Arcane Bloodline Sorcerous Origin

[P. G. Macer]

The following subclass is an attempt to make a relatively generic subclass for the sorcerer that lacks the LOLrandom and DM-dependent nature of Wild Magic, while still having some flavor. As you can see from the homebrewery copy of this brew, Simon Aumar from last year’s D&D movie was a significant source of inspiration. Now, onto the subclass itself!

Arcane Bloodline
The blood of a mighty mage runs in your veins, a person whose immense magical skill has impacted their descendants, both direct and indirect. On Toril, home of the Forgotten Realms setting, the wizard Elminster Aumar, Chosen of Mystra, is a common ancestor of arcane bloodlines. The weight of big expectations can sometimes crush these sorcerers, but those that answer their heritage’s call oft become archmages themselves.

Archmage Spells
You learn additional spells when you reach certain levels in this class, as shown on the Archmage Spells table. Each spell counts as a sorcerer spell for you, but it does not count against the number of sorcerer spells you know. When you gain a level in this class, you can replace one spell you gained from this feature with another spell of the same level. The new spell must be an abjuration or evocation spell from the artificer, warlock, or wizard spell list. You waive the royalty components of Archmage Spells you cast.

Sorcerer level	Spells
1st	find familiar, Jim’s magic missile
3rd	Nystul’s magic aura, wrispocket
5th	magic circle, pulse wave
7th	arcane eye, gate seal
9th	Bigby’s hand, wall of force

Instinct for Magic
Beginning at 1st level when you gain this Sorcerous Origin, you gain proficiency in the Arcana skill. If you are already proficient in the Arcana skill, you become proficient in another skill from the sorcerer class’s skill list. Whatever skill you gain, you add your Charisma modifier to Intelligence (Arcana) checks you make.

Maximized Arcane Potential
Starting at 6th level, you can cast a levelled spell with a casting time of 1 action and another with a casting time of 1 bonus action on the same turn.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

Eschew Materials
At 14th level, your lineage allows you to rely on your raw magical ability to cast spells. When you cast a spell with material components, you can spend sorcery points to cast the spell without material components. The number of sorcery points you must spend is determined by the material components of the spell, as shown in the Waived Materials table. When you use this feature, you can’t use Subtle Spell metamagic with the same spell.

Material Components	Sorcery Point Cost
Materials neither have a cost nor are consumed	3
Materials have a cost but are not consumed	4
Materials do not have a cost but are consumed	4
Materials have a cost and are consumed	5

Arcane Apotheosis
Starting at 18th level, you are now so suffused with magic that you can alter reality itself. You know the wish spell, which doesn’t count against your number of sorcerer spells known, and if you undergo the spell’s casting stress, you can expend 11 Sorcery points to have no chance of losing the ability to cast the spell.

In addition, you can cast wish to replicate a spell of 1st through 8th level without expending a 9th-level Spell Slot. You instead expend a slot of the replicated spell’s level. Once you use wish in this way, you can’t do so again until you finish a long rest.

(Yes, this is a slightly nerfed version from One D&D’s initial attempt at a sorcerer capstone)

Spoiler: Non-PHB Spell Sources

Show

Four spells in the default Archmage Spells list come from books other than the Player’s Handbook.
Jim’s magic missile comes from Acquisitions Incorporated.
Wristpocket and pulse wave are from Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount.
Gate seal originates from Planescape: Adventures in the Mulitverse, specifically Sigil and the Outlands.

[Twelvetrees]

That's a fun inspiration!

Comments

Archmage spells
This seems in line with the Tasha subclasses, so I've got no balance concerns here. I'll admit to some confusion about why these are the spells that were chosen. I'm not seeing the thematic link to an Archmage other than them being wizard spells. Can you walk me through that piece?

Is the usage of artificer here instead of sorcerer intentional?

The new spell must be an abjuration or evocation spell from the artificer, warlock, or wizard spell list.

Instinct of Magic
Ooh, this is cool and definitely fulfills the idea that this subclass knows a lot about magic.

