Abilities:

• Felicity
• Karma (hexes, blessings, etc)
• ?

Hex: choose a stat, target sucks at that stat for a while

Blessing: choose a stat, target is better at that stat for a while

What is the core magic of a witch?

• Karma, sure
• Vitae, but what does that mean?
  • The innate magic of blood, but also of everyday things
  • A broom can animate into a magic broom, because that's what brooms are for (and, you know, for flying)
• Familiars
• Tools (cauldron, crystal ball, broom I guess, etc)
• Medicine

Brainstorming:

• Animate object to do its natural function
• Hearthstones
• Dolls

Familiar

You have a familiar. It takes the form of a natural beast of CR 1/4 or lower, although it isn't necessarily a natural beast itself.

Your familiar can understand your voice, and you understand its own, even if it only makes animal noises. Despite its form, the familiar has an Intelligence of 10 + half your Witch level.

Your familiar gets actions of its own, acting according to your wishes, but autonomously--that is, if you are unable to direct it actively, it can still act according to its own intelligence.

Given its form, it can't do a whole lot of damage, and most familiars lack the power of speech and opposable thumbs, so it can't be incredibly useful in a battle. Still, clever uses of familiars exist. Also, you can take abilities that improve your familiar.

Your familiar does "level up" with you; its basic skills (Attack, Defense, Magic, Skill) use your level instead of its own, and it gains 4 HP per Witch level.

Witchcraft

Cauldron

• Brew Potion: Each day, you can create a number of potions equal to your Witch level + your Wisdom modifier. The potions last 10 minutes unless otherwise specified.
  • Healing Potion: Daily, short rest; you create 1d3+2 potions which heal the imbiber for heavy damage.
  • Growth Potion: Daily, short rest; you create 1d3+2 potions which either increase or decrease the imbiber's size by one category (your choice), lasting 10 minutes. (Increasing size grants a +4 size bonus to Str and Con, -2 penalty to Dex, -2 penalty to Dodge, -4 penalty to hit, and +4 bonus to Str-based damage; decreasing does the opposite).
  • Invisibility Potion: Daily, short rest; you create 1d3+2 potions which make the imbiber invisible until they take or inflict damage, or use a power that causes debilitating effects, or otherwise lasts 10 minutes.
  • Love Potion: Imbiber falls in love with the first person they see after drinking (Wis ends, 3 strike rule, lasts until imbiber completes a long rest).
  • Speed Potion: Grants a bonus action of any type each round (std, swift, move, reaction) for 3 rds.
  • Flying Potion: Grants a fly speed of 10 for 5 rounds.
  • Sleep Potion: Puts imbiber to sleep for however long creatures of that type naturally sleep, unless awoken.
• Brew Elixir: Each day, you can create X elixirs. They last all day.
  • Darkvision
  • Water Breathing
  • Longstrider
  • Thick Skin (+AC)
  • Nondetection
  • Animal Friendship
  • Woodland Stride
• Alchemical Concoction: ?
  • Grease
  • Glue
  • Poison Gas
  • Smoke Bomb
  • Alchemist's Fire

Chroma

• Blessing
• Hex

Familiar

• Invisible Familiar: Encounter, swift; familiar becomes invisible until it attacks or takes damage.
• Spell Proxy: You can use your familiar as the origin of your spells, if the familiar is within range of said spells.
• Deadly Familiar: Your familiar gains a melee attack inflicting medium damage of an appropriate type.
• Familiar Evolution: Your familiar gains more advanced powers, along with a new category (fey, elemental, construct, undead, etc). Perhaps it was always that sort of creature, but now it's growing into its power.
  • All: gain the power of speech.
  • Construct
  • Elemental: gain XYZ
  • Fey: gain XYZ
  • Unded
• Familiar Focus: Your familiar can spend its standard action to concentrate on a concentration spell that you were already concentrating on, or one you are casting simultaneously with the familiar's action. To maintain concentration, the familiar must sacrifice its standard action every round.
• Two Familiars: What's better than one familiar? Two!

