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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9131188" data-attributes="member: 27780">Living Greyhawk Journal 04: May 2001part 2/4Silent Sorcery: The introduction of sorcerers in 3e raises somewhat of a quandary in already existing settings where they’re used to all spellcasters needing spellbooks & study. They could ban them entirely, but that wouldn’t be pleasing to players who expect at least everything in the corebooks to be allowed. They could do a big metaplot event to introduce them. (which Dragonlance already has a head start on) They could say they’ve always been around, but only as a rare appearance or secret society that’s only now being revealed to the wider world. Or they could retcon it, convert some of the existing spellcasters to sorcerers and act like they were always there, fully integrated. Greyhawk is going for option 3. While they might have been around before wizards in the distant past, for the last few thousand years the more reliable and replicatable method of book learning has dominated.After that bit of general pontificating, most of this article is devoted to The Silent Ones, one of the largest and most ancient secret societies of sorcerers. Unsurprisingly, they have a prestige class that gives them access to Silent & Still spell as bonus feats in the first few levels, letting them use magic without seeming to do anything and mystify spellcasters who haven’t heard of metamagic feats yet. (or psionics) They’re also above average at messing with other people’s spells, gaining special powers that let them shut down magic items and copy a spell they’ve just seen someone else cast at higher levels. The mechanics make up a relatively small part of the article, with a good 8 pages devoted to their history, structure, relationships with other secret societies (unsurprisingly, the Scarlet Brotherhood hate them) and full stats for several of the high-up members. So this is one of the best examples so far of making prestige classes fully integrated into a setting and representing an exclusive group that you’ll need to find and get on the good side of to join, not just meeting a few prerequisite numbers on a character sheet. The ones in the DMG are pretty lacking on that front. The skill requirements will be a bit of a pain for a sorcerer to meet without at least one level of multiclass dipping, but since they gain full spellcasting progression plus a special ability every level they are definitely more powerful than just remaining a straight sorcerer, to about the same kind of degree as the Loremaster. It definitely seems worth the effort of integrating into your campaign.</blockquote>

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