Creepy alchemist that fits this party?

[Rfkannen]

Long story short: group made characters for a new campaign. current campaign lasted way longer than expected (new campaign will start in Febuary). The gm isn't able to run right now, so I ran menace under otari for the group, with all the other players playing the same builds they will play in the other campaign. Afterwords, we decided it would be more fun to have an alchemist than my planned investigator, so I want to find a new build that fits the group.

The group: A thief rogue, wields a rapier, going to take cathartic spellcaster archetype, is the scout. A pistol phenom scoundrel rogue with an air repeater, is the high charisma face. A tyrant champion with the dual wielder archetype, is the tank.

The party worked out really well, the two rogues covered most skills, the champion was able to draw a lot of attention from enemies, the thief was able to be a great flanking partner to the champion. the scoundrel was able to snipe away hard to reach enemies and target people who ran away. The one thing they were missing was any major buffing abilities (and I am thinking an alchemist who hands out elixirs would be a great build to fill that)

My character: picture old elven doctor frankenstein. Creepy old elf man who cuts up corpses, does creepy experiments, is searching for eternal life, and is creepy. Mechanical goal would be to focus on buffs and debuffs. I would prefer to avoid spellcasting on him. Here is my investigator portrait of him https://twitter.com/rfkannen/status/1570854935159525376/photo/1 )

Campaign does not use free archetype.

Any recommendations for a suitably creepy elf alchemist build that would fit that party? I want him to both provide the support the party needs, and be as freaky as possible!

Thank you for any suggestions you have!

[breithauptclan]

Flavor is up to the player. So making the character creepy is solely your responsibility. It has very little to do with class mechanics.

For mechanics, this sounds like Mutagenist or maybe Toxicologist. It is a bit of a stretch, but you could make Chirurgeon work too.

Since you aren't using Free Archetype, taking an archetype will be noticeably more expensive to your build. But you can still do it. You might take a good look at Clockwork Reanimator. That would give your rogues another flanking partner and really sell the flavor of the character.

[Rfkannen]

breithauptclan wrote:

Flavor is up to the player. So making the character creepy is solely your responsibility. It has very little to do with class mechanics.

For mechanics, this sounds like Mutagenist or maybe Toxicologist. It is a bit of a stretch, but you could make Chirurgeon work too.

Since you aren't using Free Archetype, taking an archetype will be noticeably more expensive to your build. But you can still do it. You might take a good look at Clockwork Reanimator. That would give your rogues another flanking partner and really sell the flavor of the character.

This is true! I do have some ideas for the creepy mechanics (mainly boosting occultism, so I can cast the create undead ritual and use disturbing knowledge to terrify people), I mostly mentioned it to see if there were any other freaky alchemist options I missed.

Chirurgeon had been my first thought(partly because the party lacks healing, partly because my characters name is Doc so it felt appropriate lol), why would it be a stretch? Mutagenist and chirurgeon both look interesting! My one worry with mutaginst is that for flavor I would rather avoid going high strength and sentinel (my character is both elderly and an elf), would a dex based mutagenist who mostly hands out his mutagens to the rest of the party instead of using them himself work well? Toxicologist looks like overall a great time!

Clockwork re-animator could be really fun! I just tried it on pathbuilder and realized that ancient elf doesn't work on non-multiclass archetypes, which is a shame, that would have been a fun mechanical interaction. could be fun even without that though!

[Rfkannen]

Tried making a build: https://pathbuilder2e.com/launch.html?build=259035

Does that seem decent?

[breithauptclan]

By being a stretch I mean that it will take more energy from the player to describe things in order to convey the feel of the character.

Mutagenist is already pretty creepy by default since they are making a lot of things like Bestial Mutagen, Ichthyosis Mutagen, and even Juggernaut Mutagen. Morph and Polymorph effects generally look rather unnatural right out of the box.

For Chirurgeon, you will have to go out of your way on your descriptions of things in order to make it have that type of feel. Elixir of Life for example is going to be a bit of an uphill battle to not have it seen as something pleasant and soothing.

[shroudb]

breithauptclan wrote:

By being a stretch I mean that it will take more energy from the player to describe things in order to convey the feel of the character.

Mutagenist is already pretty creepy by default since they are making a lot of things like Bestial Mutagen, Ichthyosis Mutagen, and even Juggernaut Mutagen. Morph and Polymorph effects generally look rather unnatural right out of the box.

For Chirurgeon, you will have to go out of your way on your descriptions of things in order to make it have that type of feel. Elixir of Life for example is going to be a bit of an uphill battle to not have it seen as something pleasant and soothing.

Meh, creepy doctors with questionable origin potions have been around since forever.

"It works, trust me, just don't ask where the ingredients came from".