I mean, absolutely, but personally I feel like having distinct classes for the various creature types is a more interesting idea than access feats... just my 2cp.I've been stymied by this idea myself. I tried working it as 3 access feats, one of which was basically a redesign of Necrocarnum Acolyte. The fey section wrote itself but I got blocked when coming upon ideas for elemental melds.Thought back to my Spirit Shaman and Incarnum stuff and realized I should perhaps just make a bunch of animalistic soulmelds and have them be an alternative list of soulmelds for the totemist instead of magical beast ones? And then have totemist substitution levels for shifters or something.Well, let's see. We have incarnum classes (w/ dedicated soulmelds) for Magical Beast, Plant, and Aberration. We need a bunch more if we're going to run the gamut, which would actually be kind of fun to consolidate.
Should I post a tentative?
Different classes would be cool. The big things are getting that completely different list of soulmelds and a few supporting class features. The totemist itself barely has anything to sell the magical beast theme other than the soulmeld list (wild empathy, +saves vs. totem bind's creature), so it's nice to see more fleshed out classes.
Regarding outsiders, I think the Incarnate does a decent job of filling that theme. It doesn't do specific outsiders too much, but between the alignment focus and the good number of its melds that have planar themes, I feel like it gets the point across.
I actually think a Fey one would be pretty neat.
I mean, there aren't that many Fey, but pretty much all of them are extremely distinct (compare a Murderjack, Glitterhaunt, Siabrie, and Dryad, for example).
How many monsters do you need (I've always been a bit sketchy on that); because if there aren't enough first-party Fey, then I know of plenty of homebrew ones. But I'm pretty sure there are more Fey than Plant creatures.
EDIT: And Fey are pretty wide thematically.
Sounds like the project needs its own thread, at the very least.
Or we might make a new subforum and have each type of creature with enough support for a full set of soulmelds and effects. "Expanded incarnum project" or something.
Let's make a subforum; we can have Warpsoul & Green Man moved there.
And I can make feats!
Many feats!
More feats than you can handle.
And I'll just constantly churn out half-started ideas and some starting basis for them, as well as references and crap? Like with the animal soulmelds there's the spirit shaman guides, but there's also all those barbarian ACFs. There are also several alternate animal companions in Dragon Mag as well as some new animals like the riding bird (AKA chocobo). And WotC archives do still have full searchable databases for carious creatures. http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/lists/monsters&tablefilter=animal for example.
Random thought: There needs to be a dragonblood subtype creature that also has incarnum ties.
Maybe make an incarnum barbarian? Like, even more so than totemist? I dunno. I feel like if you're going to make a bunch of animal soulmelds you have to make it into a separate class. I'd be happy to help...
Now this has me thinking...
- Constructs would be pretty straightforward, I think. Finally an incarnum class dedicated to warforged!
- For Outsiders, the problem would be narrowing them down so that you don't have too many soulmelds. Something something Planeswalker?
- Someone's making a dedicated Dragon incarnum class for the Base Class Challenge, IIRC. Noumenon Drake doesn't really count because it doesn't have its own soulmelds, but either way this should be covered.
- Elementals should work too (can expand to paras and quasis if necessary). The thematics are pretty obvious.
- Fey seems to work... okay. I dunno. The thematics are pretty narrow, IMO, and I'm not convinced there are enough unique fey to support a full soulmeld list. We shall have to think on this one... though I guess there are more mythological fey which haven't been tapped.
- Might need to combine Monstrous Humanoid, Humanoid, and Giant. Even so, finding enough unique abilities is going to be tough.
- Unless we bring in Living Spells (which opens up a huge can of worms), I don't think there are enough oozes to support a full list. Dragon Mag might help.
- Undead: trivial. And probably interesting, esp. if you can keep it away from necrocarnum.
- Vermin are boring. Maybe combine with animal?
