Occultist

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.

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 begin knowing 3 cantrips and a number of charms equal to twice your Prowess, each drawn from any spell list — your magic answers to no single tradition. The charms must be non-rare and usable with a cantrip you know.

You don’t prepare your esoterica ahead of time. The first time each day you cast a cantrip or charm you know, it becomes prepared. You can have at most 2 cantrips prepared and a number of charms prepared equal to your Prowess; once you hold that many, you can cast only what is already prepared. As you gather more esoterica you may come to know more cantrips than you can prepare, but you never have more than 2 prepared at once. Your prepared esoterica reset 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 cantrip or charm of your choice from any spell list, on the same terms as those you already know.

When you take this feat, gain a talent related to the occult, and gain expertise in that talent.