Mortuum's page

GP is a poor substitute because it can easily be transferred between characters.

That's the entire point. Rather than paying your experience to make the fighter a sword, the fighter pays for his own sword. It's a partial solution to the very problem you were trying to solve up in the original post.

Woah. I got distracted while typing my previous post, so there were only two posts in the thread when I started it. Looks like this is turning into a caster balance argument, when it really doesn't have to.

Redking, regardless of what casters can afford to pay or not, you've switched from presenting this rule as a way to help casters get the most out of their precious feats rather than requiring them to use them for the benefit of the party, to a caster nerf in which they become expected to give up their actual levels to serve the party. Regardless of how powerful casters are or what they need, levels are bigger and more valuable than feats. You need to go back to the drawing board and start again by figuring out what your goals are.

This introduces some serious problems, I'm afraid.

Removing exp costs was a significant part of the effort to simplify exp. It's part of the reason why the exp reward for defeating a monster can be static now. If leveling slower didn't result in gaining a bit more experience, every scroll you made would be a permanent hit to your character.

You're effectively charging full vendor price for items, but half that price is paid in a different currency, costing you levels instead of an equivalent amount of other magic items. That probably isn't worth paying a feat for, let alone the extra exp costs for virtual item creation feats.

Something you might be missing is that without exp costs, item creation feats are more worthwhile. I've heard them dismissed as a way to sell feat slots, but that doesn't do them justice. You get a slow but unlimited return on your investment, halving the prices of a particular kind of item forever so long as you have sufficient downtime. A budget increase that scales with your income is probably worth some feats. It allows you to convert found items into anything you can craft without loss, which is huge in many campaigns. I've seen item creation feats in forum power builds that don't even have parties to cater to.

A better approach might be change "Craft Magic Arms and Armor". With the exception of that one, that every creation feat lets the creator make something useful to them personally, even if they're a squishy wizard. Maybe you could turn "Craft Rod" into "Craft Weapons and Rods" and "Arms and Armor" into "Craft Magic Clothes and Armor", for example. That way you'd never have to take a feat that doesn't directly benefit you. You'd have to change the levels at which the affected feats and items types become available, but that doesn't sound like a big problem.

Maybe divine bond? It's difficult to say what's fair, because some curses are way more restrictive or have way better powers than others, and some of them affect the Paladin very differently to the Oracle.

I suspect this is missing the point in the code. Yes, it does cause a lot of problems, but nearsightedness seems like a very strange alternative to having to be the good guy. They're very different kinds of restriction and Paladins with curses and no code make very little sense to me.

I just modify the code to be less restrictive and less ambiguous:

Paladin: You can only fall by changing your alignment, repeatedly violating your code (and ignoring warnings) or intentionally committing a serious evil act. You don’t need to get atonement cast on you when you associate with evil characters if it’s to resolve an emergency or try to redeem them.

Anti-Paladin: You aren’t required to “impose tyranny” or “punish the good and just”. Instead you must punish those who oppose you. You can only fall by changing alignment, repeatedly violating your code (and ignoring warnings) or intentionally committing a selfless act of sacrifice for a good cause.

My mythic antipaladin villain fell. His goals were to stop being evil (to escape his fate in the abyss) and to weaken his own evil patrons (because he saw the world as an all you can eat buffet and they wanted to kill it). His problem was that his only reasons for wanting to be a better person and oppose evil were purely selfish, so his efforts could never redeem him.

He made the party an offer: They find a way to make him a better person, and he'd abandon his antagonism sabotage the armies of the lower planes. He thought the paladin was his key to salvation, but in the end the true neutral druid was able to caste Atonement on him. I'm not sure he qualified as "repentant" but since he wanted to "set right his misdeeds" and was determined to become as selfless as necessary to assure that he'd have a tolerable afterlife, I let it work.

The party were kind of surprised when he was still relentlessly ambitious and kind of obnoxious. He went from wanting to rule the region because he could to... still wanting to rule the region because he could. The real difference was that now he was theoretically willing to fight a greater evil rather than serve it. He was amazing fun to play.

Giving up spell slots is a problem. It lets mages turn time and leftovers into astonishing amounts of gold without a check.

Nightflier, I get what you're going for and it's not a bad idea, but by making the entry requirements anti-synergistic with the class itself you're going to unintentionally hose it. I'd consider using level, race, backstory, and/or any qualities that make Paladins better at their jobs instead.

