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Effect one summoned creature
Duration 1 round/level (D)
Saving Throw none; Spell Resistance no
This spell summons an extraplanar creature (typically an outsider,
elemental, or magical beast native to another plane). It appears
where you designate and acts immediately, on your turn. It attacks
your opponents to the best of its ability. If you can communicate
with the creature, you can direct it not to attack, to attack particular
enemies, or to perform other actions. The spell conjures one of the
creatures from the 1st Level list on Table 10–1. You choose which
kind of creature to summon, and you can choose a different one
each time you cast the spell.
A summoned monster cannot summon or otherwise conjure
another creature, nor can it use any teleportation or planar travel
abilities. Creatures cannot be summoned into an environment that
cannot support them. Creatures summoned using this spell cannot
use spells or spell-like abilities that duplicate spells with expensive
material components (such as wish).
When you use a summoning spell to summon a creature with an
alignment or elemental subtype, it is a spell of that type. Creatures
on Table 10–1 marked with an “*” are summoned with the celestial
template, if you are good, and the fiendish template, if you are
evil. If you are neutral, you may choose which template to apply
to the creature. Creatures marked with an “*” always have an
alignment that matches yours, regardless of their usual alignment.
Summoning these creatures makes the summoning spell’s type
match your alignment.
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I plan to play a Master Summoner soon and I have a few questions regarding this.
What happens if I summon an evil creature such as a devil/demon whatever, they are not my slaves by definition, I doubt that they would like to help me in any shape or form, can they turn against me or my party members?
Also, does repeatedly Summoning Evil outsiders could turn me evil?
By spell definition being neutral is like the "best" choice, I hate it when alignments restrict you like a straight jacket...
I ask this because I was looking at the Eldritch Heritage and one of them caught my attention.
At level 17 you can stack superior summoning with Greater Eldritch Heritage (Abyssal) and summon 1d3+2 Creatures (Provided that you summon a fiendish/demon subtypes of a lower spell list than able).
The Feat Chain is:
Skill Focus (Planes) Not that bad considering you dabble in summoning monsters from other planes of existence, fits nice with the summoner theme.
Eldritch Heritage (Abyssal) nets you claws for Cha+3 rounds per day...
Improved Eldritch Heritage (Minimum level is 11): Can either get +2 str or Electricity resistance and +2 versus poisons.
Greater Eldritch Heritage:
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Greater Eldritch Heritage
Your discovered bloodline power reaches its zenith.
Prerequisites: Cha 17, Eldritch Heritage, Improved
Eldritch Heritage, character level 17th.
Benefit: You gain an additional power from the
bloodline you selected with the Eldritch Heritage feat.
You gain a 15th-level (or lower) sorcerer bloodline power
that you do not already have. For purposes of using that
power, treat your character level as your sorcerer level for
all your sorcerer bloodline powers granted by this feat,
Eldritch Heritage, and Improved Eldritch Heritage.
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The problem is that you must waste 3 feats just to get this one (and the others don't sync very well with the Master summoner), I wonder if its useful, Summoners are not very feat starved as other classes in my opinion.
If you are half elf you get skill focus for free. (general brainstorming FYI)
If you are half elf you get skill focus for free. (general brainstorming FYI)
Oh thanks for reminding me that one.
The question still stands, is it worth all the feat burning?.
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What happens if I summon an evil creature such as a devil/demon whatever, they are not my slaves by definition, I doubt that they would like to help me in any shape or form, can they turn against me or my party members?
If the summoned creatures didn't have to do what the summoner commanded (or, in absence of instructions, attack their foes to the best of its ability, as the spell text states), nobody would ever cast the spell, because the elementals would wander off, the mindless vermin would attack the nearest edible thing, the herbivores would flee, the carnivores might attack and might flee and the angels would spend the entire duration nagging you about your lack of goodness.
Demons and devils attacking you would be the least of your problem, pretty much everything on the list would either attack you or flee...
