#jinkin

On the left is the Jinkin! These little gremlins are 2 ft (61 cm) sadistic trap making fey. They hold grudges and like capturing people for days as they taunt and torment them. If a group get together they can also curse an item within 60 feet. Make it unreliable, add a bizarre requirement to use it, petty stuff like that. Oh, and they have prestidigitation, which is a spell normally used to write things and clean up messes, but they just use it to make messes and shift little objects around.

(art by Ruavell on DeviantArt)

 It’s been a bit since we did anything with Second Edition, and this one gives me mixed feelings due to my “favorite” hangup about 2E, the transitional friction between First and Second Edition.

As I’m sure you all remember, almost all spellcasting in 1E followed two styles, being prepared and spontaneous casting. The former typically had a wider variety of spells the owner to have, but they had to prepare individual slots, while spontaneous casters have a more limited pool of spells, but more spell slots. You know, classic Vancian Magic.

The one exception to this was the arcanist hybrid class, which had a spellbook, but prepared their spells as a list of “spells known” which they could cast spontaneously throughout the day using their slots. It was a fun little experiment and proved a nice way to combine the day to day flexibility of having a large list of spells known with the instance to instance flexibility of not having to save a spell slot for the right moment because it was your one casting of a specific spell.

And apparently it was popular enough that this style of casting returned in the form of today’s archetype, the flexible spellcaster!

Applicable only to classes with prepared casting, such as wizards, clerics, druids, and witches (and any other prepared casters they introduce at a later date), this archetype is one of those caster-only options that you technically take at first level before you take the dedication feat at second (understandable, but a noticeable seam in the way that 2E handles archetypes), and modifies your spellcasting progression slightly, limiting your normal amount of spells per day but giving you a broad pool of “collection” spaces that you fill with spells from you repertoire each day.

Note that this does not effect bonus spell slots from your specialization such as a cleric’s domain or a wizard’s school specialization. Additionally, the archetype comes with a caveat on certain class feats that are no longer applicable with this archetype.

All of this leads to what it is that gives me mixed feelings about the archetype. Because, on the one hand it puts the ability to flexibly cast spells in the hands of every spellcasting tradition. On the other, it means that the arcanist class itself is likely never going to come back, the whole concepts of bending and breaking conventions of magic through experimentation and exploits becoming something describing the flavor of your caster character, rather than something mechanical. But then, I suppose one could argue that as the pathfinder setting evolves, perhaps those innovators of the first edition spread their innovations over that 10 year period, changing casting significantly, making these dangerous innovators simply another part of traditional wizardry.

That being said, I probably shouldn’t be too upset, since Pathfinder as a setting is set to change again this year with their new core books and changes to the setting. Anyway, back to the archetype!

 The dedication feat, such as it is, simply grants the spellcaster more cantrips they can prepare each day, which given how cantrips level up with you in second edition, is a nice bonus alongside the flexibility of their spellcasting in exchange for the number of spell slots.

Easily one of the simplest archetypes, having only one feat, this archetype sells itself on making a prepared caster into a more flexible spontaneous caster. While they lack the spell slots of most spontaneous casters, they retain the ability to prepare their spells at any available level, not having to learn new versions of the same spell just to cast a fireball that deals more damage or summon a better monster. This benefit can make them very attractive to some players, should they dislike the way both prepared and spontaneous casters normally play. Keep in mind, however, that certain classes might have abilities that interact with prepared spells or spell slots that may not mesh perfectly with this archetype, either becoming useless, or at GM discretion, replaced by some other ability.

 While we’re already familiar with what flexible casters are supposed to represent from an arcane tradition, but what about other mystical disciplines? What makes a cleric ask their deity for flexible spellcasting? Are their druidic circles that reflect on the specialization of life by electing to cast a few spells several times? Do witches sometimes have patrons that seek to teach them to use spells in a flexible manner?

  Discarded by his fleshcrafting creators as a failure, Maxix discovered that he had a talent for magic, though his self-taught style makes his spellcasting seem sloppy to the classically trained. Now, he has set himself up as an authority figure in the Drain, the polluted undercity of his home.

