The Seeker: Eldritch Artifacts

 Magic Items are really cool

I love the idea of a class who interacts with the world primarily through their craft. This post is about the seeker and their Eldritch Artifacts.

The goal of artifacts

Artifacts should offer two things:

1. A unique ability
2. A spell list including one cantrip and a spell of each level from 1st to 5th.

An artifact should offer an ability other artifacts don't. I begun the occultist with three important artifacts: The Black Mirror (Now called Magic Mirror), Claw of Obliteration, and Watcher's Eye. Admittedly, two of the three artifacts are about damage - it's my personal philosophy to offer a damage, support, and utility effect when first creating something akin to this. Let's take a brief look at each item.

Magic Mirror offers a strong utility. It provides information about each creature that fails to save against it per long rest, and it offers divination spells. A utility effect that offers no direct combat or social advantage should be very strong and tempting, so the list of creature properties you can scry is flexible and numerous.

Claw of Obliteration offers "damage". When you hit something unharmed, you do full damage. I place quotes around it because you don't deal more damage than normal, but instead increase the average damage by 50% more. How do I figure 50%? Each die has an average damage count, so let's take a d10, which has an average damage of 5.5. If you're dealing 3d10 damage to someone, that's an average of 16.5 damage. Against a full health target you'll always deal 30 damage, which is essentially a 50% increase in damage. It's not exact, but for the purpose of balance its close enough. The claw offers damage spells, as well as spells that raise the dead, as the claw is themed for undeath.

Lastly is the Watcher's Eye. This is simultaneously utility and damage. You'll always know where the target is, you ignore disadvantage with attack rolls, and ignore cover up to 3/4ths. While, again, this doesn't directly increase damage, it offers utility to increase Dormant Damage. From now on I'll use Dormant Damage when referring to an ability that increases potential damage without increasing minimum or maximum damage. The watcher eye is really powerful - it has a 10 minute duration once per short rest. Spells offered by the eye revolve around sight, such as Darkvision.

How many artifacts?

Here's a great use for negative space: I don't need to put any effort into figuring out how many artifacts you have. I'll have the class start with three, which is three spells, three cantrips, and three artifact skills. That's more than enough to start with. Then I'll increase the amount of artifacts in junction with gaining a new spell level. This solves two things: Players know when they gain a spell level they get a new artifact, and it increases how many cantrips they have available in a natural way. It also spaces out the artifact amount nicely over long periods. While this will result in a massive amount of known spells, the player can't hand pick each spell, and thusly should be fine balance wise. If the player is picking an item just for the spells I think I might be doing something wrong with the artifact skill. I want players to pick artifacts for their flavor and skill first, and spell list second.

Another design philosophy for my artifacts is I'll have any upgrade effect increase when a new spell level is gained. Example: Arcane Ward allows you to turn the requirements of any armor to Intelligence and wear it without proficiency. Because Heavy armor is valuable, it needs to come later, so I'll make the artifact grant heavy armor, but only at 5th level when you get 2nd level spells. The spells it comes with is already valuable enough. I could make it 3rd level, which is when the Artificer can use the same effect on Heavy armor, but I decided to push it to 5th level anyway to make it coincide with future artifacts. Plus, the class is already quite tanky.

Artifact effect or spell list first?

This is a hard question, and I think it can work both ways, but typically I think of a cool effect for an artifact before making the spell list. The item is the core fun of the class, so it should always be fun and useful. If I can't find the right spells I'll either create my own or adjust the flavor to fit the spell list without affecting the ability it has.

Wrap up

I think this should be good to begin with. I think the next post will be about expanding on later features.

Class Creation: The Seeker

 It's been a while, yeah?

Not that I haven't been up to nothing, it's that I've been on a really bad roller coaster for the past few months, and I'm now feeling like I have a foothold. Let's jump right into the discussion.

 Class mechanic idea: Item Creation

I briefly got into magic item creation not too long ago and it implanted a seed into my conscious: A class focusing around its items as a primary means to interact with the world. Sounds cool doesn't it? It feels like artificer, but then again there's something like 4 full spellcasters and they all feel different from one another, so why can't a class with item creation? I actually had this idea scratching at the back of my mind a few years ago when I was making the second version of a Ninja class, but decided against it in favor of what I perceived to be a cooler idea (a multitude of skills to replicate the feel of anime ninja). Then I had the idea of a magic class with no spellcasting. WHAT? That sounded really cool! What would it be like? How would it be balanced? I had to find out by torturing myself by creating a class I had no reference for.

Class Creation: The Occultist

Today I'll be discussing my development behind a full class. Let's start with the first version of the Seeker: The Occultist.

The previous incarnation of the class was called the Occultist. I had the idea of someone who gathered dark knowledge, not necessarily because it was evil, but because common civilization shunned it. This could come in the form of say... a heretic, for believing a truth that went against their initial religion. Another great subclass for this could have been a witch, who are typically ostracized from civilization. This rung with me quite well; it had the rhythm of a final class. Now onto class features.

The next aspect of the old Occultist was Eldritch Artifacts. This was something akin to the warlock receiving a pact boon, but the occultist obtained these items through a way that made sense player-to-player, such as obtaining the item in a dreamscape then finding it in their hand the next day. This is a part that I was less sure about. There's nothing wrong with it in principle but it sounds a bit weak. Having the player come up with the reason can lead to weaker character design. I wanted to do something different: A magic class with no spellcasting. 

