Did I give us an edge by unearthing forbidden knowledge?
Occultists scavenge the fringes of knowledge, unearthing secrets that polite society chose to bury. They belong to no sanctioned colleges and pledge themselves to no priesthoods. Instead, they collect bizarre curiosities and bargain with strange entities, assembling a personal archive of power from what others feared to touch.
Shrewd opportunism guides an occultist’s practice. They bind magic into eccentric trinkets, pulling spells from wildly different traditions as immediate necessity dictates. They place grim curses on those who cross them, harvesting vigor from defeated foes and reading omens in the dark. Where conventional scholars see madness, an occultist sees leverage.
Core Feats
Eldritch Invocations
Forbidden knowledge leaves its mark. The fragments you’ve gathered — half-remembered rites, names better left spoken aloud, diagrams that rearrange themselves when you look away — settle into you as eldritch invocations. You know a number of invocations equal to your Prowess, chosen from the list below, and can replace one with another when you take the Level Up downtime activity.
See in Darkness
You have Darkvision, and your sight pierces magical darkness as readily as ordinary darkness.
Read Any Writing
You can read and understand any written language.
Warded
You can spend 1 AP and mark 1-fatigue to gain the effect of the armor charm cast on yourself, without an upcast, treating your +CUNNING as your +SPELL if you don’t have one.
Beast-Tongue
You can spend 1 AP to gain the effect of the speak with animals charm cast on yourself, without an upcast.
That same forbidden lore lets you turn a creature’s own fate against it. Spend 1 AP and mark 3-fatigue to lay a curse on a creature you can see for 1 minute. You can do this a number of times equal to your Prowess, and recover all spent uses as part of your daily preparations. While the creature is cursed:
you add your Prowess to your damage rolls against it;
your attack rolls against it score a critical hit on a strong hit;
when it dies, you gain temporary hit points equal to your +CUNNING.
The curse ends early if the cursed creature dies or you fall unconscious.
You’re proficient with light armor.
Esoteric Spellcasting
Your magic isn’t born in you or drilled into you—it’s gathered. You hunt down occult trinkets, study them until they give up their stories, and coax the magic sleeping inside into waking. You call these trinkets your esoterica, and a caster’s whole art, for you, is laying hands on the right one at the right moment. Your spellcasting ability is +CUNNING. You’re proficient with jeweler’s tools.
You begin knowing a total number of domains and non-rare charms castable with those domains equal to +SPELL plus your Prowess plus 3, each drawn from any spell list—your magic answers to no single tradition.
You don’t ready your esoterica ahead of time. You have a charm pool equal to +SPELL plus 2, and the first time each day you cast a charm you know, it takes a place in your charm pool. Once your charm pool is full, you can only cast what’s in it. You can reset your charm pool as part of your daily preparations.
You add to your esoterica during downtime. Take the Work on a Project activity to uncover where a new trinket lies, and take it again to decode how the magic bound in it is roused; completing both teaches you a domain or charm of your choice from any spell list, on the same terms as those you already know.