Forbidden Lore - A New Wizard Tradition!

Hey folks!

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Check out this new wizard Arcane Tradition, delving into the unwholesome magics of the dark and depraved. The Perfect Union isn't as perfect as its name might suggest, and these arts certainly go to show that side of fate.

PDF LINK

Let's do a feature rundown:

Unearthed Knowledge - Put warlock and druid spells in your spellbook! Where do you find them? It's up to your DM, but ancient tomes of forbidden lore, druidic standing stones, spell scrolls, and actual instruction by learned members of these practices are great places to start.

Note that these spells aren't ever actually becoming "Wizard spells" for you, so they don't qualify for infinite at-will casting via high level wizard features.

Dark Ritual - The big spook. Arcane inscription allows you to put spells onto other creatures, letting you force them to cast those spells for you. Usually, it'll be good to put on allies to use them as additional casting platforms, but there's a few neat tricks it'll let you perform. Overall, it's the power feature of the class.

Blood Pact is less powerful, despite looking strong, primarily because there's few spells it'll be useful to be able to use with such a long casting time - Effectively, no offensive spells, few buffs, and you can cast normal ritual spells in an even shorter time anyways. The primary benefit here is to let you safely perform certain non-ritual utility spells if you have enough time and a handy creature to sacrifice.

Delve into Madness - Oh, look, a utility feature that gives you another potential source to get wizard, druid, and warlock spells for your spellbook, or to carry around a skull to quick-swap spells if you get a particularly knowledgeable caster's skull. Of course, you do need the skull, so it's still under an appropriate degree of DM-dependency.

Gradual Corruption - A spicy feature to help give you a bit of power, this makes your spells less likely to be wasted, provided you're the one casting them. Casting through Arcane Inscription means the other creature is casting, so you can't combo there. The big benefit is being able to use a failed saving throw cantrip to set up a more powerful saving throw spell, if you're trying to be more slot-efficient.

Forsaken Resurrection - A wizard, bringing people back from the dead? Truly? Isn't that forbidden? Yes. That's why it's here. The mechanics of this are intended to allow you to either make a creature your thrall - bring them back and threaten them with death or service - or to allow you to revive allies and keep them safe until a cleric can be found to revive them (curse kill, dead for just a moment so the cleric can bring them back more easily). I'm sure there's other interesting possibilities with this, but I'll leave those up to you to discover!

Thank you so much for reading - please let me know what you think!