Eldritch artifacts held power, which had uses per long/short rest, or long/short rest per individual. An example was a frightening mask that you could use as a reaction to make someone afraid of you until you started your turn, but only when you were attacked. This had no uses per long rest, but instead short rest per individual, but only on a failed save. Why per individual? I made the duration extremely short to make it a very powerful but short-lived defense so that you could affect as many things that attacked you each day. Someone afraid of you can't willingly move closer, and their attack rolls have disadvantage targeting you. Extremely useful! This short-lived fear was basically between cantrip level and 1st level spell, or as I internally call it: a .5th level spell. This made it okay to be essentially at-will. It would be terrible for a longer fight, but it would keep the baddies relatively off you in the initial part of a fight, which was most important. There's a lot of really good reasons to pick up this mask.

How these items were balanced is essentially using my Negative Space technique. (For those of you that are unfamiliar with this, here is a link with the information along other things: Red's Design Philosophies) Basically equate the power to a full spellcaster with a spell of the same level if it had per-rest, and one-quarter level if it was at-will.

The last important aspect to the occultist was Incantations. This is a really fun idea, and fit the class theme, but it felt like a last minute decision hacked into a class that already had a fantastic core mechanic. It probably should have been a subclass feature, and I was going to make it so, but by then my faith in the class was practically gone. I'd like to use incantations again some day.

The last straw was the 3rd level feature. I was trying to come up with something as defining as the Pact Boons. An example was to allow the creation of one additional artifact, but it had to be attuned to, however anyone could attune to it and use its effects. That's an idea I still think is amazing! The problem was that was the only useful 3rd level feature I could think of, so the class died.

tl:dr: The occulist had a great mechanic of magic with no spellcasting in the form of magic items unique to it, however a weak/narrow narrative left me feeling unsatisfied.

Creating the Seeker

And now we get into the meat of the post. It only took me a few days to think about the occulist and what the ultimate goal of the class was. I was going to focus it around the use of magic items, but with a new twist: You don't learn or prepare spells, instead spells are tied to a similarly thematic artifact. Fantastic! This has a new rhythm to it that feels unlike other classes. I tried to fit it within the context of the occultist, and I probably could but I felt a fresh coat of paint is in order to reinvigorate my interest, so I used a website to find similar words to occultists. I came across Witch, and it could have been a really good fit! These items could been witch crafts, which makes total sense! But a new idea for an ultimate class goal came clearly to me: Immortality. This is an extremely common goal for many, and there's a lot of inspiration to draw from.

A new spin on spells

So, instead of learning spells, the spells are offered from the items you create. This suddenly gives those artifacts more weight and personality. It also allows anyone to look at a spell and think of what sort of item it would belong to, making item creation easier. Since the items themselves have uses-per-rest, I think we can get away with the class being a half caster, which fits my philosophy

 

Subclasses

Okay, so the goal is immortality, which means each subclass is the method of which you attain it. Let's think of a few:

• Eternal youth / youth theft
• Transferal of consciousness
• Undeath / lichdom
• Vampirism
• Demonism
• Ascending flesh
• Horcrux
  

We already have more than a handful to work with. Next...

Core Features

 1st Level

We're immortals, so this class will be exceptionally tanky for a spellcaster. I've decided to make the class die a d6. This in combination with your spellcasting and artifacts will open a tremendous amount of power for the core features. So what is a Seeker? They seek immortality, and find magic by creating these artifacts using a material from their own soul called soulstuff. This feels a bit weak to me, but it's well enough that I can work with it.

2nd level

So how does the seeker operate in every day life? Since they have such a focus on items, they should get the Identify spell. But making a core feature a spell isn't enough, it needs more. So when the Seeker casts Identify, they get more information than other spellcasters. Let's say... they can know who last used or attuned to it, where it was created, and perhaps the name of the person. I feel there could be more, but this is a decent start.

The next feature should enhance their survival. Early within their career do they find inspiration for immortality. I really like the feature for the Shadow Sorcerer, where you can potentially avoid death via a save. I'm going to go ahead and directly draw from that, but give it uses per long rest equal to your proficiency bonus. Using Prof bonus is great - it naturally scales with the class in a way that doesn't require a bunch of wording. Having spellcasting modifier uses per long rest would be too many too early, and I don't feel like figuring out uses per-level-scaling. Already the class is very survivable, even without armor.

3rd level

Next are subclasses, which we described above. I really feel like since this class is about items, a horcrux subclass should be the flagship.

6th level

This is where the class's defensive nature truly comes to life. I'll directly pull features from two classes: Zealot barbarian, and pact of the chain warlock. When someone wants to resurrect you, they don't need to consume material components. This is a bit different from the barbarian zealot, which allows the spellcaster to not require material components at all. While fine, I feel this takes away a bit from the narrative of resurrecting someone, so I nerfed it slightly. Next is a pact of the chain invocation: When someone heals you, you receive full healing instead. Now you are truly immortal*!

*Provided you can get healing from a source.

Wrapping up

I think this post has gone on long enough, so I'll leave it here. Next post will focus on Eldritch Artifacts!