Hey! Anyone remember how the War Mage is basically a mix of the Evocation and Abjuration schools of magic for wizards? If they moved the Spirits bard subclass to the Wizard, it could be a Necromancy/Divination based subclass, so we could actually have another subclasss that takes two schools of magic and merges them into one.
Anyone else like this idea? I personally wish they made more subclasses like this, that merge two schools of magic (Hypnotism from Illusion and Enchantment, Shadowfell from Illusion and Necromancy, Limbo-Mages from Conjuration and Transmutation, Fleshwarpers from Necromancy and Transmutation, etc).
You mean I could potentially make an Ace Attorney style Spirit Medium in 5e?
If that's the case then sign me up.
Y'know, that's not a bad idea. Find a theme for mixing up the spell schools, and turn those themes into subclasses for the Wizard.
Could even come with mixed school spells, if they want to play around with that idea. The simple rule for that would be "The count as both spell schools for purposes of the _____ Savant Wizard subclass features (reminder: they let you scribe spells of that school into your book in half the time and I believe price.) and for the purposes of Detect Magic".
Could certainly be played that way. That sounds cool.
Yeah. There are a lot of themes that could be explored beyond the current subclasses by doing this:
- Order of Magicians with Conjuration and Illusion, summoning doves and rabbits and performing illusions.
- Necroblaster (would need a better name) with Evocation and Necromancy, that shoots people with necrotic energy and uses souls of the deceased to attack others upon death.
- Phaser as Conjuration and Evocation, where you can cause attacks to go through solid objects and flesh, warping the space around you to give resistance to creatures for certain damages, etc.
- Transitor, Illusion and Transmutation to create objects that aren't really there, but can be interacted with, and so on.
There's a lot of ideas they could play with if they leaned more into this way of designing subclasses for wizards, starting with the Spirits bard becoming a wizard subclass (or having both).
I like the idea of using dual schools of magic to create a theme for a magical tradition. I've thought of a few different traditions (mostly just names) but spiritualist didn't occur to me. I think two of them might have been your hypnotism (mind-bender) and shadowfell (shadow). I like the sound of fleshwarper, makes me think of the Phyrexians from magic the gathering but with undead instead of mechanical pieces.
Honestly, I prefer "Beguiler" for the Enchantment/Illusionist option - it's got history via the 3.5e PHB 2 (and Ruty Rutenberg & team made a version of it in
Xanathar's Lost Notes going that exact way, as a mix of schools, though I'm not wedded to anything in guild content at this time).
I've thought about how Graviturgy and Chronurgy might actually be dual schools themselves, but they don't QUITE fit the mold when you look at each of their new spells that were designed for the traditions. In general though, Gravity magic is a mixture of transmutation and conjuration - making things heavier or lighter or summoning forces to weigh you down, like a freakin black hole. Chronurgy is in general Necromancy + Divination - you do the Doctor Strange thing and see multiple future pathlines (divination), plus you can age and kill things with time magic (necromancy).
Both of the schools have some evocations though, if I recall, and this gets back to my issue that several of the schools overlap in ways that don't really make sense as separate schools (Evocation and Conjuration are the most clear ones, but then there are necromancy spells that act more like evocations (finger of death) or act more like conjurations (animate dead) or more like divinations (speak with dead), etc, and there's heavy overlap between transmutation and enchantment and illusion and enchantment.
But this just gives us more options for dual school traditions.
So Necromancy + Illusion = Nethermancy (4e tradition for Essentials wizards), for example.
I'd love to see a tradition for each combo, plus other non-standard ones like the Bladesinger that take a bite out of other classes' ideas.
Wizard had the most subclasses out of the original book, but without going dual, it felt like it had the least room to grow (compare the similarly large PHB Cleric Domains list, where they could grow ad nauseum infinitum).