miburo
2017-08-02, 04:13 PM
A long long time ago, in a thread on the WotC forums now far far away (i.e. gone), a couple of people were complaining about how hard it was to recreate the swordmage arcane gish type in 5th edition. The paladin was a great class, but it wasn't really "arcane" enough. So a couple of plucky forum-goers (mellored, aelioran, and miburo) created a paladin archteype based on the swordmage. General agreement was that was pretty straightforward to slide into a campaign, even if it didn't fully capture the nitty gritty details of the arcane original.
Some things never change, and now many of us are still looking for that arcane gish. While I created a Spellsword base class since then, I wanted to bring this "Swordmage as a Paladin archetype" back because I think in many ways it is a lot simpler to introduce a new archetype then a full base class. From a fluff perspective if you want to keep this Paladin-ish, you could modify this to be an "Oath of the Arcane" or something similar, like a Paladin of Mystra devoted to defending the fabric of the weave.
Since the WotC forum days I've modified the class a bit for balance and offered a separate optional "base class rework" to make the paladin base class feel more like an arcane half-caster and less like a holy warrior. Check it out below and let me know your feedback:
Swordmage as a Paladin Archetype (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fBoC8bVRb_0syWHZORwWeagijKOX5bljMza8rbziBQI/)
Some things never change, and now many of us are still looking for that arcane gish. While I created a Spellsword base class since then, I wanted to bring this "Swordmage as a Paladin archetype" back because I think in many ways it is a lot simpler to introduce a new archetype then a full base class. From a fluff perspective if you want to keep this Paladin-ish, you could modify this to be an "Oath of the Arcane" or something similar, like a Paladin of Mystra devoted to defending the fabric of the weave.
Since the WotC forum days I've modified the class a bit for balance and offered a separate optional "base class rework" to make the paladin base class feel more like an arcane half-caster and less like a holy warrior. Check it out below and let me know your feedback:
Swordmage as a Paladin Archetype (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fBoC8bVRb_0syWHZORwWeagijKOX5bljMza8rbziBQI/)