Sin Mage (Apath)

Unofficial rules compendium

Only wizards can truly follow the ancient philosophies created by Thassilon's runelords. The choice to specialize in a Thassilonian school of magic must be made when a character first becomes a wizard. Once the choice to do so is made, it cannot be changed.

This is a development of the Thassilonian specialist wizard to be more campaign-specific and to my tastes.

Class Abilities

This archetype has all normal class abilities, except as noted.

Thassilonian Sin Magic

The sin mage specializes in one school of magic and gains great advantage in this field. In return, they give up several other schools of magic completely.

Spells of the school the specialist is focused on are prepared in a spell slot one level lower than normal. This means that an pride mage casts illusion spells as if they were all one spell level lower. Shadow conjuration is a 4th level wizard spell, but is only a 3rd level spell to a specialist wizard of the illusionist school. What is ordinarily first level spells of the chosen school now becomes cantrips and can be cast any number of times in a day. This bonus does not apply when creating magic items; the cost of a scroll, potion, wand or other magic item is always calculated based on the spell's normal level, tough a sin mage may learn the prerequisites for creating a magic item earlier than a normal wizard.

This replaces the arcane school ability. Sin mages do not receive school slots or school powers.

Prohibited Schools

A sin mage does not get to customize his choice for opposition schools, his opposition schools are determined for him when he chooses his virtue. These restrictions are more significant than those most wizards follow, and are known as prohibited schools.

A sin mage can never prepare a spell that is in one of his prohibited schools-he treats these spells as if they were not on the wizard spell list. If using a spell trigger or spell completion item to cast a spell from one of his prohibited schools, he must use the Use Magic Device skill to do so.

Tassilonian Schools of Specialization

Sin magic focuses on the Tassilonian virtues of rulership and the sins they easily descend into. Originally aboleth concepts, the passionless aberrations viewed these concepts with intellectual curiosity. They were found to have a high magic potential, but this potential was never fully tapped. Only when humans started to work with them did they get an emotional content that could be used to fuel magic.

The seven virtues of rulership and their accompanying sins can be seen on the table below.

Summary of Changed Class Abilities

These abilities of the original class are lost or modified in this archetype:

• Arcane School