Felicity

• Sympathetic Magic: Any magic that distinguishes between friend and foe has a 10% chance per Witch level to consider you a friend, even if its caster intended you to be a foe.
• Spell Stowaway: Encounter, reaction, ranged; when anyone casts a spell that grants them healing, enhancement, defense, or mobility, you can use this reaction to gain the same effect yourself. (Take twice to improve to recharge 33%)

Medicine

• That one item that absorbs death spells and negative levels by making black gems crumble
• Talismans of various sorts; nothing permanent, it's all expendable and powered by life (or death)

Tools

• Hedgecraft: You have a knack for enchanting everyday objects to enhance their utility: (some of the more powerful ones require Vitae)
  • Mirror of Truth: A mirror's purpose is to reflect the truth, and that is what this mirror does. Three times per day, you may ask the mirror a question, phrased as a rhyming couplet, the first a supplication to the mirror's prowess, the second the actual question. The DM is free to deny an answer if the rhyme or meter is poor. The mirror answers to the best of its knowledge. Its depth of knowledge is identical to that of a mortal subject matter expert, though its answers are simple, cryptic, and composed in rhyming verse.
  • Crystal Ball: Used to scry on creatures.
  • Bottle of Air
  • Decanter of Endless Water
  • Bag of Holding
  • Candle of Revealing
  • Pipe of Smoking
  • Mask of...masking?
  • Stone of being very heavy (like Mjolnir)

Vitae

Brainstorming:

• Let Blood
• Make it real cold like a frost witch because you pulled vitae from the air
• Drain minor creatures to death for Vitae
• Use an enemy's blood to power your spells

Spells

Schools:

• White
  • Divination
  • Healing
  • Protection
• Red
  • Anti-magic
  • Blood
  • Transmutation
• Black
  • Necromancy

Insect Plague?

White Magic

Rituals

• Gentle Repose

Rank 1

Divination

• Magical Sight: see magical auras, identify properties of spells and magic items, possibly detect illusions
• Comprehend Languages
• Reckoning: Estimate the age of an object, understand its composition, and even gain an inkling of who made it.
• Augury

Healing

• Healing Trance: Subject enters a deep sleep, and after 8 hours, they gain the effect of one day of continuous bed rest for every hour thereafter. Limited by their Fortitude as their body will run out of resources.
• Verve: Convert Vitae into healing energy.

Protection

• Bless: Grants bonuses to attacks, defense rolls, etc to X allies.
• Bubble: Bubble protects ally from one attack.

Rank 2

• Reveal Illusion / See Invisible / etc
• Scry

Rank 3

• Create Hearthstone

Red Magic

Rituals

• Create Phylactery
• Let Blood: Cut yourself, take a bit of damage == bonus mana!
• Burning Blood: Turn a bit of blood into long-lasting fire, minor flame attack, etc

Rank 1

• Transfusion: At-will, touch; as a swift action, you transfer your HP to subject. Or, as a standard action, you transfer an enemy's HP to you.
• Blood Bead: It's a potion
• Contagion: Inflict a disease on subject, such as Frost Fever, Blood Boil, or Shadow Plague.
• Anti-magic Touch: Dispel touched spell, or ready an action to counter a spell affecting you.
• Animorph: Subject is transformed into an ordinary animal.
• Animate Object

Rank 2

• Blood Nova: At-will, std, ranged; subject becomes the center of a close burst 2 inflicting disease damage equal to the amount of HP the subject is missing. Subject themself is not affected.
• Outbreak: As Contagion, but multiple diseases at once.
• Ring of Fire: Circle blocks magic
• Death and Rebirth: Resurrect someone by killing someone else.
• Pestilence
• Hemophilia: Subject suffers ongoing bleed damage whenever they suffer slashing or piercing damage.
• Anti-magic Zone: Magic is less effective in the zone, depending on the zone's size
• Alteration: Subject is transformed into another humanoid form, gains unusual abilities such as swim speed, disguise as someone specific, etc.
• Transubstantiate: change object's composition

Rank 3

• Ironguard: Metal weapons can't hurt you.
• Frozen Blood: Lose all the HP you want with no consequences (until the spell ends)
• Anti-magic Wall: Magic is dispelled if it crosses the line
• Polymorph

Rank 4

• Anti-magic Field

Black Magic

Rituals

Rank 1

Necromancy

• Reanimation: Turns fresh corpose into simple undead under your control.
• Malevolence: Aura enhances undead allies, causes debilitation to living enemies.
• Corpse Explosion: Target corpse explodes; other corposes it hits may also explode. Can explode undead targets, friend or foe.
• Death Sight: See through the eyes of a corpse or undead creature.