Just follow the text in the spell. Without orders, it attacks your foes to the best of its ability. With orders, it does what it's told, and, unless your orders are delightfully unclear, the demons, devils, angels, genies, elementals, archons, azatas, etc. pretty much have to do what they are told, no matter how evil, chaotic and / or uncooperative they are feeling.
What happens if I summon an evil creature such as a devil/demon whatever, they are not my slaves by definition, I doubt that they would like to help me in any shape or form, can they turn against me or my party members?If the summoned creatures didn't have to do what the summoner commanded (or, in absence of instructions, attack their foes to the best of its ability, as the spell text states), nobody would ever cast the spell, because the elementals would wander off, the mindless vermin would attack the nearest edible thing, the herbivores would flee, the carnivores might attack and might flee and the angels would spend the entire duration nagging you about your lack of goodness.
Demons and devils attacking you would be the least of your problem, pretty much everything on the list would either attack you or flee...
Just follow the text in the spell. Without orders, it attacks your foes to the best of its ability. With orders, it does what it's told, and, unless your orders are delightfully unclear, the demons, devils, angels, genies, elementals, archons, azatas, etc. pretty much have to do what they are told, no matter how evil, chaotic and / or uncooperative they are feeling.
Oh sweet, so in a way they ARE my slaves XD, so then, can I summon angels AND demons together? what about my alignment?
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Oh sweet, so in a way they ARE my slaves XD, so then, can I summon angels AND demons together? what about my alignment?
In a single casting of the spell, even if you summon multiple lower level creatures, they have to be of the same type.
But in consecutive castings, so long as you aren't a cleric, you could summon a dretch and a lantern archon, and each would do their respective tasks (fighting your foes, if not instructed otherwise). They might say nasty things to each other in the middle of the melee, but unless you instruct them to attack each other, they don't get the liberty of just haring off and doing whatever they want.
If combat ends, and both are still around, they might get into a lively argument, 'though...
If your character was a cleric (or druid), he wouldn't be able to summon evil critters, if good, or good critters, if evil, or lawful critters, if chaotic, or chaotic critters if lawful.
But since you are working on an arcane caster, this means nothing to you. Arcane casters can cast spells of any alignment descriptor, regardless of their own personal alignment.
Casting a ton of [evil] spells when you aren't evil *might* change your alignment over time to evil, but that's purely flavor text and up to the GM. Even the developers don't want to hammer that down and say how or when or if it happens. If there's a chance your GM wants to have that alignment-slippage occur, just use every remaining spell slot and summon monster SLA use leftover at the end of the day to summon [good] creatures like lantern archons. If summoning a dretch mid-day got you 3 pts of alignment slip towards evil, then summoning a pair of lantern archons before you go to bed should give you *six* points of alignment slip towards good!
(Yes, that's a lame idea, to treat alignment as some cheap, morally irrelevant point-game, but if evil spells can turn you evil for no reason at all, then good spells should be able to turn you good for no reason at all as well, or else the whole thing is a screw-the-player double-standard.)
There's officially nothing to prevent you from summoning good outsiders and commanding them to do monstrous and vile things, or summoning demons and commanding them to wash the feet of the poor and work at the soup kitchen, but it's generally considered to be tacky. Those angels and demons don't cease to exist when the duration ends, and if one of them ever gets Planar Allied or Planar Bound to this plane by another spellcaster, they might accept a term of service for the 'payment' of having some time off to go kick your butt...
Best not to give them reason to seek you out if they ever find themselves on the material plane with an hour to kill.
(Yes, that's a lame idea, to treat alignment as some cheap, morally irrelevant point-game, but if evil spells can turn you evil for no reason at all, then good spells should be able to turn you good for no reason at all as well, or else the whole...
Here is how I think of that. If you are summoning an evil creature, casting the spell requires you to focus on that type of creature and what it does. You briefly, superficially take on a similar mind set to that of the creature. (That's why gods don't like their clerics casting evil spells.) If you do this often enough, the mind set becomes more natural to you and your alignment changes.