 The ways of druidcraft are ancient and long-standing, but nature is ever-evolving, and occasionally primal magic evolves too. Such was the case when Eila discovered how to cast her magic in a more flexible way after watching the innate magics of a gang of jinkin gremlins.

On the left is the Jinkin! These little gremlins are 2 ft (61 cm) sadistic trap making fey. They hold grudges and like capturing people for days as they taunt and torment them. If a group get together they can also curse an item within 60 feet. Make it unreliable, add a bizarre requirement to use it, petty stuff like that. Oh, and they have prestidigitation, which is a spell normally used to write things and clean up messes, but they just use it to make messes and shift little objects around.

 While there are certainly subtle ways to perform acts of sabotage, resulting in the destruction of an enemy’s assets in such a way that they might not even notice until it’s too late, today is not a day that we are looking at such an option.

This is yet another alchemist archetype focused on sabotage and object destruction with the help of specialized explosives, however, unlike other archetypes in the same vein, this one tries to also make their specialized techniques still effective against living targets.

In this way, the alchemical sapper is not just a saboteur of equipment and material assets, but also a disrupter and slayer of personnel both key otherwise, which makes them also something of assassins in a way.

Regardless, these bombers can do a lot of damage in the right situation.

 Focused as they are on explosives, these saboteurs put less time into mastering their extracts, giving them less to work with in that regard.

They do, however, learn to make an especially potent fragmentation bomb that is twice as potent as their standard fare with strong fragmentation as well, not to mention the ability to break objects quite easily. However, the essence focus and ingredients needed for them mean they can only create a small handful of them each day from their normal stock.

Naturally, they also learn the art of setting up bombs with fuses to set them up to explode later quite early as well.

As one might expect, these alchemists are quite familiar with the makings of structures and devices, all the better to bring them down.

The best traps are the ones that an enemy never sees, and when placing a bomb to explode later, these bombers know where to place them and how to cover them to make them difficult to notice.

By expending more components, these alchemists can set up relatively stable bombs that remain viable until triggered by a nearby foes, creating a sort of basic trip mine which can even be one of their demolition bombs, albeit for an large increase in components.

Naturally, friendly fire is a common concern for sappers (or at least, it should be), and these alchemists are sure to thoroughly warn their allies on where their bombs are set and how to avoid triggering them, even if they step within proximity of the trigger.

A neat idea for a bomber alchemist that focuses on not just blowing up structures, but also on being viable against foes as well, this may prove useful to those interested. The fact they get to turn a handful of their bombs into bigger and badder explosives is icing on the cake, because what you’ll really be excited about is those times you can rig a bomb to blow at just the right moment to surprise foes and bring down their assets. These alchemists gain less extract slots than others though, so you should pick your extracts known based on practical, useful options for your build, particularly stuff that lasts a long time, though some form of bomb admixture would not go remiss. Regardless, unless you later pick up mutagen or cognatogen, you’re likely playing this archetype as a stealthy long-range support.

 It’s somewhat ironic that in actual military terminology, a sapper is someone that actually builds up structures and destroys explosives in addition to the inverse as we are seeing now. If you’d like, you could build and describe your character to also be in the business of building fortifications and bridges for armies, as well as saving lives by clearing paths through engineered and natural hazards.

  Lacking the proper armaments to combat a bombardment by sea, Mayor Goldram has come up with a cunning strategy to cripple the invading naval force. By hiring a crew of cecaelian sappers, she plans on dropping the city’s docks down into the water below with a well-timed series of explosions, just as the invader’s marines are marching up them.

 Taking their name for the chaos-causing fey, Gremlin Squad is infamous among the forces of the Empire for their knack in causing ruin and sabotage amongst the military and industrial sectors. However, the guerilla squadron has problems of their own, as an actual jinkin gremlin has decided to adopt the group, and has it’s own ideas about how best to go about their “fun”.