I'll be off now, since this is somewhat off topic.

Nightflier, I would't do that to paladins. They were redesigned specifically not to depend on wisdom, because requiring two different mental stats to make use of their powers when they're expected to be warriors first made them so unfocused that they were bad at their own job.

I suggest banning them or finding a way to limit them other than making them less powerful and less fun to play.

Fumbles are a variant rule or a house rule, and if you dislike auto-fails, you can just remove it.

As it is, rolling 2d10s is a massive change that's not really relevant to removing the natural 1 rule, and they're not incompatible with auto-failing on the minimum natural roll.

2d10 had side effects, because the average result of a roll goes up to 11. This gives a small advantage to whoever is rolling, which will add up over time because you're giving out half a point of bonus on more than half of all values.

3d6 is the traditional alternative, though it's an even more extreme change to the game. The old 3e Unearthed Arcana has a threat range conversion table for it.

Both options result in a +1 bonus being more valuable than before, and everything that implies.

Headfirst, my mention of conditions that don't stack was in reference to SanKeshun's damage tiers suggestion. His idea does need them to stack.

Good luck with your new project.

Many effects do not stack, and depending on the method you use to inflict them, even some normally stacking effects won't do it. There's no way to stack disarming, tripping, stunning etc.

You could possibly make it work by creating a page of tables that organise existing effects into progressions, but that's a whole other idea, hence my concerns.

SanKeshun, I'm afraid I don't think your tiers would work well. I get what you're going for, but as far as I can see, their actual effect in play would be to keep darts just as damaging as axes, until an invisible limit is crossed and they become almost worthless. The imbalance remains, but against a certain threat level, darts go from too strong to not strong enough.

Your solution to the durability problem doesn't seem to help. It still allows for creatures that take 5 a very long time to kill, but it introduces the alternative of creatures that are more delicate, but completely hose builds that make lots of small hits by effectively ignoring their damage, meaning that no matter how many little debuffs they stack on their foes, they can never win without a big-hitting ally on their side.

Headfirst, a DC-based system could work. Basically it'd be a "save against damage". The only problems are making it scale nicely and figuring out how many failed saves should bring a creature down. If it's a fixed number, the ability to consistently hit that many times will become the focus of combat strategy (which may or may not be a bad thing), and people always going down after X number of hits will become very obvious, damaging immersion. If it scales with CR, fights will gradually become too long as described above. If it's variable depending on check results, this whole system becomes hit points with wound penalties, only far more complicated. It could work, but only if done carefully.

(I'm assuming that this system will allow anybody to trade what would have been a damaging hit for some kind of appropriate condition, so if a lion bites you you get dragged to the ground or it tears your shield off your arm or something. Otherwise too many creatures and characters end up unable to fight, due to lacking the required CMB/feats/qualities. Cirrect me if I've misunderstood)

Iterative attacks will not balance this.

One of the hurdles with this system is the way it makes a prick from a dart as powerful as a massive chop from an axe, at least in some respects. Sure, the axe might give you a worse condition, but the dart will still take you out of the fight just as easily.

I can make a 3rd level ragebred skinwalker barbarian who gets 6 attacks. Under the system as you describe it, that's more potential killing power than a hasted 20th level fighter with a greatsword. Sure, it's inaccurate, but it's still plainly unbalanced against 3rd level characters who aren't built to maximise attacks-per-round.

There's also the problem of durability scaling much faster than attack rate. A 20th level fighter probably attacks 5 times as fast as a 1st level fighter, but he's 20 times tougher. You go from everything being a 1-hit KO at first level to each hit chipping off a mere 20% at 20th level.

Sounds more colourful, but there are several problems with it that would need to be overcome.

Stacking debuffs instead of damage results in a slippery slope effect, since foes that are closer to defeat are weaker. This makes initiative even more important than it already is, turns a little good or bad luck into a very serious knock-on effect and reduces drama by creating foregone conclusions.

Fights would get gradually longer as the participants got more powerful. A 20th level character could succeed in debuffing a minotaur every time, but if it needs to be done four times, it will likely as not take 4 turns. With hit points, characters can deal out more damaging as they level, so they can take out lesser foes more quickly as well as more reliably.

