Reduce spell level (while casting)

[Raishoiken]

Outside of sanctum spell, are there any other ways to just straight up reduce spell level for some sort of penalty to the spell?

Also: as far as spells that mimic other spells (wish, miracle, shadow conj/evo), do they count the spell slot it should otherwise be cast from?

[Nihilarian]

The Ambient Tempest PrC from Bestiary of Krynn lets you reverse the effects of Extend, Enlarge, and Widen metamagics. I think you need to have the feats in question to do it.

[ExLibrisMortis]

A Mind Mage's Focus of Discipline can reduce the level of spell slot required for a given spell by one per eight power points spent, subject to the usual restriction that you cannot spend more power points per use than your manifester level. The spell's effective spell level is reduced to the slot's level (reducing its save DC, amongst other things,) but the spell's effect is unaffected. In theory, if you have ML 72, you can cast shapechange out of a cantrip slot, and it's exactly as effective as a regular shapechange.

Most of the time, spending 72 pp for a single ninth-level slot isn't very efficient, but given enough time, you can "compress" a tremendous amount of power into a single spell loadout. It's very useful if your campaign has a lot of downtime.

For example, mental pinnacle is a sixth-level spell that gives three power points per caster level. If you boost your caster level for Transmutation spells enough (with Psiotheurgy or consumptive field stacking), you can give yourself enough power points with a single casting to prepare four mental pinnacles into four cantrip slots (48*4/3 = CL 64 required), and use the resulting 768 power points to get 96 free spell levels by preparing spells in lower-level slots, or 256 levels of free metamagic.