A few points:
Cabal Leader and Ritual Adept are inconsistent as to how many particpants there may be in a ritual spell. Ritual Adept implies the normal number is 1 per 10 ranks of spellcraft, and Cabal Leader says the normal number 1 per 5 ranks.
I can see what you're thinking - the feat is badly worded.The normal number is 1 per 5 ranks, Ritual Adept allows 1 extra per 5 ranks (i.e. a total of 2 per 5 ranks).
The mitigating factor for increased casting time says the base casting time is 1 minute. That should be 1 standard action, right?
Yep. Good catch.
I'm wondering if the 5000 xp cost for non-divine use of the Heal seed is too high. Heal is 5th level on the adept spell list, and so limited wish can access it. The 5000 xp seems an allusion to the use of wish, but that amount of experience corresponds to a -20 mitigating factor. That seems too high. Ditto for the harm based application of the Harrow seed.
The original system allows no arcane use of
heal at all - I wanted to keep a relative divine monopoly without barring arcane casters altogether. I'd pegged
heal (the spell, not the seed) at 6th: I didn't even consider adepts, though. The buggers already screw with my cabal rules based on Leadership. The 5000xp is based directly off of
wish.
I'm inclined to keep it in place for the time being, even though adepts are core. They're anomalous anyway (they don't get 5th level spells until 16th level). And I'd be pretty leery of letting an arcane caster cast
heal with a
limited wish: it's already got pretty sweeping powers. It seems kind of backdoor-ish. You've got a point, though.
A few of the base spells used in seeds have long casting times and/or expensive material components. Have you thought about modifying the spellcraft prerequisite in compensation?
Yes. I opted for simplicity in the end, and decided on the 5K xp as suitably appropriate/symbolic. I'd have to increase the Spellcraft Prerequisite of a number of other seeds (
contact, summon (usually 1 round)) etc. +2 for
summon is piddling, and I felt that I'd have to draw a line somewhere - it was just a question of where. And would
summon be a +2 (because it has 1 round casting time) or +1 (because you can use
limited wish = 250xp) to emulate it? I'd also have to retrofit
polymorph as the
dragonshape spell has a casting time of 1 swift action - therefore
polymorph would have a Spellcraft Prerequisite of 20 instead of 28: this is addressed partially by the fact that a mature adult has a CR of 18, and the seed allows CRs of up to 20. There again, dragons are notorious for having lower CRs than they actually deserve..
So no modifiers to Spellcraft Prerequisite based on the casting time of the root spell, cost of material components, or XP (except initially with
heal and life; harrow came later and call later still). I've been sceptical about the 1000 XP for call, but I like the idea of there always being an xp cost for this one, no matter how you mitigate.
Right now, though, I'm thinking of retooling summon off of summon monster iX: it might prove more pliable.
could you give an example where the +2/+1 rate for an intelligence buff would be broken?
Maybe I'm just paranoid about the fortify seed. It might scale better than I think. Ritual mitigation has been reduced as well (-1 per spell level), and that was my biggest concern. Frankly, I was at my wit's end with this seed for a whole variety of reasons. I tried splitting it (into augment and fortify) and heaven knows what else.
BTW, fortify should be a Transmutation effect, not an Abjuration. That's a copy/paste error.
Having a somewhat underpowered Energy seed might not be such a bad idea. It would indicate that the seed system is a more flexible system, but not always the best tool for a situation.
I don't know that I agree with this, and I think it's been used in the past to justify a vastly underpowered energy seed. It really needs to be competitive with metamagicked nonepic spells, especially if the epic caster is investing in feats designed to lower the Spellcraft Prerequisite for various things: this means he is not taking Intensify Spell, Multispell etc. And you're paying in time and resources to develop epic spells. As I say, I'd ideally like to split it into five seeds (I've been too lazy to think about it, though).
.
