A somewhat-ready first draft. The class itself is generic, but there's plenty of room with the Guild Powers and guilds themselves to provide all the flavor such a class really needs; and three sample guilds besides.
I plan to add a few more fleshed-out guilds later, but I thought I'd see the thoughts on what I had so far first.
I so do hate to bump my own threads, but I was hoping for some thoughts and opinions, maybe some guild ideas.
this kind of reminds me of the Guild Mage of Waterdeep. this is an interesting direction to go with instead of the spellpool access. I like the word of recall 1/week. I would be a little worried about how early the spellcaster would have access to that ability. but with its 1/week usage it wouldn't break anything in my games.
just an observation if I was playing a wizard that was going to take this prestige class I would probably wait till level 11 to take my first level of it. with the entry requirements set as high as they are, the benefits the class provides are nice options for a wizard who doesn't really gain any class benefits other than bonus feats after level 6 or 8. but it wouldn't be a priority to start until I had all my school powers and I would probably go ahead and pick up my level 10 wizard bonus feat just to have it before I started this class.
is there any reason you didn't set the skill requirements to level 5 like you did the spellcasting?
Partially because I wanted to have Word of Recall in there, partially because I wanted to have a little more room with the Guild Powers. You can have a little more room with 'earliest level 9' abilities than 'earliest level 7'; kinda like the difference between Dimension Door and Teleport.
And I was never really happy with that old spellpool ability, too easy to abuse IMHO :P
I certainly like the idea. if you hadn't thought about it yet, you could base a mage guild off of espionage and have its powers revolve around illusion and enchantment.
I like the idea of a high level "elite" mage's guild that a player can enter, and with the guilds having themes it gives them a lot of flavor that I enjoy. my only worry is I probably wouldn't multiclass a bard or sorcerer because none of the abilities gained from the 3 guilds really offers any "new" abilities. they do provide a few more options which is nice but I wouldn't want to give up my other class features for them.
have you considered adding maybe a unique ability that can only be obtained from that guild?
Well, these three guilds I put here are only examples and simple guidelines of how powerful each ability should be. A GM could make any sort of guild they like, particularly ones that suit the campaign.
The first power is meant to be mostly symbolic, generally just reinforcing what a wizard of that guild should already be able to do.
The second power is a more useful ability granting a stronger power, something worth giving up advancing your wizard school abilities and bonus feat(s) for.
Whereas the third is meant to be just the right side of crazy good, not a tremendous capstone but something useful enough to build around (the evocation one comes to mind, particularly with a level of crossblooded sorcerer) or just insanely useful (dropping spell slots for dispel magic? Counterspelling ahoy.)
I'll be putting up more example guilds eventually, particularly ones I'll be popping into my own campaign world.