Suggesting that every damaging spell be changed is almost like suggesting every feat be re-designed. It simply cannot be done. You'd probably need the system to be almost exactly equivalent to damage dice in order to be able to rule what a spell does without homebrewing it on the spot, maintain meaningful differences between spells and maintain game balance.

If trying to end effects on yourself is free or as good a use of your time as trying to affect your foes, you risk endless battles, where the average round does not bring the fight closer to its resolution. If it's less efficient, as healing magic is, it's likely not going to be a good option, since giving up your action to stay in the fight is a much worse option in a slippery slope scenario. It could be useful in some situations though, like when you've been hit by an effect that penalises attacks, but not attempts to cure it.

As I understand it, the difference between the Eldritch Knight and the Magus is this:

Eldritch Knights have one of the broadest ranges of expertise in the game, including the versatile powers of the wizard, and the direct simplicity of the fighter, but the price of being able to do everything is that the two roles don't combine well, so their tactics are about compromise and they're not as good at either field as the pure base classes they used as stepping stones to qualify.

Maguses (Magi?) look similar if you draw them, but they're the exact opposite. They DON'T have two different fields of expertise. Instead, they are specialists whose very limited combat and spellcasting will not work if they aren't used together. The trade-off is that a Magus CAN use them together, which is extraordinarily powerful.

Giving the Magus the kind of breadth that an eldritch knight has is fine, but if you're going to do it you have to make him pay, because he'll combine that breadth with his other abilities and shove it down a monster's throat on the end of his sword.

Limiting Agile Manoeuvres to finesse weapons is a bad one. If you're giving out for free, just give it out for free. Manoeuvres often don't use weapons at all and high dexterity characters will have finesse weapons anyway because of your other house rules.

Why not use Fighter weapon groups for weapon feats?

Why the dexterity 15 prerequisite on Finesse Mastery? What does it add? What would go wrong if you removed it?

Can I turn off weapon finesse if I don't want it?

Arguably, but my suggestion wasn't an attempt to address balance between classes, and people who care about adjusting that are probably playing with their own fixes already. Besides, if the vigilante talents turn out to be so effective that offering them as feats creates a massive paradigm shift of that sort, the rule will punish anybody who takes a normal feat.

Yeah, they're good and I'd have to read over them again with that rule in mind before I made them so easy to get. With the Mythic version of the rules I might instead add a mythic feat called Vigilante Talent that can be taken multiple times.

The option has to be powerful, otherwise it would be ignored because there are so many powerful or required feats to choose from.

I just realised that this idea would work very well with the Background Skills rule from Unchained. Its additional skill points should help create a more rounded character, with skills reflecting both identities.

It might be cool to offer characters characters a limited selection of free traits, requiring them to pick one from a list of social identity backgrounds and one from a list of origin stories. That would help cement the concept and ensure that people have access to important class skills like Disguise if they need them.

I like this.

It's definitely a massive freebie, but that's ok. You could use it like Gestalts: It's a buff, but it's a fair, manageable buff that NPCs sometimes get too. You probably don't need to significantly adjust encounters, but I would give it to all the PCs or none.

You pretty much can't use the Vigilante itself when this rule is in play. I recommend allowing anybody with a Dual Identity to take Vigilante Talents as feats. That way nothing is really lost and everybody has access to a goody bag of costumed adventurer abilities if they're willing to pay for them.

You'd have to decided which class features can be used without raising suspicion on a case-by-case basis. It's a pretty easy call to say that a Wizard's magic risks giving him away, but what about a Bard's versatile performance? I don't foresee it being a problem if you make sure everybody knows how you've ruled as soon as the ability is acquired, rather than letting them find out when it's first used.

Obviously this rule would be great for superhero themed games that have episodic plots or a dimension of personal drama, but it could also be excellent for evil aligned parties or heist stories.

EDIT: For a really over the top superpowers game, you could tie dual identity to mythic. Mythic characters get mundane identities, mythic abilities risk revealing them and a new social talent is awarded at each rank instead of every two levels.

You said up-thread that I disagree about how available darkness should be. I kinda do and kinda don't.

I think that it's not right to have you main level 1 feature be so situational that it cannot be used in the day. I also think that giving a character a situational ability and an ability that creates that situation on the same level is probably just over-complicating things. At the moment he can't rage enough, so he depends on his darkness to function, but he can cast darkness too much, so he might as well be able to rage in the light.

