Empath



"I can be anyone...except me." -Mira of many Faces, an Empath

Mortals yearn for light - they have huddled around crude fires since the dawn of time. They build lights to the heavens, and chase away darkness with a thousand clever inventions. And yet, if you locked a mortal in the darkest of rooms, stole the sun and stars from the sky, and drowned every candle and torch in liquid night... light would remain.

An empath does not kindle some grand beacon within herself, or shout out for the lights of the world to awaken at her command. An empath simply opens her eyes. She looks within her fellow mortals and sees a sea of embers - a thousand-thousand candles, impossibly faint, which together illuminate the world below with a brilliance no celestial body could hope to match. The light of an empath is the light of mortals: from their victory fires to funeral pyres. From the darkest embers of rage, to the most resplendent beacons of love imaginable. It is the good, the wicked, and every shade between. And like the moon, the empath stands resplendent, blazing with the reflection of every heart and mind to ever grace the earth.

Abilities
An empath's incredible versatility makes almost any ability potentially appealing to them, depending on their focus and build. A high Wisdom is utterly vital to any empath, allowing them to integrate and attune themselves as they channel the latent power all around them. Constitution is also possessed of its usual importance, and can help the relatively fragile empath stay alive if she wishes to spend any significant amount of time on the front lines of combat. Intelligence can help an empath make the most of her incredible class skill selection, and Strength or Dexterity should not be ignored for their importance in combat.

Role
An empath possesses almost unparalleled flexibility - she can access a number of potent utility powers outside of combat through her chosen aspects, and is capable of filling almost any role in a pitched battle. She lacks the focus to excel at individual tasks, but her versatility allows her to fill whatever niche is most needed at any given moment.

Races
Members of any race can take up the mantle of an empath - the calling is rare, but may be felt by anyone with the sensitivity and intuition to tap into the great collective unconscious.

Alignment
Unlike most evokers, empaths are not particularly biased towards good. The essence of the mortal world is rarely black and white, and while good-aligned empaths certainly exist, they are no less rare than their less moral counterparts. Despite this, empaths tend to be acutely aware of their alignment, and often (though not always) exemplify many of the defining traits of whichever segment of the alignment wheel they occupy.

Starting Gold
As druid

Starting Age
Most empaths come into their power early, perhaps out of the innocence of childhood. When rolling for age, roll as a Bard - but subtract the total from adult age rather than adding it (to a minimum of half an adult’s age). If rules are in place that would reduce the statistics of child characters, the empath is exempt from them.

Class Skill List
An empath reflects and channels a power formed from the sum total of all mortal experiences, and finds that no that task she sets her mind to will ever feel wholly unfamiliar. An empath may treat any skill as a class skill.

Skill Points
(6 + Int modifier) x4 at 1st level.

6 + Int modifier at each additional level.

Hit Die
d8

Weapon and Armor Proficiency
Empaths are proficient with all simple weapons, and with light and medium armor.

Illuminations
Infused as they are with the power of light, an empath is capable of crafting and calling upon powerful manifestations of radiant energy known as Illuminations. The illuminations of an empath are intrinsically bound to her personas – each of her personas possesses a fixed illumination capacity. The empath crafts a separate illumination list, with a number of illuminations up to her Persona Capacity, to form the Illuminations Known list for each of her personas. While manifesting a persona, an empath can evoke any illumination known by that persona – she does not require any form of preparation beyond donning the persona itself.

In addition to those illuminations bound to her personas, the empath gains a small number of Innate Illuminations. These illuminations are always considered to be both Known and Readied, regardless of which of her personas an empath is currently manifesting.

An Empath's evoker attribute is Wisdom.

Illuminations are explained more completely in their own section.

Radiant Armaments (Su)
Upon awakening to the radiance within her soul, an empath establishes a bond with a particular weapon and suit of armor. How an empath finds the armaments that are hers by right varies widely; she may stumble upon them in a dream, only to awake clutching them in hand, or she might find them in the crater left behind by a falling star, but they always appear within a week of attaining her first level in this class. As she advances in level, the empath may imbue her armaments with an ever greater number of powerful modifications, as indicated above.

