Master Astrologer

[Chrizzt]

What do you think about this PrC? It's in the Dragon #340. One of my chars has it. Basically you get free feats to choose from a list, a large bonus on sense motive (which is quite useful in rp, especially if your party is evil and you are better off not trusting your comrades ; ), boosts to your spell DCs, some minor benefits and some free metamagic per day. The capstone ability is, though restricted to once per day, quite powerful, especially if you use it with spells that have fixed numbers, like enervation.

All those abilities are well balanced out due to the loss of one caster level, from my point of view. In addition, I like the flavor. Fitting for the archetypical wizard that sits in his tower observing the stars.

[Eldariel]

The character needs to consistently make DC 50 Sense Motive-checks, so you're probably best off making the Master Astrologist of a Wisdom-based caster. It's clearly planned as a Wizard-class, but the huge DC on figuring out signs as a free action makes Wisdom feel more appealing. Move action is ok, but generally you don't want to lose actions for minor bonuses.

It looks interesting, although losing the caster level is painful. The feats are handy and the bonuses to spells are quite useful. The free metamagic levels are no Incantatrix-abilities to be sure, but Incantatrix is kinda beyond fair anyways. So in a midpowered campaign, one could be interesting to play. The abilities are sorta flavourful, and quite playworthy.

[Chrizzt]

I agree about the point with the wisdombonus to sense motive. But my char has at least a mediocre bonus to wisdom (wis 14) so it could be worse.

A nice combo that comes into my mind is adding levels in the fatespinner Prc as well. With the +3 to DC for enemies whose sign you have learned, the +4 of the Fatespinners SpinFate ability (assumed you take 4 Levels of the Prc to avoid the CL loss at 5th) AND the +4 of the MA' "The Stars are right" this make a total of +11 to the DC of one single spell (which enjoys all the additional power of "The Stars are right". Of course, you burn a good amount of your special powers in one shot, but used with a nice save-or-die spell I assume you could whipe out the life of enemies with strong saves. If by some miracle they succed their save, let them roll again with the fatespinners ability. You could even add Spell Focus to further raise your DCs, but the abilities mentioned before come to you "naturally".