What if you made it so he didn't get darkness as easily, but he could spend double points to rage in the light?

No, I get that the normal sorcerer wouldn't exist, but if this modified sorcerer is going to keep up with the classes that still are allowed, he needs something better.

As it is, he gains some pretty good stuff that he can't make efficient use of. If he had attacking-focused class features and decent proficiencies, that 3/4 BAB would be a real advantage. As it is, he doesn't get much in the way of extra damage or accuracy, so he chooses each round between inferior sorcery or inferior fighting. Meanwhile the Magus can do both on the same turn, the Bard is boosting not only his own accuracy and damage but everybody else's too, and the alchemist is outperforming the mini-sorcerer at either job by throwing bombs or using drinking mutagen before he even touches his extract slots.

I think the BAB is right. It's a warrior first and foremost and it has no magic or similar.

I do not like mechanics that give you points for killing things. It encourages arguments about kill stealing, weird tactics to feed kills to the character, and debate about what counts as a kill. Obviously the gunslinger does this already, so I guess the designers disagree with me there, but that's my opinion.

This is far weaker than a normal sorcerer. I wouldn't play it given the other options, since it doesn't really have a job to do, particularly if Bloodragers exist.

Consider starting with something else, like the Eldritch scoundrel did. You could also make some very simple archetypes that swap existing options to sorcerer casting.

How about making the shadow pool increase as you level, to discourage dipping? As it is, you can already get a spell-like ability, 8 rounds of rage in the dark, (or 4 in the light by using Darkness as a swift action), trapfinding, two good saves, decent skills, good proficiencies and a point of BAB. It may be a pretty limiting base class, but imagine a 1 level dip into it.

I'm not sure what to do about shadow rage, but I do think it needs to be reliably available if it's going to be your main level 1 feature.

I just realised this class really needs a way to see in the dark built in.

Ructo Confibular, my brother's Skull and Shackles character, was a thing of beauty.

He was a ninja, but he never explained that to anybody. People just saw a Princely Grippli wearing colourful clothes, a rapier and a feather in his hat. Nobody could ever figure out how he was vanishing, pulling off stunts and disguising himself. It was good enough to seem magical, but he never cast any spells. Maybe he really is just that good?

Climbing and swimming like a Grippli is obvious very, very useful. He could just jump into the sea and climb up the side of a ship. People didn't really know much about Gripplis and he'd combine that approach with stealth, so nobody quite figured that out either.

This is a slow forum and giving worthwhile feedback on a class takes a lot of reading and thought, because classes are so complicated. I wouldn't worry about the lack of response.

These are the things that stand out to me as potentially needing more work:

Shadow pool is dubious. Getting more points the slower you go strikes me as problematic. 8 is not a lot of rage rounds in a day, but the average adventuring day is short enough that if you aren't travelling far you'll be best off meditating a LOT, probably in a bag of holding while the rest of the party plays cards.

Shadow rage is also pretty troubling. This is your main feature at 1st level and yet it's only available in the dark. A party member who sucks in the daylight is going to be a terrible hindrance sometimes, and starting every battle with an action to make it dark is very poor. It's looking like you'll be burning large amounts of shadow points for swift action darkness spells, purely for the purpose of being allowed to rage.

I'm not sure why this has a magical darkness theme at all, given that it's meant to be a hybrid of two non-supernatural classes, neither of which has a darkness theme, and darkness doesn't seem to be representative of their thematic or mechanical overlap. I'd have thought a rogue/barbarian hybrid would have a dex rage, weapon finesse, sneak attack while raging only and a thug/brigand theme. This feels more like a unique base class, thematically speaking.

Finally, while the name is appropriate for what you've made, it doesn't sound like the name of a base class. I can't think of a better one, but that might be indicative of an overly narrow scope.

Please don't take these comments as discouragement. I hope they're helpful.

Magic. Golems have all kinds of weird properties that their materials don't.

Magic weapon rules apply as normal, but Franz is right: You need silver bullets to kill werewolves, not silver guns.

I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. Power attack checks if you're holding a 2-handed weapon. It does not check your strength multiplier.

Dragon style adds a bonus to damage equal to half your strength bonus. It does not increase or multiply your strength bonus.

The benefits of the two feats stack, but as far as I can tell neither modifies the other's effects.

Yeah. I'm not thinking that specifically, but things along those lines for sure.

