New Arcane Tradition: Battlemage

A rare tradition, battlemages are instructed in the use of arms and armor so that they can engage in close quarters combat while wielding their arcane powers. Sometimes considered a dwarven answer to the Bladesinger, these armed and armored wizards seek out combat and bend their magic to empowering attacks against their foes.

New Arcane Tradition: War Wizard

Trained to be living siege engines and weapons of mass devastation, War Wizards have developed skills to lay waste to vast tracts of a battlefield. Unlike other combat-focused spellcasters, such as bladesingers, battlemages, or even eldritch knights, warlocks, and sorcerers, War Wizards spend no particular time training in close combat. Instead they rely on their spells to devastate their foes from afar. They achieve this through the application of metamagic, twisting the arcane forces at their command to greater potential. While this tool is similar to that used by Sorcerers, its expression by these weavers of devastation is far more formulaic in its development and use.

New Arcane Tradition: Defilers (D&D 5e)

Best known for its origins on a distant and desolate world, this dark practice has metastasized across the prime material through the work of various dark powers and the even stronger force of human avarice. To say that there are those who consider the practice of this arcane tradition is an evil act is to understate the level with which they revile it. While defiling magic is rooted in necromantic practices, the manipulation of life and death, many necromancers consider the level of wanton destruction practice of this path represents a stain of so deep it undercuts the value of achieving that power. They recognize that, unchecked, these abilities would swiftly turn even the most verdant of world into a gods-forsaken, magic hating wasteland like the world from which this tradition hails. The reaction of druids, rangers, green knights, and most sane creatures is nearly beyond words. They condemn this path with a passion that would dim the sun, carving paths of blood and holy wrath through nearly any obstacle to annihilate so much as suspected practitioners of it.

A History of Magic: Table of Contents (D&D)

Introduction

The Dawn of Magic

• The History of Divination
• Divination Subschools and Selected Spells
• Eddies in Time and Space

Sources of Power

• The History of Necromancy
• Necromancy Subschools and Selected Spells
• The History of Evocation
• Evocation Subschools and Selected Spells

First Flowering of Magic

• The History of Abjuration
• Abjuration Subschools and Selected Spells

Children of the Elements

• The History of Conjuration
• Conjuration Subschools and Selected Spells
• The History of Transmutation
• Transmutation Subschools and Selected Spells

Scions of Light and Darkness

• The History of Enchantment
• Enchantment Subschools and Selected Spells
• The History of Illusion
• Illusion Subschools and Selected Spells

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New Arcane Tradition; White School Necromancer (D&D 5e)

The stereotypical necromancer is a dark-cloaked ghoul huddled over the graves of the dead in search of parts and pieces to bolster their power. These charnel misanthropes are ill liked and mistrusted, and their practices are often marginalized if not outlawed directly. There are those, however, who claim the necromancers so often seen are the failures and degenerates of a greater legacy. This lost legacy recognized the powers and energies of death and dying as merely one part of a greater whole. The few practitioners who know of this ancient tradition talk of the respect and power it held at its height. Their stories are bolstered by eldritch and obscure formulae and tantalizing descriptions held in some of their most prized texts; tomes of ancient provenance and exceeding rarity. However, often, these pieces are useless. Calculations and formulations built upon assumptions that the writers took for granted but have been lost to the modern practitioners of the necromantic arts.

New Arcane Tradition: Craftsmage (D&D5e)

The world of Eberron is kept running by the Artificers who build the pervasive magic upon which the society is built. The evolution of magic from a wild, unpredictable force to one that is becoming available to the masses is not a thing that happens overnight, and the first step was a tradition which shifted focus from types of spells and schools of magic to a method of applying that magic reliably. Far from being a dead practice that vanished with the evolution of the Artificer, there are still Craftsmages across Khorvaire. Appealing to those with the intellectual rigor but not the physical stamina of the Artificer, many junior craftsmages work providing mystical support in arcane foundries and forges. As they gain experience, talented craftsmages go on to serve as theoreticians as researchers; the more dynamic nature of spell-work providing a flexibility to their arcane research that the process of attempting to create new types of enchanted items sometimes lacks.