Cast death knell as a divine spell

[VolcanicErupt]

I'm building a Dread Necromancer, custom race, and looking for a way to gain the ability mentioned in the title. It's the prerequisite for the weapon I want, the Scythe from Weapons of Legacy.

[Crake]

You would almost 100% be better off just buying and upgrading a scythe over the course of your game. The rituals and the base item will cost you a pretty chunky 55k or so, and while initially this seems alright compared to the 200,000 it would cost to buy, when you consider the spell slots you lose, and what it would cost to recover them with pearls of power, it would cost 64k just for an 8th level slot alone, 49k for the 7th level one and 36k for the 6th level one. That's not even including the attack bonus loss or the hp loss, but as you can see, it pretty quickly becomes not worth it at all, unless you've just gotten some mediocre casting and don't actually lose the spell slots, such as from being a black guard or something.

A lot of the weapons of legacy fit into that category honestly, the downsides really gnawing away at their usefulness, but if you still really want to use it, I believe there's a feat that allows an arcane caster to cast their spells as divine spells called southern magician, though it is forgotten realms material, so isn't necessarily a guarnatted thing to rely on if your DM doesn't allow setting specific material.

[Thurbane]

I would suggest Southern Magician feat, but custom race likely wouldn't meet racial reqs.

Alternate Source Spell and Geomancer requires the ability to already cast divine spells.

Death Knell appears in a couple of Domains, but spells acquired the Arcane Disciple are still cast as arcane, I believe.

Planar Touchstone: Catalogues of Enlightenment should work. Death, Dragon Below or Gluttony domain would allow you to cast Death Knell using the Higher-Order ability.