Well, I've noticed one problem already: I was going to use the Giant template as a partial step towards gaining +2 CR age categories, but dragons don't actually gain as much Strength and Constitution as the Giant template offers. I'm thinking I could advance their size, armour, ability scores and breath weapon instead. That way they get everything that's on the main dragon advancement table the first level and everything species-specific the next. Nice and simple. Thoughts?

I know. That's why I'm trying to figure out where it's likely to go wrong and how best to handle it, rather than rushing ahead.

According to the rules for monster PCs, a monster of a given CR should be roughly equivalent to a PC of equal level, so I'm trying to figure out how well that holds in this particular case, and what, if anything, should be done to shore it up.

Ok, cool. That was... unexpectedly fast and positive.

How about the bare-bones implementation outlined in the post though? And pitfalls to look out for?

I'm hoping to be able to make the existing dragons work, rather than creating similar-looking dragons from the ground up.

Can the true dragons serve as balanced PCs and advance in age categories instead of levels? Maybe! How does this look?

It seems dragon CRs go up by 1 if they don't grow or 2 if they do. I'm considering making a same-size age category equivalent to a level. In the case of the categories where dragons grow a size, I'd give them the Giant simple template the first time they level up and the rest of the age category the next time.

This would allow for pure dragon PCs starting from levels equal to the CRs of the various wyrmlings all the way up to CR 20, or even beyond.

I'd allow players of true dragon characters to pick out their own feats and spells, place their own skill ranks and tweak their ability score totals, but I'd leave them on the same point-buy totals as the Bestiary wyrmlings.

Obviously this has true dragons growing up very quickly unless the campaign has abnormal amounts of downtime, but I'm happy to change their life cycle to accommodate something like this.

This is a very simple rule to achieve a very complex end that the game was not designed to cope with, so I'm sure that it will mess things up dreadfully somewhere along the line. Can you name any specific problems with this? I'd love to know.

If you can make those touch attacks somehow you're looking pretty strong.

If there was a tick box somewhere that allowed us to mirror our avatars it would be slightly easier to tell people apart, effectively doubling the number of unique images. If we were told how many accounts used the flipped image vs the original, we could deliberately choose the less popular direction to help distinguish ourselves.

It's always mildly irritating to read a conversation between two people with the same avatar or to encounter anybody with the same avatar as me, and flipping seems like a good way to halve that problem.

Cyrad is right about Spellsunder. Everybody can already do that. It's name is wrong too. It's nothing to do with sundering or spells, both of which have very specific meanings in Pathfinder. Spell prep should probably be moved as well.

That said, I like the idea of this archetype. It just needs a different implementation. How about something like this instead?

Proficiencies: A Fury is proficient with all simple and martial weapons, but not with armour or shields. Armour interferes with a fury’s movements, which can cause spells with somatic components to fail.

Canny Defence: At 1st level, a Fury gains the Canny Defence ability. This is identical to the Duelist prestige class ability of the same name, except the fury must use both his hands to wield melee weapons.

The Magic of Steel: At 1st level, a Fury can use a hand wielding a melee weapon to cast a spell. He can use Spell Combat when attacking with a two-handed weapon or a weapon in each hand. Regardless of his equipment however, he may not use Spell Combat to cast spells targeting anything other than himself. This modifies Spell Combat

Chanting Charge: At 2nd level, a Fury can cast a Magus spell as part of a charge. Spells cast in this way can only target the Fury himself and must have a casting time of one standard action. This replaces Spellstrike.

Offensive Defence: At 7th level, a Fury benefits from a +2 shield bonus to AC whenever he wields a two-handed weapon or a weapon in each hand. This replaces Medium Armour Proficiency.

The Best Defence: At 13th level, the shield bonus from Offensive Defence increases to +4. This Replaces Heavy Armour Proficiency.

Canny Defence is an already-implemented method for smart characters to defend themselves without wearing armour and it's already used by multiple Magus archetypes, so I went with it. It's pretty painful to depend on it at 1st level, but I think the devs want it that way to discourage dipping, so whatever. You could give him armour instead without messing up any other parts of the archetype.

The Magic of Steel allows the Fury to do what a Magus is meant to: Cast spells while hitting people. It lets him do some significant conventional melee damage at the cost of his free second attack from spellstrike and his ability to use his spells on his enemies. I don't know if you'd still consider this fiddly, but it is at the very least less fiddly. I opened it up to TWF characters as well, because why not?

