Wizard Character Concept Academic

Wizard Character Concept Academic

Hunched over their thick tomes of knowledge, academics spend their days researching a wide range of esoteric subjects. These scholarly mages specialise in accumulating knowledge and uncovering forgotten facts, feasting on books and devouring their knowledge like a starving man at a banquet.

The Quintessential Wizard
Author Mike Mearls
Publisher Mongoose Publishing
Publish date 2002

While all wizards to one degree or another study the theory and history of the arcane arts, academics make it their passion, preferring a tome of lore to a book of powerful enchantments. To the academic, magic is a tool that facilitates his main end of accumulating knowledge, rather than a goal in and of itself.

Adventuring: Surprisingly, academics take well to a life of adventure. While they might seem far more comfortable and happy staying in their libraries and attending to their books, an ambitious academic knows that the best way to make a name for himself is to unearth an exciting find related to his field. For instance, a young researcher who finds an ancient tome describing several long-lost treatises on herbalism quickly leaps to the head of his field. Ambitious, young, or desperate academics are drawn to adventures for that chance of a once in a lifetime breakthrough. On adventures, an academic proves useful when exploring the ruins of an ancient civilisation, decoding forgotten runes, or analysing a puzzle or trap.

Role-Playing: Academics train in libraries, academies, and other civilised settings, leaving them well adjusted to the easy life of a sage or researcher. They tend to have many ideas that in theory should work, but in practice are not practical to implement. Some academics over-think problems, endlessly analysing a situation and becoming too caught up in hypotheses and ideas to determine a useful course of action. Academics also tend to be arrogant, as they expect others to live up to their standards for intellectual acuity and knowledge. However, some academics successfully combine their knowledge with a practical approach to situations, devising clever
and useful solutions to vexing problems that baffle others.

Bonuses: At 1st level, the academic gains the Skill Focus feat for any one Knowledge skill. In addition, the academic gains two skill ranks for each point he spends on a Knowledge skill. These two ranks may be spent on the same skill or may be split across two different ones. The academic can never violate the maximum allowable skill ranks with these bonus ranks. The academic may use the bonus feats granted by the wizard class to select Skill Focus for any Knowledge skill. In addition to the normal wizard class skills, the academic gains Decipher Script as a class skill.

Penalties: The academic must choose four Knowledge skills as his areas of specialisation and keep those skills at the maximum number of ranks allowed by his level. These Knowledge skills may be any topic other than arcana, nature, the planes, or religion. The academic’s obsession with topics other than magic, be it divine or arcane, is what sets him apart from the traditional wizard.