Firstly I find it odd that adepts who are described as divine casters gain a familiar ... that being said, when creating an adept NPC, are they restricted to the same alignment guidelines as clerics seeing that they use a holy symbol for their DF ... or can they be any alignment using any gods symbol?
Adepts also get lots of wizard-only spells on their list. They are usually used to emulate shaman-type characters. Having a mini-animal companion (a familiar) makes sense to me.
Adepts, unlike wizards, do not acquire their spells from books or scrolls, nor do they prepare them through study. Instead, they meditate or pray for their spells, receiving them as divine inspiration or through their own strength of faith. Each adept must choose a time each day during which she must spend an hour in quiet contemplation or supplication to regain her daily allotment of spells. Time spent resting has no effect on whether an adept can prepare spells.
They are divine casters, but they don't seem devoted to a particular god. They seem more like druids, rangers, paladins, oracles or philosophical clerics than normal god-fearing clerics or inquisitors.
They use a holy symbol, but it just says "depending on the adept's magical tradition." This means it doesn't even need to be the holy symbol for a particular god, just from the adept's tradition. If that tradition means using a recognized holy symbol, that's fine; if that means using the mummified ear of the tribe's first chief, that's also fine. He just has to have something and use it as a divine focus during spells.
Their alignments are open to being whatever you'd like/need them to be.
The adept is an all-purpose NPC-class spellcaster. A GM can take one and make a wizard-light character with a staff and a robe and a familiar, or ignore the familiar and take a feat of Light Armor Proficiency and make it a clerical caster in a chain shirt with a mace.
|
The 3.X adept felt like an attempt to allow the 'witch doctor' from 1st edition, a humanoid spellcaster that had a few low-level cleric spells and a few low-level wizard spells.
I like the idea, from either the Eberron Campaign Setting or Temple Quarter (from The Game Mechanics) of splitting the adept up into two classes, an arcane adept (with familiar) and a divine adept (with a single domain). In a somewhat lower-fantasy world, you could even have the vast majority of NPC spellcasters be divine adepts or 'magewright' arcane adepts, so that a wizard's guild or temple might have few clerics or wizards (or even none at all!), and PC clerics, wizards, sorcerers and druids would be a big deal, accessing levels of magical might not commonly seen in every community.
Adepts are also handy for when you have use for a 'old witch what lives out of town' who can provide some healing services or sell some potions, and don't want to have an established temple or faith in the area, for whatever reason. (Like the town is in the grip of an evil cult, and you don't want to spill those beans quite yet.) Similarly, they can provide limited divine spellcasting support in places that don't truck with organized religion (like Razmiran, or Hermea, or an earlier interpretation of Druma), for whatever reason.
