A Wooded and Noble Class Pt. 2: The E6 Gaelic Witch

Continuing the series on the classes of my E6 psuedo-Gaelic campaign. Read more about it here.

Gaelic Witch
The witch is the worker of magics that are subtle, deceitful, and weird. A blindness/deafness cast by a saint might blind the target with a bright, searing shaft of light from the sky, or deafen them with fanfare of angelic trumpets. The same spell cast by a witch, however, might blind someone by turning their eyelids into long, droopy flesh-curtains, or deafen someone with the constant whispers of the dead.

A witch gets her powers from a Hellcrown. All the Hellcrowns (one for each witch patron) are malignant, fickle, and abstruse. To enter into a pact with a Hellcrown, a witch must either be an active and devout worshiper of her Hellcrown, or make a deal with one (which means repaying the debt at some point. And Hellcrowns take debts very seriously.) Each night the witch's familiar disappears and travels to the witch's patron Hellcrown; in the morning, the familiar returns with spells for the witch. A displeased Hellcrown will never refuse to give a witch spells for the day, but would gleefully twist the spells into warped versions with undesirable consequences.

Custom Witchery
These changes to the witch are mostly non-mechanical. To make up for it, have some witch spells--one of each level.

Door Speak
School divination
Level witch 1
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components Verbal
Range personal
Target touch
Duration 1 min./level
Door speak allows you to speak with doors. You can use this ability to persuade, trick, or bully doors into doing things for you (such as unlocking or locking, slamming in someone’s face, or sharing information about what’s on the other side). When you do so, roll your Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate (whichever is appropriate) plus your witch level against the Disable Device DC of the door (unlocked doors have a DC of 10, unlocked but stuck doors have a DC of 15). 

A door’s personality may effect what you can get from it. Newly constructed doors may be flighty, while a door in an ancient tomb is likely to be stubborn. Illusionary doors are often deceitful, and trapdoors are likely to pompous or submissive (depending on their physical relation to you).

Hair-Trust-Bond

School abjuration

Level witch 2

Casting Time 10 minutes

Components Verbal, Somatic, Focus (two bracelets of hair)

Range touch

Duration 1 week/level

Saving Throw Will (see text); Spell Resistance no

You take a length of hair from two willing target creatures, and weave them into two bracelets. After the spell is cast, you give each target one of the bracelets. If a target wearing one of the bracelets attempts to do harm (physical, mental, or social; directly or indirectly) to the other, they must make a Will save. If they succeed on the Will save, they are unable to complete the harmful action. If they fail the Will save, the harm that the action would have caused instead happens to the doer of the action. For example, if one of the targets attempted to stab the other and succeeded on their save, they would move to stab them, but be unable to follow through with the blow. If they failed the save, they would instead stab themself.

 

Only the wearer of a hair-trust-bond bracelet can remove it. If another tries, it immediately regrows on the wearer’s wrist. Removing a bracelet allows the target without a bracelet to be harmed by the other target, but not vice versa.

Dance of the Dead

School necromancy

Level witch 3

Casting Time 10 minutes

Components Verbal, Somatic, Material (a fiddle worth 500 gp and a communion wafer soaked in blood)

Range touch

Target dead creature touched

Duration instantaneous

Dance of the dead brings a semblance of life back to a dead body. During the casting of this spell, you play the fiddle and dance about the body of the deceased. At the completion of the spell, you jump over the body three times; after the third jump, the creature returns to life.

A creature raised with this spell is only a shell of its old self. Each of its mental scores are dropped to 2. It cannot speak. The creature acts upon base instincts (hunger, thirst, lust) and simplified versions of its old habits in life (a hero-warrior might attempt to fight anything that moves, while a drunk might down any liquid in sight).