Maximized Arcane Potential
This pairs really well with Quickened Spell, probably too well. It effectively allows an Arcane Bloodline sorcerer to take two turns in one.

If I can suggest something else, maybe a feature allowing the character to swap one of their spells known would work?

Eschew Materials
I'm struggling to imagine this feature coming into play very often. Maybe if an Archmage spell had been swapped for the artificer's Revivify? I think you could do more here.

Arcane Apotheosis
This is fine. It doesn't spark my imagination, but it's a good capstone.

[MrStabby]

The following subclass is an attempt to make a relatively generic subclass for the sorcerer that lacks the LOLrandom and DM-dependent nature of Wild Magic, while still having some flavor. As you can see from the homebrewery copy of this brew, Simon Aumar from last year’s D&D movie was a significant source of inspiration. Now, onto the subclass itself!

Arcane Bloodline
The blood of a mighty mage runs in your veins, a person whose immense magical skill has impacted their descendants, both direct and indirect. On Toril, home of the Forgotten Realms setting, the wizard Elminster Aumar, Chosen of Mystra, is a common ancestor of arcane bloodlines. The weight of big expectations can sometimes crush these sorcerers, but those that answer their heritage’s call oft become archmages themselves.

Archmage Spells
You learn additional spells when you reach certain levels in this class, as shown on the Archmage Spells table. Each spell counts as a sorcerer spell for you, but it does not count against the number of sorcerer spells you know. When you gain a level in this class, you can replace one spell you gained from this feature with another spell of the same level. The new spell must be an abjuration or evocation spell from the artificer, warlock, or wizard spell list. You waive the royalty components of Archmage Spells you cast.

Sorcerer level	Spells
1st	find familiar, Jim’s magic missile
3rd	Nystul’s magic aura, wrispocket
5th	magic circle, pulse wave
7th	arcane eye, gate seal
9th	Bigby’s hand, wall of force

Instinct for Magic
Beginning at 1st level when you gain this Sorcerous Origin, you gain proficiency in the Arcana skill. If you are already proficient in the Arcana skill, you become proficient in another skill from the sorcerer class’s skill list. Whatever skill you gain, you add your Charisma modifier to Intelligence (Arcana) checks you make.

Maximized Arcane Potential
Starting at 6th level, you can cast a levelled spell with a casting time of 1 action and another with a casting time of 1 bonus action on the same turn.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

Eschew Materials
At 14th level, your lineage allows you to rely on your raw magical ability to cast spells. When you cast a spell with material components, you can spend sorcery points to cast the spell without material components. The number of sorcery points you must spend is determined by the material components of the spell, as shown in the Waived Materials table. When you use this feature, you can’t use Subtle Spell metamagic with the same spell.

Material Components	Sorcery Point Cost
Materials neither have a cost nor are consumed	3
Materials have a cost but are not consumed	4
Materials do not have a cost but are consumed	4
Materials have a cost and are consumed	5

Arcane Apotheosis
Starting at 18th level, you are now so suffused with magic that you can alter reality itself. You know the wish spell, which doesn’t count against your number of sorcerer spells known, and if you undergo the spell’s casting stress, you can expend 11 Sorcery points to have no chance of losing the ability to cast the spell.

In addition, you can cast wish to replicate a spell of 1st through 8th level without expending a 9th-level Spell Slot. You instead expend a slot of the replicated spell’s level. Once you use wish in this way, you can’t do so again until you finish a long rest.

(Yes, this is a slightly nerfed version from One D&D’s initial attempt at a sorcerer capstone)

Spoiler: Non-PHB Spell Sources

Show

Four spells in the default Archmage Spells list come from books other than the Player’s Handbook.
Jim’s magic missile comes from Acquisitions Incorporated.
Wristpocket and pulse wave are from Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount.
Gate seal originates from Planescape: Adventures in the Mulitverse, specifically Sigil and the Outlands.

