Magicless Bards


Homebrew and House Rules


I'm looking to adapt a bard into a non-spellcaster for a game,any suggestions?


What would your spell-less bard specialize in? Performances? Combat? Skills?

Any flavor thought up?


A simple solution could be to give him a full BAB and d10 hp...or give it a moderate sneak attack progression, bonus feat or rogue talents. Spellcasting is so important for a bard that it will be difficult to replace it without nerfing the class. A good way could be allowing to run 2 performances at the same time (like, dancing and singing could halow to maintain inspire courage and dirge of doom at the same time).

Also, as secret wizard said, what do you realy want ? A martial inspiring commander, a sneaky roguish minstrel or a pure artist, with more performances option and a few spell like ablities related to art ?


Here is my favorite sans-magic bard rule:

The bard has one additional round of bardic performance per level and his own bardic performances count for double on himself (inspire courage grants him a +2 to attack and damage rolls at level 1 and a +8 over at level 17). This means he is better in combat with improved inspire courage and/or inspire greatness but not really as good as a full BAB class in general.

I also like to give inspire courage an additional +1 as a cap stone.

The upcoming investigator class has its studied enemy (or whatever) ability that might work well too but that ability combined with inspire courage might be too legit even as studied enemy (or whatever) has to compete with performances for actions to activate.


So I adapted the Noble class from Black Company. It (or parts of it) might suite your needs.


Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

There is a 3rd party product that covers this called "The Genius Guide to Martial Archetypes" (and its related products for arcane, divine, and archer archetypes). The key point is that each class gets 1 or 2 archetype packages that can be swapped out for other archetypes in these products. The Spellsinger package is the one that gives a Bard all of his spellcasting ability.

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