Creature Type | Incarnum Class | Done? |
Aberration | Warpsoul | Yes |
Animal | Savage | |
Construct | Vitalforge | |
Dragon | Anima Drake | |
Elemental | Essence Shaper | |
Fey | Sidhe Lord | |
Giant | Channeler of Myth | |
Humanoid | Channeler of Myth | |
Magical Beast | Totemist | Published |
Monstrous Humanoid | Channeler of Myth | |
Ooze | Sludgebeast | |
Outsider | Incarnate | Published |
Plant | Green Man | Yes |
Undead | Gaunt | |
Vermin | Savage |
Incarnum Class | Creature Type(s) |
Anima Drake | Dragon |
Channeler of Myth | Giant, Humanoid, Monstrous Humanoid |
Essence Shaper | Elemental |
Gaunt | Undead |
Green Man | Plant |
Incarnate | Outsider |
Savage | Animal, Vermin |
Sidhe Lord | Fey |
Sludgebeast | Ooze |
Totemist | Magical Beast |
Vitalforge | Construct |
Warpsoul | Aberration |
Re: your thoughts on Dragon, the way you describe the "Totem Dragon" class is actually very similar to the Noumenon Drake class from Ethos of the Wyrm. In fact, we'll have to be careful to draw clear lines between Ethos and the Anima Drake, though of course we can borrow class features if we really want to. The main idea I had was to associate particular draconic deities (and therefore grouping dragons primarily by alignment) with particular chakras. This doesn't line up exactly since there are 12 draconic deities (11 in RoDr and Drac, + Sardior) and 10 chakras, so it stalled out because I wasn't sure exactly how to deal with that... but I was taking inspiration from spellscale Blood Quickening Meditations (general mechanics themes, not specific abilities).The immediate differences I can think of putting in place would be having it be a Totem Bind class, without the Ideal Bind or Soul Bind, and building around the idea of doing most dragon things with Soulmelds. Also not using the Ideal system as a crutch for certain functions of being a draconic Meldshaper class.
Re: Undead-themed, I haven't looked at my Necrocarnate fix recently enough to be able to compare with your ideas. Have you seen it? I don't remember how I dealt with some of the problems with Necrocarnum at the time...What problems with Necrocarnum? It can easily just be seen as the negative-energy counterpart to regular Incarnum's positive energy. There's no lore I'm aware of that contradicts this conceptualization of it. Just because it's only uses in official material is soul-sucking and zombie-making doesn't mean it can't be more interesting.
I was originally intending to go for an undead-themed one that didn't involve Necrocarnum, because the idea was to create thematic soulmelds based on the abilities of specific undead creatures (like I did for Warpsoul and Green Man). I do like the idea of giving up a part of yourself to shape them (a la -1 Con per something, soulmeld or essentia or chakra bind or whatever) -- since undead are perversions of the natural progression of souls, so the undead soulmelds would have to be powered by your own soul energy or physical essence or whatever.The thing is that Necrocarnum is actually exactly that. It's a twisted form of Incarnum. Perverted progression of the natural form of souls? That's Necrocarnum. There's no need to build piles of fluff for an Undead incarnum class when Necrocarnum is just a variant energy type. Literally to normal Essentia as negative energy is to positive. And we all know that negative energy destroys positive on contact, so imagine what negative energy soul-stuff being shoved into you does...
My main inspiration for Incarnum crafting is the feats by Amechra, which Green Man actually gets, so I think I'd rather stay away from that.My own Incarnum crafting ideas revolve around the idea that you make it a permanent item by carving off the bit of your soul it's attached to and crystallizing it, using extra Essentia to be able to do this without permanently ruining the Chakra it's attached to. Temporary Con and/or max HP damage, as well as temporarily lost Essentia.
However, I really like the idea of synergizing soulmelds - not just soulmelds which upgrade others, but where you can designate soulmelds as "linked" or something, and depending on which combinations you link, you get interesting feedback effects. I was also thinking that there weren't going to be as many soulmelds in total for the class (for example, I was thinking of making a single golem-themed soulmeld which took on characteristics of different golems based on which chakra it's bound to), so this would actually help mitigate the lack of options there.In this case, it's a mix of Soulmelds that upgrade a Chakra they are shaped to and simply Soulmelds being designed in a way that makes them stack together simply by being shaped at the same time. A limited list is important, yes, otherwise the combinations become nearly impossible to work with. One of the examples I considered was having extended range Splash weapons inflicting three different save or suck effects. And being able to get 20 attacks per round by having four rounds of Dancing with four attacks per round sending out Dancing weapons.