I think there is a serious problem here. The class seems to read like sorcrer, but with exra wizard spells. This overlaps far to strongly with wizard... which has basically the same spell list + extras. And its not like the overall quality of the spells is low. If there is a wizard in the party they will be tempted to be taking the bigby's hands and the walls of force. It feels like the class is taking away a huge chunk of why you might want to play a wizard.

Access to wizard spells alone wouldn't be enough normally. THe thematic tightness of the sorcerer list forcing hard choices on spell selection gives the wizard some flexability to stand out. Just knowing more spells is not great from a balance perspective. Wizard, but with metamagic and free constitution save proficiency is aways going to be tough to balance (and arguably Charisma is a more useful stat than inteligence as it conributes to an entire pillar of the game). I would suggest engineering this from the perspective of "how do I ensure that anyone playing a wizard a the same table doesn't feel reret over their choice". Find more ways for the wizard to still shine. So wizards do get things like ritual casting, which means if you want that feature you don't have to pay a feat for it, I guess.

Instinct for magic is interesting - you can easily be better than a wizard at arcana, just by not dumping Int. Its not a big thing - but is this a skil you think the wizard class would expect to have as one of its strong points?

Maximised Arcane Potential - potentialy very powerful. Overall I don't think its too powerful but I think its powerful in the wrong ways. Its powerful in the sense of being able to totally dominate fights. Its powerfu in that it lets a PC effectively stop others from having a meaningful contribution. Sure, they pay for it later, but the issue is the sorcerer player gets to chose when other payers get to contribute which I feel is a poor dynamic. Better to have something that raises the lower end of power than raising the peak impact the PC can have.

Eschew Materials is very cool, though I do wonder if the costs are quite right or if this is the right class for it. A sorcerer generally know their spells. This isn't a cleric that has zero investment to get a spell on ther list and can swap in and out on a whim. Your spells are spells you are probably expecting to cast a lot and therefore will invest in the components for. For most spells then you are paying a cost in SP to mimic warcaster. I cant think of any spells that have material components that are consumed but don't have a cost. So its really 5 SP to cast spells with expensive components that can be consumed - and I am struggling to work out which of hese spells are on the sorcerer list? Where s simulacrum or clone or resurecton?

Arcane Apothiosis - My thinking about this is ike the maximised arcane potential. You have, in my opinion, one of the big design issues wth casters - that at peak power they can render other team mates unneeded, and hen you exacerbate it. You need a specific problem fixed - wish can do it almost always with little long term consequence now. And casting wish not using a 9th evel spell sot is now multiple wishes per day - and you still get to copy spels that need ong casting imes or expensive components. I ove abilities that buff specific spells, and I love abilities that really encourage their use - in this case though you are taking a spell that is problematicaly powerful and making it more powerfu still... and I foree that something more powerful than problematicaly powerful might be a problem.


I see some cool stuff here, but wonder if it might be better on another class to take the end result further from wizard. Bard could work (I would also say warlock, but short rest walls of force is a bit of a DM nightmare). A very different direction could be ranger - a wanderer in search of arcan secrets. The sower spell progression would avoid stepping on the wizards toes, the spells on the list would work well with a ranger and scale well and its less likely to get out of hand.

[P. G. Macer]

Thank you both for your feedback. I’m going to handle Twelvetrees’s feedback first, and then MrStabby’s, both because of the order in which I received them and because I need to do deeper thinking over the concept on the latter.

For both: I was indeed going for a wizardly theme here for the subclass spells, but considering the unanimity of the feedback I am open to suggestions of how do make it more coherent and cohesive. For Maximized Arcane Potential, I was concerned about it being too powerful and thus considering the idea of making it so the two spells had to be different spells and/or making it LR-recharge only, but once again the feedback seems to be once again that it’s simply too strong. Maybe if I moved it to 18th level and replaced the 6th level feature with the abandoned optional class feature Spell Versatility from the 2019 CFV UA?

