In my game most villages will have access to a spell caster. These spell casters will often be the local witch or wiseman/woman.
I know there is a Witch RM2 profession that works with RMC but for me I have found that the Sorcerer hybrid is the perfect fit for this role.
The sorcerer has access to the closed healing lists which fits with the idea of turning to the wise woman when there little hope of normal healing.
The sorcerer also has access to their own base lists which are great for putting ‘curses’ on people in the form of inducing neuroses.
Demon summoning and control is also great for requests for real revenge.
All in all the sorcerer is a great all rounder for the local villagers to rely on.
The point of this is to suggest to you to try creating an NPC sorcerer, dump the professional name and stick them in a hovel on the edge of a village.
There have been a few references this year about healers. How simply using them as a bolt on to the PC party is a cliche, how one can do more with them. What I am suggesting here is how about making the only healer available to the party a hag or a crazy old man in a hovel in the centre of the woods?
Not making the healer an attached part of the party means that the party now have to think strategically about their health and their healing.
I wonder if I could come up with a Witch spell list based on the Pathfinder hexes? That might be interesting.
There are four Witch base lists in RoCoII (page 53) which could be easily rolled into the Sorcerer profession if you wanted to avoid the profession bloat that RM2 is often accused of. I like them with familiars, candle magic and potions. They are excellent for witch flavour.
I think that the “Witch”, “Shaman” and “Hedge Wizard” are a big omission in the original RM and now RMU. All three are naturalist spell-casters tied to rural or tribal societies and should be seen as mainstream professions. Especially in a fantasy society.
I use all three quite a lot, but the spell lists are really driven by the social setting. A witch from a woodland society might have {healing, divination, plant mastery, potion} while another in a reaver society may have {curses, potion, demon, charm}. This is my whole issue with the set profession/base list paradigm.
I never liked the spirit/totem spells in the Companion (II?)–it needed to be supported by the setting meta-physics.
True. I am trying to ease up on the No Profession drum. Witches are a Channeling + Essence hybrid. Sorcerers are a Channeling + Essence hybrid. Sorcerers are core rules, witches are RoCo material. Adding the Witch lists to the Sorcerer profession gives Sorcerer players greater variety of base lists and the same profession now fulfils more magical niches without having to be two or more professions with mutually exclusive spell lists.
That’s a great point that the Sorcerer looks a lot like a Witch. I also agree with Brian that the Witch/Shaman should be a stock class– very common in a medieval setting.
No one ever played the Shaman class in our RM2 games because the rules for spirits seemed a little complicated.
I’d also like to see a redone Warlock class for RM2, possibly a little more along the lines of the DnD Warlock. The DnD In DnD, the Warlock was a bit tougher, mid-range combat specialist than a Magician: he could use a bit heavier armor (leather) and wield an enchanted weapon (hexblade I believe), as well as blasting Nether bolts. The RM2 Warlock has some good hexes, but lacks a bit of the blasty-blasty ability of the DnD Warlock; I’d like to see him get at least some sort of elemental/magical bolt.
The warlock and necromancer are all hybrids with Channeling + Essence. One could roll all these into the Sorcerer. In all you would have 16 closely related base lists from which to build this highly versatile spell caster.