Class Feature Friday: Shadow Discipline (Psychic Discipline)
(art by Silinde-Ar-Feiniel on DeviantArt)
The neat thing about the disciplines for the psychic class is that each one, at it’s core, is a way for the psychic to focus their powers, which in turn influences what sort of spells they learn.
And today’s entry focuses on those that contemplate the nature of reality and illusions through the lens of shadow magic!
As many of you know, the plane of shadow blurs the line between what is real and what is illusion, a blurring between imagination and reality in a place of eternal gloom. And that blurring is no doubt very fascinating to certain scholars and psychics alike. By honing their senses peering into such realms, today’s subject gains a fundamentally deeper understanding of these mysteries, which allow them to call upon those quasi-real shadows to aid them, becoming masters of the gloom while their foes feel alone in the dark.
While these psychics draw upon many of the same shadow magics, they may boast and understanding of the shadow and light, and the blurry line between, better than even other shadow-casters, so let’s take a look!
The spells this discipline is associated with range from distorting their own appearance when moving, inflicting others with light blindness, creating darkness, short and long-range shadow teleportation, replicating evocation spells with shadow magic, and blasting foes with icy cold darkness as either a bolt or as a freezing cold zone of twilight.
But the spellcasting does not end there, for these shadowy psions can also cast the spells associated with the Darkness domain in a limited capacity, once per each spell level. These range from obscuring fogs, inflicting blindness, creating darkness, invoking both conjurations and evocations of shadow at various levels, summoning undead shadows, and long-range shadow travel. What’s more, using these domain spells actually lets them draw power from the act, regaining a bit of their phrenic power.
Wrapping light and shadow around themselves, these energies actually physically protect the psychic when they are concealed at least partially from their foes, providing even greater protection.
Additionally, the shadows help conceal them from notice as well, making them harder to see when in darkness.
This discipline grants your typical shadow-based stealth and concealment powers, but the fact that you get spells from both the discipline itself and a domain (the latter albeit in a limited capacity), and that both include various shadow illusions means that these psychics boast surprising versatility with their casting in addition to blinding and befuddling foes with darkness. With their ability to conceal and damage covered, this also allows you to pick your spells and amplifications pretty freely for whatever sort of build you want beyond shadow magic.
It's tempting to go with some sort of edgelord build with this and other shadow-themed options, and those are perfectly fine if they make you happy. However, remember that you can do any personality with any power set. Imagine a plucky shadowmancer that fears nothing, or the artist that paints with shadow as others do with color.
Descended as they are from nocturnal predators, it should come as no surprise that some gnolls have a knack for shadow magic, but Whissat is different, seeming to tap into the shadows as an extension of their body and will. They seem to be on the fast track to becoming a mighty ruler of the tribe, but they are as of yet untested.
Tizana of the New Moon is sinister even by moon hag standards, for her prophecies always contain precise details of demise and death. However, her most recent prognostication has revealed that her own doom is nigh, at the hands of one with a mind of light and shadow: the party’s own psychic. In an ironic fit of pique, she seeks to prevent her own demise, which only puts her in the party’s notice when she sends leng hounds to destroy them.
Deep in the shadow plane, a machine intelligence from an ancient facility slowly goes mad from centuries of isolation and the unreality surrounding them. However, it’s dreams have begun to reach mortal minds, awakening some to newfound psychic power over the shadow and a calling to the complex once lost to that realm.
