Some Tome Questions

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CommanderComics
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Some Tome Questions

Post by CommanderComics »

I've been using a smattering of Tome material in my home 3.5 D&D game and I'm statting up a BBEG with a couple of different builds to see how I like it. I'm running into some stuff where I'm not sure what the design intent is or how to adjudicate the way it works.

First of all, the warlock gets Fiendish Servant at level 11, which has to take one of the Tome Fiend classes or have racial hit dice. How exactly do the Fiend classes work? Am I supposed to pick a demon and then slap the class on top of it? That seems redundant - the whole point seems to be taking the demon and devil traits and spreading them out over a bunch of levels instead of giving them to the creature all at once. But then it has a Race section and says that only an Outsider can take the class. So what kind of Outsider is it supposed to be?

Second, the BBEG is going to be high level and have Expert access to the Magic sphere (I won't bore you with the fluff, but I'm allowing him to take non-Fiendish spheres for story reasons). This gives him access to anyspell, greater anyspell, mnemonic enhancer, and spell engine. I'm not sure I understand how these abilities will work in this case. The text of anyspell has a bunch of language stating things like "the prepared spell occupies your 3rd-level domain spell slot" and explaining that you use your Wisdom for casting. Clearly the designers never considered anyone but a cleric with the Spell domain getting access to this spell - but here we are. Since warlocks don't get domain spell slots of any kind, and this is an at-will SLA with expert access, what happens when this NPC uses this ability? Does he get "virtual" slots that he fills with the prepared spell? Since he can use the SLA at will, does he have an arbitrary number of spell slots containing spells of up to 2nd level (or 5th with greater anyspell)? Or does he get just one, and can swap it out by using the anyspell SLA again? Does he get one 3rd-level slot and one 6th-level slot, since he has greater anyspell as well? For the mnemonic enhancer ability, I think it's pretty clear that you can use the "prepare" version just fine - but I could see an argument that since a warlock doesn't actually get the spell preparation class feature(s), he can't "prepare spells normally" even with this SLA. And I don't know if or how the "retain" version would work with a character who casts spells from nonexistent slots using spell-like abilities. And what about spell engine, a spell that exclusively allows you to swap out prepared spells for other spells? Would this character have prepared spells to swap, or not? Obviously, I've got mind caulk, and I have a set of interpretations for how to resolve this, but I'd like to know how much I'm cheating when and if my PCs call me on this.

Thanks in advance, Denizens!
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Kaelik
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Re: Some Tome Questions

Post by Kaelik »

Can't really answer what is going on with the Magic Sphere. Seems like if you don't even know what the sphere does (and I don't either, this isn't a criticism) then there isn't really any reason you need to take it with the NPC and they should just have a different sphere.

For the Fiend classes. There is a Aisimar and Tiefling at LA zero in the Tomes, you can use those. You can also just take any LA 0 race and take Fiendish Dalliance and qualify for any Fiend classes.
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deaddmwalking
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Re: Some Tome Questions

Post by deaddmwalking »

I think if you have an ability that modifies your prepared spells, but you don't have any prepared spells, that ability doesn't do anything for you.

Edit - I think you're referring to the magi sphere. Technically, they're all 'magic' spheres, so for story reasons if you gave your BBEG access to a different sphere and you wanted it to be 'magical' themed, 'magi' may not be the right choice. It is sort of 'wizard themed' (thus magi I wager)

In any case, the version of mnemonic enhancer here [CatharzGodfoot » Sat Apr 11, 2009 10:22 pm] can allow you to gain spell slots if you don't normally have them, thus allowing virtual spell slots. But if you don't use that ability to gain virtual spell slots, I don't think you could use the other version of the ability (like retaining a spell just cast).
Surgo wrote:
Fri Jan 22, 2010 12:05 am
I was just going through Spheres that I could upload to the wiki to fill out that section, and I come across these.

Magi is kind of problematic. Anyspell and Greater Anyspell are normally 10-minute casting time deals that you use in the morning to prepare in place of a spell slot as a cleric. In fact, I think they explicitly deal in spell slots. With this it means you can cast any spell of level n or lower...
No response was ever given regarding this interpretation.

While someone who casts mnemonic enhancer to get a 3rd level spell slot wouldn't have a 3rd level domain slot, I'd let them prepare any spell of 2nd level or lower in that spell slot just to be nice. But since this was designed to let clerics cast 2nd level wizard spells in place of a 3rd level cleric spell, that's sorta pointless - if you have a 3rd level slot you might as well prepare a 3rd-level spell, right?
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