Lingering Innovations: Warlocks and Witches (And Sorcerers)

Going back to Second Edition again, its pretty easy to find the precursors to the Sorcerer and Warlock class in the Player's Option: Spells and Magic book. I'm strongly in favor of the Wizard, Sorcerer, and Warlock being core classes in the new D&D. I'm concerned, however, that an emphasis on the four 'core' classes might lead to the downplay of non vancian wizards.

For the first two decades of its existence, D&D hasn't been too keen on accepting alternative magic styles. The rules give us casters who memorize (or later prepare) their spells for the day, and that's basically true until a few innovations in second edition, like the runecaster from the Vikings sourcebook (later redone as a Totem-Sister in Elves of Evermeet and again as a runecaster in Giantcraft). We saw a couple alternatives like the Sha'ir and Ghul Lord from the Al-Qadim line and the later Shaman product, but the core of spellcasting in D&D has always been fire-and-forget magic.

Spells and Magic focuses, like so much of second edition, on world building. There's a wealth of character options there, but it didn't seem to occur to the authors that one might mix and match their channellers (sorcerers?) with the magic systems for witches and warlocks or alienists (basically infernal pack and star pact warlocks). The assumption is that the wizard class works one way in any campaign world, but providing distinct mechanisms for arcane magic (and similarly for divine magic) as distinct classes seems like the plan. It even now has a bit of a history in D&D.

Now, channelers don't quite equate to the modern D&D sorcerer, but that's a relatively minor difference. Technically, they could be studious scholars who channel powerful forces too. What I'd still like to see in future editions, however, are options so that one could create a campaign setting so that we have magic users who use these distinct types of magic (or possibly more). This is what my friends and I did in our Rule of Law setting. There were two arcane caster classes, so they represent different magical factions in the game. But that was the essence of the extravagance that was second edition: world building.

The d20 Conan game does this in the opposite way, where the scholar class could represent someone trained in a religious tradition, an apprentice to a dark master, warlock-style pact magic, or an independent scholar just trying to make his own way. But doing this as one broad class loses out on some of the specialization: no longer can a scholar really seek out and pick from an vast array of spells limited only by the page-count and the author's imaginations, as with traditional wizards in D&D. I don't think we'll see one simple and broad magic user class in the new edition, so I'd like to see the studious wizard complemented by an intuitive or innate casting sorcerer and the pact-forging warlock. From there I'd still like to see something customizeable with each one, but I'd be quite happy to retain school specialization for wizards, thematic bloodlines for sorcerers, and pacts for warlocks.

I don't think 4th edition quite captured the magic-style distinction with the late explosion of wizard sub-classes and other arcane classes (swordmage, bard, and artificer). Some of this is due to the fact that the designers set up wizards and sorcerers and swordmages as distinct classes from the beginning, instead of the later resource-sharing builds. Ritual casting was close, but it didn't quite work for me that wizards could regularly summon demons or conjure up fireballs but spells for excavating a pit were costly and rare. I'd always wished WotC had somehow build each power source with its own powers, so there was a set of powers that the arcane classes all shared (as well as a similar set for martial and divine classes). I think their sub-class system might have worked out better than my idea in some ways, but I didn't really feel like the recent witch class really warranted existence, and the Sha'ir seems like it could have easily been a warlock build. Though I was also disappointed that the Sha'ir didn't resemble the old Al-Qadim kit as much as I wanted it to anyway. My homebrew version would have had the gen familiar fetching rituals as well

In a generic D&D Next (as opposed to a specific Al-Qadim type setting), I'm pretty strongly in favor of three magician-type classes: the studious wizard, innate/intuitive sorcerer/sorceress, and pact-forging warlock/witch. The names could be flexible, but those three magical methods might deserve to be distinct classes. Specialist casters, like the Elementalist, Illusionist or Necromancer, can still be class-features of some kind that could apply to any type of these three classes: we can easily imagine a studious wizards who focuses on the ship and sea magic, a fey-blooded sailor who's draws on the strength of the sea itself, or a witch who's made a pact with a Marid or sea deamon for power. The issue here is that individual DMs or campaign settings should also limit the types of casters as needed. Maybe the birthright setting assumes that powerful casters are sorcerers and wizards are impoverished magicians who aren't blooded. Or dwarven innate magic-resistance limits them so that can't be sorcerers.

If WotC handles multiclassing well in the new edition, particularly between these three magic-style archetypes, I'll be happy. We'll be able to have multiclass sorcerer/wizards who studiously study to gain new spells but channel that powerful magic by the power of their innate bloodline, unlike 3.5 which requires strange prestige classes to do decent (if often underpowered without the early entry feat tricks) multiclass spellcasters. Here's to hoping.