Derulbaskul said:
Are you familiar with the Midnight setting?
I've heard of it, but I wouldn't call myself familiar with it.
If so, Midnight uses Heroic Paths, basically a supplemental set of special abilities gained over 20 levels reflecting some sort of heroic archetype. Since seeing this, I have been wondering whether this might be an option for statting up wild talents in a manner that more or less captures the Dark Sun flavour without being too unbalancing at 1st level.
Sounds neat. I'll consider that. Another idea that struck me today (OUCH!) is to use a variant of the magic system in Wheel of Time (another book I don't have). As I understand it, there are a bunch of different things you can do with magic, and then you can use different spell levels in order to get effects of varying degree. Maybe something like this:
Telekinesis
0th level: Lift an object weighing a few pounds and move it around slowly (basically,
far hand)
1st level: Lift an object that weighs about 20 pounds and move it around as fast as you can walk (basically,
unseen servant).
(some intermediate steps)
5th level: As per the
telekinesis spell.
(some more steps)
If you combine something like that with power points, I think you could get a rather neat psionics system. High-level psions would only be able to do a couple of different things, but they'd do them well. Many of the powers in the PsiHB are already the same thing at different levels (e.g. the Concussion powers), so it probably wouldn't be
that hard to do.
Oh, and you could have it where certain powers had other powers as prerequisites. Concussion could require Telekinesis, for example (learn to move stuff around before you go around throwing TK punches).
Anyway, here is a list of prestige classes that I pulled out of the 2E books which may (or may not!) be of assistance:
[list snipped]
Thanks! Prestige classes will be left for later - the regular classes are trouble enough. But when that time comes, I'll be sure to take your list into account. Some of them probably work best with regular feat selections (I like to keep prestige classes prestigious and not use them for
everything), but others look like decent candidates for prestige classes.