What I wanted to do here was to get the summoner class far from the sorcerer and more wizard-like.
Doing so I had to create a completly new origin story and flavour-text for the class, which was something I disliked a lot about the original Pathfinder summoner.
Then I placed this origin story as a recent minor event on my favourite campaing setting, the World of Greyhawk, which is where my home campaigns take place.
I still left some space in the setting for what I called "natural summoner", which is the summoner class as presented in the Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide in opposition to the "regular" summoner I just created.
To those of you who do not know the Greyhawk setting, there is something you must know: most of the time, but not all, the "sorcerer" word used in the origin story of this class does not refer to the sorcerer class. That happens because I tied my variant summoner to a World of Greyhawk organization called the Sorcerer's Nexus of Rel Astra, which was created in AD&D age when the sorcerer class did not exist, and the word "sorcerer", as far as I know, was just another synonym for the ordinary magic-user.
Nexus Sorcerers kept their name in third edition, as seen in Living Greyhawk supplements. I tried to make the difference clear everytime I used the word sorcerer to refer to the class instead of refering to the members of the Nexus, so I would not have to appeal to tecnical terms.
Here you can download the variant summoner:
http://www.4shared.com/file/Q2qDkRCZ/New_Summoner__Nexus_Sorcerer_o.html
I took away the medium BBA, the d8 hit dice, and the Summon Monster ability.
Made the class prepare spells with a spellbook, and reformulated its spell list, giving it nine levels of spellcasting.
In addition they receive Summoner's Charm and Nexus Method as a bonus feat for free.
So, I clearly gave it too much power, and I'd like to know your opinion on which penalties I should give the class, and which other abilities I should take away in order to make it balanced.