I have been looking at suitable professions for an NPC I am working on. I want her to be potentially useful to the party but at the same time I don’t want her solving all the problems instead of them.
She is particularly non agressive in combat with all of her skills in that department being dedicated to parrying and avoiding being hit.
I had always intended that shw was going to be some sort of spell user and I quite liked the idea of her being some sort of astrologer/seer/mystic with a monk as an alternative if the other three didn’t work out. I am looking at those classes mainly because I kind of like the idea of someone who has such insight into the future and the fates of the characters but then cannot actually communicate except via one person whom she is tied to.
Looking at the spell lists available, all of the classes above have access to spells like blue, shield and blade turning and that satisfies my need for a really strong defence and all of them have some kind of self healing, body renewal lists. That was something else I wanted. I want the PC to whom she is linked to have no good reason to leave her at home. IF she can protect herself, heal herself (and him potentially) and be useful in other ways as well then more the merrier!
Two of my favourite spell lists are gate mastery (or equivelant) and rune mastery. In this case I do not think that gate mastery woudl suit her but I could imagine her with elegant carved ivory scroll cases and scrolls written in beautiful eastern style caligraphy. I would happily give her a brush and a pot of ink for creating these. So right now I am leaning towards the mystic or the back up monk character. I am not really taken that much with the idea of the monk, it doesn’t quite have the other worldlyness of the pure and hybrid spell user professions.
Surprisingly, I had never noticed quite how aggressive mystics were! I would certainly consider playing one as a PC and there is nothing wrong from what I can see with the spell lists. It looks like she will be able to do everything I am looking for in this NPC.
Next up I am looking at the seer profession. We are talking pure mentalist here. We get the healing and attack avoidance spell lists, some excelent future prediction and interrogation spell lists. What we don’t get is the rune mastery but I can live without that. This profession is also ticking all the boxes so far. The party are not really going to be looking to their seer to bail them out if things go horribly wrong for them.
The astrologer, looking at the available spell lists encompassing Channelling and Mentalism is interesting. Of the three this has the strongest healing spells taken from the closed channeling lists, good future prediction lists and the attack avoidance spells. Looking at it though the channelling realm is only contributing to the healing everything else is being provided by the realm of mentalism. I am not at this time overly taken with the astrologer.
I suspect that I will end up generating at least three first level characters and seeing which one ticks the most boxes when the pencil hits the paper.
I will start creating characters this week and will share the character sheets once they are done.