I have a Reborn Necromancer that is a children's entertainer. Zombies? They just joined our Friendship Circle! Toll of the Dead? You said today's magic word! Cause fear? We're sharing our emotions in a safe space!
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Typical T3feri behaviour.
I haven’t actually seen this being used, but since Hypnotic Pattern in DND5E can require a stick of incense as a component if you’re using spell components, I imagined someone casting that by twirling a thurible (incense burner on a chain) above their head, and somehow physically throwing the scent into the targeted area, and then a (mostly) harmless explosion of colorful, sparkly gas charms any affected targets through sheer fascination.
"That's not incense."
I love spells like this. The Animal Friendship spell component is "a morsel of food." Like damn, I guess I'm a wizard.
Yeah, you could easily reflavor component-requiring Animal Friendship as “just feeding the animal and somehow flawlessly avoiding harm”, just to make it ambiguous whether this is actually magic or just mundane.
I wish artificers were this instead of true casters.
Good news! The 5e Artificer is the perfect class for spell flavoring and it's actually written into their class description. From Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, page 11: 
Yes, but you're still affected by antimagic and whatnot. No matter how you flavor it, you're a true caster under RAW. This is the kind of thing that the old spell-like abilities from 3e would have been useful for.
Hot take: I can't stand the word "dunamancy". I don't care for critical role, so maybe it's justified somehow (or maybe just if someone I liked said it a lot I'd learn to let it go), but as it is, it hate it. It's not duna/dyna- (physical force or potential energy) it's not a -mancy (a form of divination), and it sounds like a cringelord teenager's invented name for sand magic. Plus now that it's canonized, I have to argue with every group I run for that my setting doesn't subscribe to the many-worlds theory and that is not an acceptable flavour for their magic in my game.
Anyway to answer the question, I once saw a class entirely reflavoured from top to bottom as a Chronomancer. You probably think it was a wizard or a warlock or something, but no, it was the Battle Master Fighter.
Weapon/armour proficiency and extra ASIs were because they did extra training in a personal timeloop. Second Wind was a short personal rewind, Action Surge was a personal fast-forward. Most of their maneuvers were various manipulations of time; rewinding themself to parry, slowing the enemy for precision strike, looping themself for feinting strike, rewinding an ally for rally.
I don't remember all the flavour, but god dang it was cool.
That Chronomancer was actually pretty close to the flavor I had for a 4e character that I only got to play for 3 sessions because our DM was a flake Q_Q
The weirdest thing they did was make the Pathfinder dirty Sarenrae canon in 5e
That's actually really neat
Much as I'm generally not keen on CR stuff and will never not be salty about them accidentally turning D&D firbolgs into cow folk, the name "dunamancy" is actually a bit better than that. It's just based on another meaning of the Greek word that "dyna-" comes from. This version is better translated as "potentiality" or "possibility". Aristotle used it for a bunch of stuff, so it got brought into English with that meaning as "dunamis". The -mancy bit is definitely just because fantasy stuff uses it to mean any magic though
I honestly wasn't aware it was a Critical Role thing until I posted this.
Wow that fighter is awesome. I'll add it to the list of characters I would play if I wasn't a forever DM.
Hmm. First time hearing about it but I guess dunamancy wouldn't work in my setting either. Parallel universes exist in a general sense, but the all-devouring cosmic destroyer is omniversal - it exists identically in all universes simultaneously, and so does the big ball of energy and matter and thoughts and dreams that are sealed around it as it's prison. Which is the world. So there are no alternate versions of the world existing simultaneously. However, the history of the world from creation to destruction to resealing does tend to run on a loop with minor (or not so minor) variations, so if you want a variation of yourself with 6 more hit points you can just time travel a few millennia to the right loop. You could probably reflavor dunamancy as a form of chronomancy and have it function identically.
Yeah, that's the other thing that bugs me about Dunamancy, that it's actually four separate schools of magic in a trenchcoat. Dunamancy covers time magic, gravity magic, luck magic, and, for lack of a better name, quantum-alternate-universe magic. Because in the Critical Role setting those are the same thing, or something? So while not every spell needs to be reflavoured, those that do need individual consideration.
I mean dunamancy is space-time magic. If you can manipulate space-time at a fundamental level you can make your own luck. It makes sense to me, even if it does cover a lot of different aspects of magic.
By that metric, all magic is dunamancy.
And IRL there is no such thing as particles, it's just waves all the way down bby, but that doesn't mean you can't academically specialize in things besides quantum mechanics
Good take.
Also that chrono legionare is super flavourful!
Our bard didn't cast "Dissonant Whispers", he'd just drunkely hurl insults so mean they do psychic damage.
Emotional damage.
Viciouser mockery
I forgot about Vicious Mockery, but that's probably where it started. I remember there being more spells that were just tirades of insults – I think Synaptic Static was among those as well.
I love the interpretation of bards that they don't actually cast magic, they just keep it so real that it borders on supernatural.
When keeping it real goes right.
Over at /c/TenForward we call this "pulling a Harry Kim".
The downside is you're stuck below level 5 for the entire campaign
Level 3. Harry can't even get that first feat.
He wouldn't anyway because he took one level in Bard
So wait, you're telling me I could just be walking down the street, minding my own business, when some jerkass wizard from another universe merges our realities or whatever to heal my doppelganger? I'm out 6 HP because of some guy who doesn't live in my universe and I don't even like got hurt?
I'm imagining as a consequence to doing this all the time, eventually the wizard is going to have a class action lawsuit against them from all the innocent bystanders they've hurt. And just imagine the legal complexity of serving all these suits across different universe' legal codes. This wizard's going to be bogged down for an eternity in the courts.
In all the multiverse, there's got to be someone who specializes in parallel-universe case law. A Parallelalegal, if you will.
Did you have "parallelalegal" in mind before you wrote this or did it come to you after? It's brilliant and will be stuck in my head for a while
I was definitely trying to figure out how to work that in there
Damn, this gives me an idea for a PC: Raz is a novice dunamancer who believes he has the worst luck in the world until he realizes that his wealthy and successful alternate self has been manipulating fate to always be in HIS favor instead. Now the only thing Raz wants is to find and kill his other self and take back what fate owes him.
See the jet Li movie: The One
Yesss, one of my favorite (ridiculous) hidden gems that I will forever keep on DVD.
Murderer.
Ok, fine, I collapsed reality on an entire alternate universe ending them in the blink of an eye, but now Rog the barbarian is back to full health!
It's actually kind of astonishing that what villains try to do for an entire campaign is done as collateral damage by you using a first level spell slot, and it only heals 6 hitpoints. Meanwhile, Sad Frank drinks two potions and does the same, but without billions of deaths. Score one for Sad Frank.
Or, like, just reverse the localized time on the individual that got hurt to a point before they took the damage...
Ah, that's chronomancy and you do NOT want me messing with time. Not after what will happen next time.
You know, this would actually be rad if the DM started using it as a plot point. Extra-dimensional police start hunting the PC for multiverse-level crimes, or some dunamancer in another reality kills an NPC in the PCs' reality to heal one of their friends, and the PCs have to do some dimension-hopping to hunt them down and get them to stop.
In pursuit of known dunamancer Rick Sanchez