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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 4505387" data-attributes="member: 29746">Divine ResearcherAs I've mentioned elsewhere, both games I now run are divine-level, and we've been busy little beavers coming up with ways to get things to work together and run well. Now, some of what we've come up with wouldn't work well in any game but ours, but other things would work very well. I've been meaning to share the latter on here, but haven't gotten around to it; with this post I begin rectifying that lack of effort.This ability came up because my game features four locations/edifices that were built by mysterious ancient beings predating the current cosmos- they could be Sidereals/Overgods, or they could be some prior (and now-vanished) race/cycle of Immortals. One of the four, the Obsidian Tower, was the inspiration for the rest; I got it from a brief notation in the Planescape book The Inner Planes discussing a site in the Quasielemental Plane of Minerals called the Tower of Lead. For my own game I changed its material to Obsidian, and set it up in a different location of the plane, as well as detailing exactly what it does (which the original note about the Tower of Lead does not- it just says that inside it is a really great forge). Now, when Ascension came along, there was an interesting case of serendipity: the Obsidian Tower's special Forge grants its user crafting ability which the power Divine Architect almost exactly duplicates.As I said, there are four of these in my cosmos, based on the Obsidian Tower as an original, and one of the other three proved to be a very popular visit for casters in my games who heard about it. That location, placed in the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance, is called the Dark Lens, and it is postulated to do for spell and psionic power research what the Obsidian Tower does for item crafting. This naturally led my players, once they started crossing the line to divinity and reading through all the nifty stuff Ascension could let them have, to ask: If we can get Divine Architect to more or less carry the Obsidian Tower with us, why can't we do the same for the Dark Lens? To this I essentially replied: No reason, and thus the ability detailed below was born.Divine ResearcherYou can discover new spells faster than others.Prerequisites: Automatic Writing, INT 40, Spellcraft 40 ranks.Benefit: Your spell research times are measured in hours rather than days.Normal: It takes a character one week per level of the spell to research a sub-Epic spell, or one day (rounded up to the nearest whole day) for each 50,000 gp in resources required to develop an Epic spell.For psionicists, we obviously changed the skill requirement to Psicraft 40 ranks, but we kept the Automatic Writing prerequisite- with the understanding that the following change would be made to Automatic Writing to make it useful for casters besides Wizards:Automatic WritingAny spell you see in action is automatically written down for you.Prerequisites: INT 25, Scribe Scroll.Benefit: Whenever you see a spell in operation, either in the act of casting or its ongoing effects, you are able to immediately write that spell into your spellbook (you must still have available blank pages and resources for writing the spell- if you do not then you lose the opportunity to write it). If you do not use a spellbook, you instead may instantly scribe a scroll containing that spell (you still pay the gold and XP cost as normal).The psionic version of this would of course require Imprint Stone instead of Scribe Scroll, and allow you to get a powerstone of an observed power rather than a scroll (or spellbook write) of an observed spell.Interestingly, despite having this ability available, only one player has actually taken it so far, though this is no doubt in part due to the fact that all the party's casters know where the Dark Lens is and can thus go there at will. As mortals, they were scared to use the sites too often or for too long because of the fearsome Guardians that lurk around the sites; however, as deities they have seen enough of the Guardians to not have much reason anymore to fear them.</blockquote>

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