Death

• Necrotic Touch: Negative energy touch attack inflicts one of:
  • Buncha necrotic damage, absorbs healing
  • Shadow's Grasp: disadvantage to Str attacks/damage
  • Ghoul Touch: paralysis
  • etc

Rank 2

Necromancy

• Command Undead: Take command of targeted undead creature. Reversed: frees undead creature from domination of another.
• Necrosis: Subject sprouts undead limb which uses subject's abilities as you direct.
• Plague Bolt: At-will, std, ranged; for each disease on subject, inflicts that disease's periodic effect immediately (minimum light disease damage).

Death

• Death and Decay: At-will, std, circle 2; on turn start, enemies suffer light necrotic damage. Concentration.

Rank 3

Necromancy

Death

• Hasten Death: At-will, std, ranged; any harmful ongoing effect on subject instantly procs for up to 5 rounds of remaining duration. Can also force death saves.

Rank 4

Necromancy

Death

• Grudge: At-will, std, ranged; target suffers necrotic damage equalt to all damage they've inflicted on you and your allies in the encounter.

Rank 5

Necromancy

Death

• Malleus Maleficarum: Inflicts ability damage equal to 100% of each of subject's six abilities (each allows a save for half)

Old Stuff

Witch

They do thaumaturgy.

Attribute	Value
Attack	0.5 per level
Magic	1 per level
Hit Points	2 per level
Skills	4 per level
Fortitude	0.5 per level
Reflex	0.5 per level
Willpower	1 per level

Class Features

Feature	Description
Thaumaturgy	The ability to cast spells using sympathetic magic
Felicity	Perks related to the understanding of magic
Chroma	Ups and downs of the sympathetic nature of magic

Class Features

Thaumaturgy

Witches use Thaumaturgy (often, quite incorrectly, referred to as "Witchcraft"), a form of magic based on the understanding of the Sympathy Principle. To greatly simplify, the Sympathy Principle holds that, metaphysically, all creatures and objects have a magical essence that suffuses their existence. Thus, a small part of a creature or object is, magically speaking, indelibly and irrevocably part of the larger whole. A common technique exploiting this principle is the Phylactery--a magical device constructed of various materials, most crucially a "sympathetic component", or a literal piece of the subject's physical essence (e.g. a sample of a creature's physical body such as hair, skin, or blood), which, thanks to the Sympathy Principle, allows a Thaumaturgist to conduct magic upon the subject using the phylactery as a proxy, for it is magically "the same" as the subject themselves, even if said subject is many miles away, behind protective wards, etc.

Thaumaturgists understand and respect the fundamental nature of magic, described as Chroma (see below), a system which equates the morality of one's magic use to a color on a spectrum, setting expectations accordingly. Magic, according to Thaumaturgists, has an inherently moral nature, and a tendency to balance itself, according to laws greater than any mortal practitioner and not even necessarily beholden to any divine beings. A common--but incorrect--appelation for this is the Threefold Law: the idea that misuse of magic leads to retribution upon the caster three times greater than the offense. Not only would Thaumaturgists counter that this does not represent balance--only a hypothetical Onefold Law would do so--but would clarify that it isn't even Magic itself that obeys this law. According to mainstream Thaumaturgical understanding, the entire cosmos obeys this principle--the applicability to practitioners is only that they are generally able to commit far more impactful good or evil through their workings than their mundane counterparts. Furthormore, they would emphasize that the Universe is not some logical, mechanical judge that declares one act "evil" and sentences the accused to a specific equal-and-opposite punishment. It is quite evident the Universe does not work this way. Rather, that all life and all things are connected through a cosmos-wide network of cause-and-effect, and those with the choose to do good or evil are necessarily affecting the equilibrium of the Universe when they make that choice. The Universe, in kind, will act to keep the balance. This effect does not swiftly punish all evildoers, nor reward all selfless actors--but, in time, all moral decisions will reflect upon their makers, and when magic is involved, that timescale tends to be shorter.

