I’ve been working on a custom Magus Class Deck concept for awhile. It began as a collection of my efforts to create multiple magus class characters. For awhile, I considered making two class decks, one composed of good magi (including a “less evil” version of Seltyiel) and one composed of evil magi. With the availability of Ahmotep, a staff mage, in the Mummy’s Mask adventure path, my Valánta staff mage became irrelevant and has been dropped from the project. The release of the Witch, Warpriest, and Summoner class decks also gave me some ideas and I’ve overhauled the project. So now it’s down to three magus characters:
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I’ve already presented ideas for the Arcaveil character, but made some modifications based on considering the larger issues of the class deck card composition. I shuffled the Seltyiel roles around, consolidating two into the Seltyiel character and combining others into the new Raziya character.
Discussions of the thought process behind each character are provided in the linked discussions. My intent with the separate discussions is that the discussion for each of the characters is intended to cover the specifics of that character, whereas this discussion is for the overall synergy of the characters in a single class deck, as well as the potential composition of the cards in such a class deck.
Note that the following discussions are no longer relevant and can be ignored:
- Valánta – custom magus (rendered superfluous by Amhotep in Mummy’s Mask)
- Seltyiel - "good" version (well, not really "good") (the Kensai role has been reassigned to Raziya while the Eldritch Knight has been reassigned over to the “evil” (only) Seltyiel character)
- Custom Character – Amrael the Magus
My Seltyiel Bladebound Role + development isn’t part of this project, but draws upon similar concepts. That role is being developed as part of another effort.
This effort is largely academic in nature. The characters, once refined, would be usable, but the overall class deck is really notional. The process and methodologies are very interesting, though, especially as we've seen the design team refine their process in going from the earlier class decks (especially those with 4 characters) to the most recent (the "cycles" are interesting and the new powers and templates provide interesting concepts for making characters distinctive).
I actually looked at a lot of different ideas for characters, including tieflings (ahem..."pitborn") cat-folk, half-orcs, elves, etc. I figured that at least one character needed to be human, and one character (not necessarily a different character) needed to be female. For awhile I considered dropping Arcaveil from the project and was working on a female half-orc, but I couldn't get that concept to work within the limitations I see in the cards. So I made some revisions to Arcaveil so that the cards wouldn't be too watered down; and while I don't like having both a half-elf (the obligatory Seltyiel) and an elf (a drow in this instance) and a human because that looks like nothing more than a spectrum of human/near-human characters, I felt that the three I ended up with allow the cards to work across multiple characters. There are too many good ideas for magus characters from across multiple races, however.
The composition of the cards will be the next step, once the characters are refined a bit.