[SPOILER=Aside Tangent]As I get more into D&D homebrewing, I find the creative writing adage “kill/murder your darlings”, i.e. be ready to get rid of things you love or are proud of if they don’t work, to be equally applicable in this medium./SPOILER]

@Twelvetrees: The choice of aritificer instead of sorcerer for the bonus spell swapping was intentional, to reflect the ordered nature of this Sorcerous origin. However, since Cure Wounds is an artificer spell of the evocation school, I may switch arty back to sorcerer to prevent access should that prove problematic.

For Eschew Materials, my reasoning was that there are several higher-level spells that have don’t often see much play in campaigns where material component acquisition is difficult, such as teleportation circle and true seeing, that this feature was intended to encourage the use of.

I’ll admit, Arcane Apotheosis is powerful (perhaps too much so), but boring. If moving Maximized Arcane Potential to 18th level is still too good, I’ll have to go back to the drawing board.

@MrStabby: You’ve made me reconsider big aspects of this subclass. I thought even with the bonus spells that the wizard’s preparation of its spells meant its toes weren’t getting too stepped on, but now I’m not so sure. I may cut the Archmage Spell table in half and only grant one extra spell for the first five spell levels, or lock in them to make it less flexible.

I also think we’re coming at this from very different perspectives: I rarely see wizards and sorcerers in play at the same table, because they already occupy such similar niches that if a player chooses one class, others opt not to pick the other. I recognize, however, that my experiences are not universal, and I need to account for tables where both classes are in play.

For Instinct for Magic, I took inspiration from 2024 playtest features for the Cleric and Druid allowing them to add their Wisdom modifiers to INT (Religion) and INT (Nature) checks respectively, but I see how it could potentially be problematic here. My first instinct was to make it so the sorcerer added half its CHA mod to the checks, but that only lessens the problem, not eliminates it. Another possibility is to get rid of adding the CHA mod and replacing it with a d4, like how the dragonmarked race variants in the Eberron book boost skills, but a d4 is generally anemic without other bonuses in my experience, so that would be reducing this to barely more than a ribbon.

For Maximized Arcane Potential, would the initial amendment(s) I proposed in the “for both” section fix the issue, or will I have to from scratch like I said earlier?

For Eschew materials, there’s a humble 1st-level spell that fits the criteria of a consumed non-costly component—protection from evil and good, which while not a native sorcerer spell, is a wizard abjuration spell and thus an Archmage Spells candidate. I see your general point though that as a known spells caster, the sorcerer doesn’t get enough expensive consumed component spells to justify this feature; I misremembered how sparse the sorcerer list at higher levels.

Arcane Apotheosis is likely going in the dustbin, or at least getting a huge nerf based on your feedback.

Thank you both for your time! I have a lot of revising to do!

[P. G. Macer]

Update:

Based on this thread’s feedback, I have revised the subclass!

Here’s the change log:

• Archmage Spells: Counterspell replaces pulse wave, Mordenkainen’s private sanctum replaces gate seal, and scrying replaces wall of force. Additionally, conjuration replaces evocation in the schools of choice for swapping spells.

• Instinct for Magic no longer grants a free skill proficiency, neither to Arcana nor any of the other Sorcerer skills.

• New 6th-level feature: Spell Versatility. I just cribbed the abandoned optional class feature from a 2019 Unearthed Arcana article published in the lead-up to Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and adjusted the wording to account for its place as a non-optional feature now.

• New 14th-level feature: Partial Magic Resistance. This feature grants advantage on saving throws from spells and magical effects for one of the “strong” saves (DEX, CON, WIS) and two of the “weak” saves (STR, INT, CHA). I originally was going to do all the saves, but realized that would be stepping on the Abjuration Wizard’s toes. It still may be a bit much.

• Maximized Arcane Potential is now the 18th-level feature, and can no longer be used in conjunction with Quickened Spell to cast the same spell twice in a turn.

I suspect this subclass may still need tuning down, but I wanted to share where I’m at so I don’t end up going off in the wrong direction, so to speak.