Arcane Mark's page

I'm glad to see somebody still considers me every once in a while.

The maze suggestion was a solid one, but why limit it to mazes? A mark every so often will do wonders against getting lost just about anywhere-- a forest, a swamp, anywhere Survival checks might be called for. You can save yourself the time detecting magic too, by making the marks visible. This lets people follow you, including allies who get separated, or possibly enemies. Choose wisely!

Any sorcerer or bard who really wants to USE their Charisma will get good mileage out of me as well, since I'm basically your own personal logo. Mark your cloak and make it your "signature", and leave it wherever you want people to know you were, to build up your legend. If you want to leave mooks alive out of mercy, mark their foreheads as an intimidation tactic to break the enemy's morale. Give your favorite NPCs a marked item they can use to demonstrate that they're under your protection.

Plus, temporary tattoos! Tattoos are cool!

I think some of the "magic is evil" idea is a holdover from 3.5's default pantheon, where you had Wee Jas, Boccob, and Vecna as granting the Magic domain. Of the three, one is pure dagnasty evil, one is LN but is also the god of death, and the third is neutral but also grants the Trickery domain. It does sound a little biased, doesn't it?

As for Shield Warpriests, you'll want Power Attack, natch, but also look at Saving Shield, Missile Shield, Ray Shield, and Pushing Assault. I like the Rune domain myself, but I'm in the minority there...

The best argument against it that I can see is that giving that much damage a x4 crit modifier is going to be incredibly swingy. If Mark the Magus builds himself around getting x4 Shocking Grasp crits, he's going to be disappointed 95% of the time. The other 5%? He will do such absurdly high damage that it will trivialize whatever enemy he deals it to and render the rest of the party's contributions redundant in the process.

On the other hand, any fighter with decent STR and a scythe can do much of the same, so if you want to houserule it, go ahead-- it's not likely to break anything too bad. And it will give Magi a reason to choose the pick over the scimitar/rapier.

Oh, sure, I get one neat trick and everybody wants to replace me with Brand...