Reflavoring the shadowcaster.

[Agrippa]

One class that has intrigued me since it first came out in Tome of Magic is the shadowcaster. Yes, I admit that the official shadow leaves a lot to be desired, but you do have sirpercival's shadowcaster rewrite here as well as jiriku's on Giant in the Playground. Jiriku's take on on shadowcasting is one of my favorite 3.5/Pathfinder subsystems, along with psionics, arcane formulae and ToB/PoW-style maneuvers. Though I do feel like changing the flavor a bit from a strictly shadow based magician to a more occultist style of mage. Something along the lines of a John Constantine or Dennis Wheatley's Duc de Richelieu. While technically on the same side in the spiritual/supernatural community their political views would drive them to tear into each other like two cats tossed into a burlap sack. If you're going for the shallow end of the alignment pool, there's always Catherine Monvoisin for inspiration.

[bhu]

Ive always wanted to fiddle with this class

[sirpercival]

I used the mechanics from my Shadowcaster rework for Powerbard, which is probably my favorite homebrew I've ever done

[Nifft]

I'd probably re-write Shadowcaster as a Sorcerer-style caster who has a far more limited spell list, but who also gets:
- Skills (6+Int) including stealth & perception; and
- Sneak Attack / Evasion / Uncanny Dodge; and
- Maneuvers from Shadow Hand + Diamond Mind + Tiger Claw schools. Expended maneuvers refresh whenever you cast a spell.

Maybe throw in the Spellthief's shtick, so you can be stealing spells & casting all day to refresh your maneuvers. If so, then reduce the casting slots to Bard progression.

So basically an anti-social Bard with performance anxiety who keeps killing people in the dark to compensate.

[sirpercival]

So like a Beguiler version of Prime32's Great Wheel Warmage?

[Nifft]

So like a Beguiler version of Prime32's Great Wheel Warmage?

Nah that one's "random granted" thing is basically a casting Crusader.

I'm thinking of something more like a Warblade who casts instead of making a melee attack:
Round 1 - Strike
Round 2 - Strike
Round 3 - Strike & Counter
Round 4 - Cast + Refresh all

... and so on.

That would give the character significantly more combat endurance, and that in turn would mean spells don't have to be the primary combat feature.

[Agrippa]

I appreciate all of your suggestions, especially sirpercival's powerbard. But they still don't get me much closer to my occultist class. I've chosen the shadowcaster class as a base largely because it uses a different casting mechanic than normal Vancian/spontaneous slot casting. Though I want my occultist class to still be useful, so I plan on using jiriku's shadowcaster remix. The mysteries or rites will cover quite a bit of ground, like the power chords of sirpercival's powerbard class. This would include curses and counter curses, as well as exorcisms and perhaps even summoning. I'm not quite sure what to call the "bundles" of rites though. I've been thinking of using the word litanies but that would make more sense as a rename for fundamentals. Maybe panoply would work. So jiriku's shadow/voidcasters would have patinas of mysteries, occultists would have panoplies of rites and powerbards could have routines of power chords. This could work.