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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 6990251" data-attributes="member: 32659">Absorb Elements is such a great spell, it wouldn't be amiss to just give it to every caster that you want to appear tough.------The Hobgoblins get a pair of new entries in Volo’s that demonstrate their unique approach to some of the traditional fantasy roles. The Hobgoblin Devastator is their wizard, a blunt instrument of arcane power used to blast apart enemy formations. <img src="http://pathfinderwiki.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/7/7c/Hobgoblin_firebrand.jpg/250px-Hobgoblin_firebrand.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />The image in the book is really great, and one of my favourite. With a similar Japanese aestetic to the ones in the Monster Manual, the Devastator has a very characterful image, with loads of little tokens hanging on his chest, a cloak tied around his shoulders, and a haughty, cruel expression. I’d use this as the basis for an NPC in an instant. The flavour text tells us that the Hobgoblins regard arcane magic as a tool, not a form of study and self-growth. One wonderful idea illustrates this: a warrior doesn’t need to know metallurgy to swing a sword, so neither does a wizard need to know how magic works to cast fireball. Another interesting insight into the Hobgoblin mind is that the Devastator is shown great respect by others, with their exploits likely to win greater glory than any one warrior - the Hobgoblins don’t take the view that swinging a sword is somehow better than casting a spell, unlike the martial culture of Frost Giants and Uthgart Barbarians, for example. Much of this is more interesting for the insights into the Hobgoblin mindset as a whole, than into the Devastator himself; but the Hobgoblins are a very easy race to make into a neutral bad-guys-but-we-can-work-with-them faction in your campaign, and if so then you can use one or more of these as great recurring NPCs, just using the ideas present here. The Devastator has a statblock that will look very familiar to anyone who has DMed for an Evoker Wizard. They get a bunch of top-tier combat spells - Fireball, Thunderwave, Fly, Fire Bolt and Lightning Bolt - and an improved version of an Evoker’s Sculpt Spells ability, here called Army Arcane. This lets them really toss the fireworks around without worrying about spell placement, and I am confident that players will really hate seeing that ability used against them. A further nasty trick is that the Devastator can add bonus damage to a spell if there is an ally in melee range of the target - it doesn’t work on everyone, just one person per turn, but it is still very nasty. I’m a big fan of the spellcaster statblocks in Volo’s, since I think that they have a lot of cool tricks without being overbearing, and they use the spell lists to create very cool themes for the combat. This guy is great, and definitely a reason to bring Hobgoblins into your mid-level campaign, as they act as a huge force multiplier for normal Hobgoblins, not to mention their utility as ‘boss monsters’ who can reasonably be encountered in groups. Sent from my iPad using <a href="http://r.tapatalk.com/byo?rid=93205" target="_blank">EN World mobile app</a></blockquote>

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