Radiant Armaments and Imbuements are described more completely in their own section.

Merciful (Ex)
Whenever an empath deals damage with an attack or an Illumination, she may choose to deal non-lethal damage instead with no penalty to attack or damage rolls.

Manifest Persona (Su)
An empath draws her power from the teeming masses of life – from the sparks of light that reside within the souls of every being, living, dead, or immortal. In the great pool of thought and feeling that makes up the world of men and gods, each empath finds many reflections, each one binding her to another facet of the world. These reflections are an empath’s Personas – the primordial mantles that allow her to unleash the radiance she had gathered in patterns all her own.

An empath may manifest any of her personas (or dismiss her current persona) as a free action that may only be taken on her turn. Manifesting a persona costs a number of motes equal to the empath's evoker level. If she attempts to manifest a persona while manifesting a different one, the original persona is automatically dismissed without requiring any additional action. Shifting personas often has a profound visual effect on an empath’s costume, but this is not always the case, and such alterations are universally cosmetic.

In addition to allowing her to access her Illuminations, an empath’s personas grant her a number of potent abilities, derived from their chosen Aspects. The aspects are potent forces in their own right, each one an infinitely complex face of the great mortal consciousness. When the empath forms a new persona, she chooses its aspect from the following list. Once chosen, a given persona’s aspect can never be changed (though the illuminations allocated to it can be still be changed normally as an empath gains levels).

All aspects, save for one, exert some degree of mental influence over empaths who manifest them. Such influence can be ignored if need be, and never rises to the level of true compulsion, but empaths – particularly powerful ones – often find themselves slipping into the guise of their aspect in times of emotional stress.

The Power of Friendship (Ex)
An empath is capable of swaying the alignment of captured foes, as described in the Power of Friendship section.

In addition, an empath can open themselves to others in a way that can form bonds as strong and true as those she pushes forward with force of personality. Using a keen ear and open mind, an empath may use her Wisdom score, rather than her Charisma score, when making redemption checks. This particular method of reconciliation allows an empath to develop a powerful sense of her own identity, and redemption checks made against her experience a DC increase as if the empath possessed an alignment subtype.

Changing Heart (Su)
Though the aspects she channels can offer an empath a powerful array of abilities, there is ever the danger of losing her sense of self to the great unconscious upon which she draws. Beginning at 3rd level, an empath may reinforce her personas with a mighty fragment of her innermost heart, empowering a single facet of her personality to anchor her identity even against the strongest of tides.

Each of the empath's personas gains access to a single Heart Fragment, which imparts upon that persona an appropriate bonus feat. While manifesting a persona, the empath gains the benefits of the feat assigned to it. She does not actually possess the chosen feat, and this effect may not be used to qualify for any prerequisites which might require them, with the sole exception of other Changing Heart feats applied to the same persona. At 8th, 13th, and 18th level, each of an empath's personas gains an additional bonus feat. Once chosen, the Heart Fragment and bonus feats an empath assigns to one of her personas may never be changed.

Moonlight Apotheosis (Su)
The barrier between the empath and the radiant power she channels has all but dissolved. Many like her have lost themselves along the path she walks, fading away in the face of something infinitely greater than themselves, but her blazing spirit has preserved against all odds, beaming forth with a fury that angels and demons might envy. At 20th level, an empath forevermore becomes a Native Outsider with one alignment subtype of her choice and an Augmented subtype pertaining to her previous type, with all the traits that implies. Further, she can no longer be aged by any means mundane or magical, and will never die of old age.

Additionally, the empath may open herself to the world in ways her less experienced sisters could scarcely imagine. The empath may partially manifest a second persona without dismissing her original. She does not gain the illumination list of this secondary persona, but she gains the granted abilities of both personas' aspects. Bonuses to saving throws and skills from different personas do not stack, and she uses the better Base Attack Bonus progression of the two.