If you are a good person and spend six seconds thinking about what it would be like to kill a baby, you will probably end up saying "that was unpleasant". If you spend a minute or five doing that every day, you will eventually transition to a "yeah, it's time to think about killing babies" attitude (neutral) and then to a "baby killing time. I wonder how skewers would work" attitude (evil).
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(Yes, that's a lame idea, to treat alignment as some cheap, morally irrelevant point-game, but if evil spells can turn you evil for no reason at all, then good spells should be able to turn you good for no reason at all as well, or else the whole...Here is how I think of that. If you are summoning an evil creature, casting the spell requires you to focus on that type of creature and what it does. You briefly, superficially take on a similar mind set to that of the creature. (That's why gods don't like their clerics casting evil spells.) If you do this often enough, the mind set becomes more natural to you and your alignment changes.
If you are a good person and spend six seconds thinking about what it would be like to kill a baby, you will probably end up saying "that was unpleasant". If you spend a minute or five doing that every day, you will eventually transition to a "yeah, it's time to think about killing babies" attitude (neutral) and then to a "baby killing time. I wonder how skewers would work" attitude (evil).
By this logic, summoning a lantern archon or hound archon often enough would 'balance the score'.
The thought process of a character skilled in summoning would not be how evil the creature they are summoning is...it's more like 'which tool fits this job?' If you are going to say that casting evil spells make you evil then casting good spells, conversely, MUST make you good.
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If you are going to say that casting evil spells make you evil then casting good spells, conversely, MUST make you good.
Plus, if one has to get into an 'evil' mindset to cast an [evil] spell, then, not only would one similarly have to worry about that when casting [chaos], [good] and [law] spells, but possibly even [fire] or [shadow] spells. Does one really have to think like an efreeti to summon a fire elemental? Or think like a shadow demon, greater shadow or d'ziriak to cast deeper darkness?
It's an interesting notion, that casting a spell requires one to get into the alien headspace of the outsider-type most related to that force or ethos or mindset, but not one that the game supports. If that was the case, most likely one would also benefit from speaking the appropriate languages, such as Abyssal to summon a dretch, or Terran to summon an earth elemental, or Celestial to call down positive energy to cast cure light wounds.
A specific setting, that requires languages and knowledge-planes ranks to attune oneself to the extra-planar forces one magically conjures or evokes could be *very* flavorful, or one that so strongly linked the gods and their portfolios that one had to learn spells of [fire] from the church of Sarenrae or Asmodeus, or spells of [darkness] from reading sacred texts to Zon-Kuthon, could be way, way interesting, making all magic, even arcane magic, more or less 'theurgical,' but, again, that's not this game or this setting (and, IMO, would warrant a more spread out selection of deities and domains, so that more types of magic wouldn't be so sharply limited to specific alignments, such as Zon-Kuthon being the only source of [darkness] spells).
You briefly, superficially take on a similar mind set to that of the creature. (That's why gods don't like their clerics casting evil spells.)
Actually, I think the reasoning behind the summon limitation for clerics is far more simple. You summon the servants of your deity so they can help you. And since evil outsider genereally don't serve good gods...
Luckily, as an arcane caster you are not restriced at all. Summon whatever you want.
In fact, (True) Neutral is by far the best alignment to be if you want to do any summoning at all. Since you are not good or evil, you can always choose to summon celstial or fiendish animals. Sure, usually celestial will be better for smite evil, but the resistances of fiendish creatures might come in handy. Oh, and since we have the Bestiary 2, there is also the option to summon resolute ("lawful" template) or entropic ("chaotic" template) creatures to smite the occasional LN or CN foe.
And while we are at it: The templated animals always have YOUR alignment when summoned. So just summon a celestial dire lion and laugh when the evil cleric tries to get rid of it by using Protection from Good.
You know, i'm starting to hate aligments in pathfinder more and more, casting protection from good is labeled as evil...yeah....protecting from someone who is good is considered "evil"...