Divine Word (3.5e Class)

Divine Word
Where the Word Wizard, Wordmaster, and Word Warrior rely on careful study of magical principles to achieve magical greatness, the Divine Word simply listens to the unimportant minor thoughts of his deity translated badly through the true language of the universe in order to achieve the divine might of words.

Making a Divine Word
The Divine Word benefits from their unusual ability to create new spells on the fly. However, the rules for how their spells are created is fairly restrictive, meaning that there are many strange things that Wizards and Clerics can do that Divine Word cannot. Since the Divine Word's word list changes every day, Divine Words have a lot more flexibility than Word Wizards or Wordmasters, but a lot less control.

Abilities: Divine Words use Wisdom to determine the save DC's of their spells, and occasionally also benefit from a high Charisma.

Races: Races with many members who worship deities are likely to form the majority of Divine Words.

Alignment: Any, but only one step away from their chosen deity.

Starting Gold: 5d4&times;10 gp (125 gp).

Starting Age: Simple.

Class Features
All of the following are class features of the Divine Word.

Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Divine Words are not proficient with any weapons. They are, however, proficient with light and medium armor, and do not suffer from arcane spell failure penalties.



The Divine Word must worship a deity. Each deity has three favored words and three banned words. The Divine Word always knows the favored words of his deity, and cannot cast spells that contain any of the banned words.

At a predetermined time of day depending on the Divine Word's deity, the Divine Word can pray to his deity. Doing so makes him temporarily learn one random word per class level, drawn from the wordcasting page, not including words that are specifically restricted to other classes or words that are on his deity's favored or banned list. These learned words are temporary, because he forgets all of them 48 hours later or when he next prays, whichever comes first.

Some suggestions for favored, banned, and time of day are listed below.

The save DC of a Divine Word spell is equal to 10 + one third the spell's word count + the Divine Word's Wisdom modifier.

The character casting the spell must then pass a Concentration check with a DC equal to half the number of words expended plus the Divine Word's Charisma modifier or the spell is countered.

The time it takes to cast the spell is reduced by one fewer than the number of words removed in this way, but all other attributes of the spell are left unchanged. ''For example, without using Nonrepetitive Prefixes, the spell "Bang Pyr Pyr Pyr Pyr Pyr" would normally take a standard action to cast. With Nonrepetitive Prefixes, it could be spoken as "Bang Pentapyr", meaning it would take a swift action to cast.''

1d6 improves to 1d8, 1d4+1 improves to 1d6+1, 1d4 improves to 1d6, and so on.

As such, they take twice as many words to cross each time interval threshold.



Ex-Divine Words
Divine Words who have their alignment change to be more than one step away from their deity must either change deity or get an atonement spell cast on them. Until they do one of those things, they lose access to Divine Word word magic.