Goodman Games

Been absorbing the release pdf - really has my brain thinking of adventure ideas.

One thing I've been puzzling over is the starting spells given to an elf. They get patron bond and invoke patron plus three more. This seems out of balance with the poor wizard who gets four total and lacks most of the elf's neat extras like better combat, stealth, etc. Am I missing something as to why one would take a wizard instead of an elf (now if total random characters are made an elf might not be rolled up - perhaps that was the intention).

The random nature of character creation is biggie. If you play by the book, you need to get lucky enough to roll an elven starting profession, and have that elf get ability scores that support both the fighting and spellcasting role well. Likely, if you end up rolling an elf, he probably won't have the intelligence that a human who chose wizard would have. Second, getting either patron bond or invoke patron automatically gets you the other, so it's functionally one spell. In any case, Patron bond is cast very, very rarely, and Invoke patron is a pretty desperate act ,too. The "no iron" restriction is pretty potent, and limits what gear an elf can loot. Form my experience in play, elves don't play much different than a wizard after all. The hit bonus and hp aren't that big a deal, since elves don't really melee that often to begin with.

Yeah the best way to min max is randomly roll and elf AND get him/her to survive the funnel

Right, Invoke Patron and Patron Bond will both probably not be used too often. Plus, the elf is probably going to wear armor and misfire/lose spells a bit more often than the wizard.

From the rulebook (p. 56):

"Elves can cast spells as wizards do. An elf of the same power level as a human wizard also
has many decades of combat experience. As such, elves typically cast their spells just as
competently as human wizards and also have martial skills."

So, does a level 1 elf get to add their Intelligence modifier to their number of spells known and to their base spell check, and is their Max Spell Level also limited by their Intelligence score?

Andy

Note that the patron spells for elves are in addition to their spells known. A high INT would give the elf bonus spells too.