Chanting Charge is the simplest implementation I could think of for a spellstrike-equivalent that doesn't mess with Spell Combat. It also seems thematically appropriate for a character with a bloody great weapon.

Offensive/Best Defence may be a bit weak due to access to shield, but that's OK in my opinion. An alternative would be to add a small deflection bonus for a round whenever the Fury casts a spell.

Overall, I suspect this is weaker than the vanilla Magus, and I wonder about adding the cure spells to its list with the limitation that it can only cast them on itself.

As far as I can understand it, brown mold uses up heat. It doesn't have to be able to absorb an infinite amount, only enough heat per round. Perhaps it converts the energy into matter to reproduce.

I once put together some notes for a party of pre-built adventurers called Headbreaker and Associates, the idea being that once I'd made sheets I could just hand them out and run a one-shot without the prep.

The idea was to give him light armour and one of the dexterity to damage options. His boss is an Orc who's struggling to convince himself that he's still evil and is only in it for the money (obviously not true), and the party's skill character is an alchemist with a giant bug theme.

What does Revolutions actually do?

The spell list looks very limiting, but I assume that's intentional.

Yes. There have been feats, talents etc that do nothing, do the opposite of what they were intended to do or allow you to do something skills already let you do, only with extra penalties. At least some of these have been errated to some extent.

This thread has cropped up before, so I won't repeat the cycle by looking up the specific examples, but you can probably search for it easily enough.

Here's that same FAQ as a link.

I figured that one out a while ago. I really like that there's this one specific build that can pull off something truly world-changingly incredible like that. You need everything just right, so only one person is going to be able to do it, and when they do, everybody will take notice.

Yeah the race builder was a mistake. RP values don't reflect power, so neither do RP budgets. The restrictions on who can take what seem extremely arbitrary. I couldn't recommend using it for any reason, least of all judging the relative power of races that weren't built with it, which isn't even it's intended purpose.

Yeah.... don't do this. There is no point in them being there if the capture absolutely needs to happen. You need to acknowledge that they have some measure of control over events, even when the odds are stacked against them, and you need to plan accordingly.

That said, it should be trivially easy for the team you've described to murder them in a round. Just beat their heads in with merciful weapons, or kill them with a single spell and raise them from the dead without even telling them they died. "The wizard begins casting something!" **dice clatter** "Everything goes dark!"

Lawrence has said pretty much everything I was going to. E6 does a lot more than limit spell levels, but E6 + mythic does neatly cover one of the major advantages of E6 without capping advancement.

I have an old idea for an open online campaign that anybody can drop in and out of. The idea was to set a very low level cap and allow mythic tiers, but your mythic tiers only come into play when you encounter a mythic trial and power-up. That way it remains much easier to jump in with lower level characters without being as restrictive as it could be.

I find running without a grid drives me nuts. It's very difficult to have a battle without people getting confused about what's where. That said, for quick or one-sided encounters I don't bother.

I can actually see a really good argument for adding Mythic to low level cap games. It lets you keep "leveling" without introducing higher spell levels and so on. level 6 with mythic probably isn't that different from level 8 with extra feats. It also allows the potential for more powerful characters than the norm for the world, but it draws a very, very clear line between them and people who are merely experienced.

If I were you I'd consider:

A theme. Hybrid classes need one. "mix of sorcerer and oracle" doesn't count. Maybe go for the idea that it's a worshipper of the sorcerer bloodline critters or something.

Lowest possible hit die, BAB, skills and proficiencies. As a combination between two radically different full casters, this is a pure magic class about having all the spells all the time.

9th level casting with limited access to both lists. You could force members of the class to take an equal number of sorcerer and oracle spells, and you could give them the bonus spells from both a bloodline and a mystery at the cost of some of their ordinary spells known. That would give the class great flexibility for building at the cost of not being quite as flexible in play once you've locked in your spell picks.

A combined bloodline/mystery class feature. Either make it from scratch and give it aspects of both, or make it a single feature that forces the player to choose whether they get their next bloodline power or a new revelation every few levels.

Some kind of curse, negative mutation or code of conduct, not necessarily with the eventual pay-off of the oracle's curses.

If you really want access to tons of different things, you could add a pool of class points that gives the class temporary access to full-powered sorcerer or oracle features instead.