Arcane Memory
1st level divination (ritual)
Casting Time: 1 reaction
Range: Self
Component: V, S, M (minor divinatory tools which may be consumed, such as burned incense or tea which is drank, but may not be, such as casting runestones.)
Duration: Instant
If presented with an Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion skill check a character who knows this spell may use this spell as a reaction.
When you perform this spell you pull from the universe minor signs and portents that help fill in a particular piece of information. You can add your proficiency bonus to the skill roll. If you are already trained in the relevant skill this doubles your effective proficiency bonus for that skill for the duration.
If cast as a ritual this spell's duration becomes 8 hours. During that time the caster may benefit from the effect as if they cast the spell from memory once. After the roll is made the spell ceases to be active. A character can benefit from no more than one suspended version of this spell at a time.
Arcane Tutor
1st level conjuration (ritual)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Component: V, S, M (a small item of interest or value to the summoned creature which they take)
Duration: Instant
When you perform this spell you call up a small creature and exchange some small token or service for pieces of information and clues about a puzzle. You can reroll an Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion skill check you have made, so long as you did not already benefit from Advantage on the initial roll.
This is the result of my grinding on the knowledge skills that I left out of the skill bonus cantrips. While I'm not terribly pleased that I ultimately bumped it to a 1st level ritual. But, arguably, such a ritual takes even fewer resources to have and use than a cantrip and even after dumping all the knowledge skills together I couldn't justify anything else. Unlike some divination rituals (Augury), there is still an argument for memorizing this spell, allowing its use in the heat of the moment (Comprehend Languages).
Frankly, knowledge skills are the poor cousins of the skill family. While you regularly see adventures stymied by needing to climb a cliff or jump a crevasse I know vanishingly few GMs that will let a knowledge check direct their games in the same way. Ironically, this is because these skills have an outsized effect; failure, if significant, means that an alternate path is often not a matter of a few spells or trying new things at the same place or nearby, it reroutes entire tracks of as discovering that key piece of information becomes the goal. Depending on how obscure you want the knowledge to be this can be as simple as a bookkeeping trip to the local knowledge store (generally whatever source of esoterica your group of murder-hobos' arcane caster is connected with) or can become its own massive derailing of an adventure. For this reason official adventures almost never put important pieces of knowledge behind skill checks, opting instead to let them decorate the walls (and thus be essentially worthless in goal-oriented terms). While I firmly believe the best GMs are perfectly comfortable with this sort of potential derailing (and have had exactly this happen repeatedly) it's certainly not the norm. Consequently, I feel not at all bad about lumping these skills together into a single pool.
Casting Time: 1 reaction
Range: Self
Component: V, S, M (minor divinatory tools which may be consumed, such as burned incense or tea which is drank, but may not be, such as casting runestones.)
Duration: Instant
If presented with an Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion skill check a character who knows this spell may use this spell as a reaction.
When you perform this spell you pull from the universe minor signs and portents that help fill in a particular piece of information. You can add your proficiency bonus to the skill roll. If you are already trained in the relevant skill this doubles your effective proficiency bonus for that skill for the duration.
If cast as a ritual this spell's duration becomes 8 hours. During that time the caster may benefit from the effect as if they cast the spell from memory once. After the roll is made the spell ceases to be active. A character can benefit from no more than one suspended version of this spell at a time.
Arcane Tutor
1st level conjuration (ritual)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Component: V, S, M (a small item of interest or value to the summoned creature which they take)
Duration: Instant
When you perform this spell you call up a small creature and exchange some small token or service for pieces of information and clues about a puzzle. You can reroll an Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion skill check you have made, so long as you did not already benefit from Advantage on the initial roll.
~~*~~
This is the result of my grinding on the knowledge skills that I left out of the skill bonus cantrips. While I'm not terribly pleased that I ultimately bumped it to a 1st level ritual. But, arguably, such a ritual takes even fewer resources to have and use than a cantrip and even after dumping all the knowledge skills together I couldn't justify anything else. Unlike some divination rituals (Augury), there is still an argument for memorizing this spell, allowing its use in the heat of the moment (Comprehend Languages).
Frankly, knowledge skills are the poor cousins of the skill family. While you regularly see adventures stymied by needing to climb a cliff or jump a crevasse I know vanishingly few GMs that will let a knowledge check direct their games in the same way. Ironically, this is because these skills have an outsized effect; failure, if significant, means that an alternate path is often not a matter of a few spells or trying new things at the same place or nearby, it reroutes entire tracks of as discovering that key piece of information becomes the goal. Depending on how obscure you want the knowledge to be this can be as simple as a bookkeeping trip to the local knowledge store (generally whatever source of esoterica your group of murder-hobos' arcane caster is connected with) or can become its own massive derailing of an adventure. For this reason official adventures almost never put important pieces of knowledge behind skill checks, opting instead to let them decorate the walls (and thus be essentially worthless in goal-oriented terms). While I firmly believe the best GMs are perfectly comfortable with this sort of potential derailing (and have had exactly this happen repeatedly) it's certainly not the norm. Consequently, I feel not at all bad about lumping these skills together into a single pool.
Arguably, I've already gone down this route previously, and between the two a wizard who decides to focus on "knowing things" can gain a hefty bump in their success rate. But, as I said, I don't feel even a little bad about that.
The conjuration version of this spell grew out of thumbing through various types of divination and running across repeated references to "demonomancy." There are multiple ways in the base rules that a character can call up extra-dimensional creatures for answers and information, but most are higher level and significantly more powerful for it. I've mentioned before that I'm a much larger fan of adding clear, discrete bits of rules that provide a particular mechanical bonus than more open ended powers like "answering questions." Of course, knowledge skills always suffer that weight.
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