special mount. This ability is identical to the paladin ability of the same name, except the mount will always match your alignment. Levels of paladin and Knight of the Blue Moon stack for purposes of determining the special mount's abilities. In addition, if you do not have a familiar, levels of sorcerer or wizard also stack for purposes of determining the special mount's abilities."

If you qualify without paladin levels, you have the ability to call a special mount as a level 1 paladin it seems? Which means that the power is useless until level 5, unless I'm missing something (or level 4, if you have one level of wizard without a familiar).

Also - the limitation/feature of "always match your alignment ..." - trying to figure out how it would work if you take the "Dragon Steed" feat. This steed allows you a dragonnel or a dragon (if high enough level). If you had a neutral good character, are you limited to a battle dragon (which is the only neutral good dragon that I know of) - or could you get another color with an alignment different than the norm (a neutral good silver dragon for example?)

Thanks in advance for any guidance or thoughts you might have.

schreier

[DrMotives]

Hmm... Dragon #321 has the archdragon template, which sets a dragon's alignment to NE, LN, NG, or CN and adds a couple other perks. Plus there are planar dragons from every outer plane other than Baator, so all alignments get representation somewhere there. NG dragons would include Admantium, Beast, Elysium, as well as Battle dragons.

[schreier]

Thanks for the heads up on those other dragons! The Adamantium Dragon sounds awesome reading it, but hard to get from a level perspective. The phrasing on the Archdragon template was a little weird ("There are four types of archdragons, one for each nonneutral alignment: chaotic, evil, good, and lawful ... the base creature loses any other alignment subtypes") So that means the archdragon is either chaotic neutral, neutral evil, neutral good, or lawful neutral?


For qualifying for higher level mounts - it seems like the Holy Mount would help by counting ranger class levels towards the paladin mount level.

With the Holy Stead feat, it allows "Divine spellcasting classes" to count towards the mount level ... does this include prestige classes? I keep getting different interpretations, so I'm guessing it's a gray area, but I figured I'd ask here just to be safe. Like if a character were Ranger 8 / Sacred Exorcist 1 / Sorcerer 1 / Knight of Blue Moon 5 ... Sorcerer 1 and Knight of the Blue Moon 5 would count by the class feature ... with Holy Mount, Ranger 8 would definitely count as it is a divine spellcasting class. Would you be able to include the Sacred Exorcist level as a divine spellcasting class level as well?

[TristanS]

Holy Mount says "You can combine the levels of your paladin class with those of your other divine spellcasting classes"

Now, classes like sacred exorcist, under Spells per Day, says: "Spells per Day: A sacred exorcist advances in spellcasting ability as well as learning the skills of exorcism. Thus, when a new sacred exorcist level is gained, the character gains new spells per day as if she had also gained a level in whatever spellcasting class she belonged to before she added the prestige class. She does not, however, gain any other benefit a character of that class would have gained (improved chance of controlling or rebuking undead, more frequent remove disease, and so on). This means that she adds the level of sacred exorcist to the level of another spellcasting class the character has, then determines spells per day accordingly."

The last sentence may help you justify adding the sacred exorcist level to Ranger for the Holy Mount feat (adding the two levels to determine spellcaster level).

I know that most people take "Obtain Familiar" to allow you to include all prestige class levels to determine the familiar level. It says "For the purpose of determining familiar abilities that depend on your arcane caster class level, your levels in all classes that allow you to cast arcane spells stack."

"all classes that allow you to cast arcane spells" is not identical to "arcane spellcaster level" - but I would think that, if you say that this feat includes prestige classes, so does Holy Mount.

[schreier]

That makes sense - there are several feats and abilities that seem to focus on this "per spellcaster level" type language. I guess it comes down to DM fiat as to whether that includes prestige classes.

I think the important thing is consistency