Thus, Thaumaturgists tend to shy away from magicks that are overtly harmful. However useful they may, the certain knowledge that harmful consequences will soon retribute upon the practitioner tends to limit one's preference away from using such magic. Of course, people are inteligent and clever, and many workarounds have been invented over the years. So-called "black" witches take advantage of the fact that the tendency of nature to retribute malevolence upon bad actors tends to seek the worst offenders first, much as lightning seeks the conductor closest to the clouds, so they will happily throw harmful magic at a subject they know to have a darker Chroma than they themselves, counting on the cosmos to direct its retribution upon the evildoer before targeting them.

In any case, Thaumaturgists have many advantages related to their deep understanding of the Sympathy Principle and the Chromatic nature of magic, but have relative disadvantages, especiall in the area of directly harmful magic.

Powers available:

• list TBD, depending on the final power list. But basically:
  • Frost magic--a special case of elementalism where they pull energy from the environment
  • telepathy, mentalism, illusion, etc
  • core thaumaturgy, i.e. Blood
  • black magic, such as Death, Drain, Undeath
  • divinations that involve the Sympathy Principle
  • certain transmutations, especially Polymorph and similar magic

Felicity

tbd

notes:

• small chance for all spells to treat you as a "friend" (1% per level)
• can use light Chroma to heal or cleanse yourself, dark Chroma to curse enemies, all as immediates not requiring consciousness
• detect magic at will (needs some development b/c how does detect magic even work)

Chroma

Chroma is a concept that attempts to simplify the moral aspects of Thaumaturgy, and their consequences, into a simple spectrum that uses light and color as a metaphor. It is deliberately similar to the word "Karma", but that word is not used as how this system works is not at all how true Karma works according to the religious and philosophical beliefs that rightfully own the word.

In short, Chroma is a description of the moral value and consequence of any magic use, and subsequently the status of the practitioner using it. In game terms, Chroma is how Thaumaturges can access power levels beyond the minimal status quo afforded them at their level. The rules, in brief:

• Using magic to heal, defend, enhance, protect, etc creates "light" Chroma, shifting the caster's Chroma toward light.
• Using magic that harms, debilitates, inhibits, or causes distress creates "dark" Chroma, shifting the caster's Chroma toward dark.
• Magic that does both of the above in roughly equal measure is more or less neutral and does not shift the caster's Chroma.

When a caster's Chroma is sufficiently bright, they are likely to spontaneously suffer good fortune. This can manifest in almost any way--anything from good weather, to chancing upon positive discoveries or encounters, to being allowed to replace bad rolls amidst combat. When light Chroma manifests in this way, the caster's Chroma regresses toward neutral.

When a caster's Chroma is sufficiently dark, they are likely to spontaneously suffer ill fortune. This can manifest as unfortunate encounters, unlikely negative events happening seemingly at random, and, of course, penalties to combat rolls or failures to wield magic as desired. When dark Chroma manifests in this wy, the caster's Chroma regresses toward neutral.

Actual rules TBD

Talents

Felicity

• Clarity: You can perceive the flow of magic. All magical auras within your field of vision become visible, and you can instantly discern the identity and purpose of all effect corresponding to spells of your rank or lower from any list.
  • At rank 1, you detect the aura of illusion spells and can thus see invisible creatures. Your vision penetrates concealment within long range.
  • At rank 3, you can see the true form of any creature whose form is obscured by illusion, transmutation, or magic of any kind. You can detect alignment at will. You understand the purpose of spells of any rank. You know exactly what spells a creature in your sight is capable of casting.
  • At rank 5, you learn the keywords and weaknesses of magic spells. Your vision penetrates cover within long range.
• Ecstasy:
• Sympathy: You begin to fully realize how interconnected all life truly is, and begin to lose the distinction between yourself and all other creatures.
  • Against enemy spells and effects which discriminate between friend and foe, you gain resistance equal to 5% per level of Witch, as you become the "friend" of the caster. This can apply to traps and wards as well.
  • Whenever an enemy gains a beneficial effect or healing effect within medium range, you gain 5% per level of Witch of that effect, with 100% of the duration.