I was in a discussion about Pathfinder sorcerers and I was thinking, can you become sorcerers through magical experimentation?
So I know you probably meant like a super magical ritual that involves years of practice but in my head I just thought of an Alchemist replacing all of their blood with fiends blood or dragon blood in an attempt to become a sorcerer.
Either way I totally think it possible to become a sorcerer through magical experimentation. Its mentioned in secrets of magic that transmutation wizards craft entire bloodlines as their magnum opus so that could be your Imperial sorcerer. Fleshwarping magical experimentation from Nex could certainly make some Abberant sorcerers.
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By the rules, a character is just a sorcerer and the default backstory is that the sorcerous ability was hereditary.
You didn’t choose to become a spellcaster—you were born one. There’s magic in your blood, whether a divinity touched one of your ancestors, a forebear communed with a primal creature, or a powerful occult ritual influenced your line. Self-reflection and study allow you to refine your inherent magical skills and unlock new, more powerful abilities. The power in your blood carries a risk, however, and you constantly face the choice of whether you’ll rise to become a master spellcaster or fall into destruction.
But so long as the origin is in a backstory rather than during the campaign, we can fiddle with it outside of the rules. I have live experiments that granted a bloodline in the backstory of three characters, though someone else had performed the experiments without their consent.
My wife once created a halfling aberrant sorceress named Wealday Addams. Doctor Addams was a rich estate owner in Nidal and he experimented on his halfling slaves. He was so disrespectful of his slaves that he didn't even name them; instead, Wealday was labeled after the day on which she was born. Addams infused Wealday with eldritch essences, she developed aberrant bloodline powers, she used those powers to escape and stow away on a ship, and that ship ran aground in the shipwreck that began Souls for Smuggler's Shiv.
A sympathetic teenage NPC Val Baine was the daughter of the wizard Khonnir Baine in Torch in Numeria. Khonnir had a secret backstory that he was once Pauldris Gray, a member of the evil Technic League. When a fellow Technic League member became experimenting on a little girl, Pauldris could not stand it. He rescued the girl and they took the false names of Khonnir and Val Baine in hiding. Eventually, Khonnir tired of lying low, so he resumed work as a wizard and hoped the Technic League would not identify him. The party in Fires of Creation was hired to find Khonnir after he went missing on a mission. They recruited Val Baine as a fourth party member, and I had to turn a NPC without stats into a playable character. I made her a bloodrager, a barbarian with a sorcerous bloodline, with the backstory that she was the last survivor of the Mountain Crow tribe that was experimented upon by the lich Alling Third (Numeria: Land of Fallen Stars, Adventure Sites section, Crowhollow, pages 38-39). Either she gained a bloodline from the mutagens Alling Third put in their water supply or her parents did and she inherited it.
For Trail of the Hunted my wife created the halfling rogue Sam, who was Wealday Addams' cousin. Doctor Addams experimented on a slave named Toilday by injecting him with red dragon blood. Nothing happened, so Toilday was assigned as to tend animal pens and was rescued from slavery by the Bellflower Network. He changed his name to Sam. At 2nd level, the character took Sorcerer Multiclass Dedication and belatedly gained a red draconic bloodline years after the experiments.
All these origins were involuntary, because we would not want sorcerous powers easy and safe to obtain. Addams and Alling Third had a high death rate in their experimentation. The Raven Black mentioned the origin of Marvel superhero Captain America. In that story the formula for Captain America's powers had to be lost; otherwise, we would have had a dozen people with the same powers running around (which did happen in the Power Broker storyline in the comic books and in a Marvel Disney+ TV show). Someone who negotiates for powers from an eldritch patron is a witch and has to keep to their contract, but their children might be born as sorcerers not bound to any contract. Someone who gambles for powers might be a sorcerer because they are not bound to any contract, but the gamble has to be difficult or deadly to fit the setting.
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I'll note that we now have ancestries like poppet and leshy for which the normal concept of 'bloodline' as the inheritance of genes doesn't really apply. Yet they can be sorcerers. So I'd say that we already have a pretty broad concept of how characters can become sorcerers.
I'll note that we now have ancestries like poppet and leshy for which the normal concept of 'bloodline' as the inheritance of genes doesn't really apply. Yet they can be sorcerers. So I'd say that we already have a pretty broad concept of how characters can become sorcerers.
But Twining Gold-Flame Honeysuckle Vine (Honey for short), the leshy fey-blooded sorcerer in my PF2-converted PF2 Ironfang Invasion campaign, did inherit her sorcerous powers. She was a native vine of the magical, fey-infested Fangwood Forest before being awakened by a druid to become his familiar. The vine was so magical it retained its awakened intelligence after the druid died.
