Spiritual Spotlight: Haagenti, the Whispers Within
Chaotic Evil Demon Lord of Alchemy, Invention, and Transformation
Domains: Artifice, Chaos, Evil, Strength
Subdomains: Construct, Demon, Resolve, Toil
The Complete Book of the Damned, pg. 56~57
Obedience:
Practice the Divine Experiment by following the procedure to transmute lead into gold. This process normally requires a Philosopher’s Stone, but for this obedience, you can substitute any material for lead—it’s not the actual transmutation that functions as the obedience, but the act of going through the motions.
Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on saving throws against Transmutation effects.
Hoo boy! Back with the Spiritual Spotlights, and our first one in a while is a doozy! And the wording is frustratingly unclear. As patron deity of alchemy’s darkest creations, the Divine Experiment Haagenti first created allowed him to turn the worthless element of lead into the infinitely more valuable gold, a power that to this day still draws the greedy and covetous to his doorstep. And as his worshiper, you also have to perform the Divine Experiment every single day, without fail.
But… how? Do you actually need to perform the true Experiment? Do you need to physically transform an element into a different one? Or, as the last line of the Obedience hints, do you merely have to go through the motions, pantomiming the Experiment without actually doing it? Do you even need equipment, or do you just pretend it’s there? Moving your hands over test tubes that aren’t there, tracing circles into the ground without leaving a marking, and finally pouring empty air over a lump of metal and “marveling” as it “transforms” even though it stays unchanged?
“This process normally requires a Philosopher’s Stone” seems to mean you don’t actually need the Artifact in question, which is good because it’s only available to level 20+ Alchemists (or a lucky explorer), at which point you don’t particularly need Haagenti’s help. This is one of those Obediences that requires working with your DM to make it work, because there’s just so much here that’s unclear. Plus, there’s the small but very important detail that it requires you learning how to do the Divine Experiment in the first place, something Haagenti doesn’t just go handing out. You may have to earn the formula for the Divine Experiment from the Demon Lord, which makes this Obedience unique in that it offers a delightful plot hook for any character hoping to serve the Whispers Within.
Also, as another upside, it’s incredibly easy to disguise what you’re doing as just mundane experiments. You’re unlikely to rouse suspicion in your Good party members, or even most prying members of society, which fits Haagenti very well, as he’s a subtle, careful manipulator. Most of his Boons are even easy to hide!
The benefit is less useful than it seems. While bonuses against Necromancy and Enchantment are common enough to frustrate Necromancers and Enchanters, bonuses versus Transmutation spells are decidedly less so, as the school isn’t known for its hammering offense. Transmutation’s offensive spells are fewer in number but some may say more debilitating, with such treasures as Flesh to Stone, Baleful Polymorph, Slow, and Disintegrate… But even still, the bonus is much, much less likely to come up unless you regularly battle Transmuters, which is a little disheartening. Good thing the rest of Haagenti’s Boons are outstanding.
Boons are acquired slowly: the first once you reach 12 hit dice, the second at 16, and the third at 20. However, the Evangelist, Exalted, and Sentinel Prestige Classes can be entered as early as level 7; doing so grants you the Boons at levels 10, 13, and 16 instead. Servants of demons may also take the Demoniac Prestige Class; you don’t get the Boons any faster than E/E/S, but you may select which set you want, and you get cool demon-related powers!
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EVANGELIST
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Boon 1: Novice Philosopher. Gain Cure Light Wounds 3/day, Lesser
Restoration 2/day, or Cure Serious Wounds 1/day.
Silly Haagenti, those have nothing to do with philosophy! You know, I’m not even entirely sure why it’s called the Philosopher’s Stone and not, I don’t know, the Alchemic Opus or the Perfect Creation, or any other number of names. A cursory Googling and swift perusal of alchemic practices just points towards old-time alchemists just being called “Philosophers,” which I suppose is as good a reason as any.
I do like that it’s calling you a Novice, though. No matter how high-level you are, you’re still going to value those first lessons! I didn’t get right into the spells themselves because there’s not much to them. It’s just a handful of healing spells! They’re useful! Though being so low-level, they fall off very, very quickly. Lesser Restoration, at least, remains useful even at high levels with its ability to cure ability score damage without consuming any resource but time. This is a pretty good first Boon, even if it’s not particularly exciting.
Boon 2: Altered State. You gain the ability to create a Mutagen as if you were an Alchemist with a level equal to your Hit Dice -4 (min 1, max 20). If you could already create a Mutagen, your mixture becomes purified and no longer applies penalties to your ability scores while it’s active and any ability score increased by your Mutagen is increased by an additional +2.
Now this? THIS is exciting. Mutagens are incredibly powerful buffs that last an enormous amount of time (10 min/level; 90 min if obtained as quickly as possible), allowing you to slap a +4 onto any physical score you want at a cost of a -2 to a corresponding mental ability score, plus some natural armor on top of that! Buff your Strength to hit even harder, buff your Dexterity to make yourself harder to hit, or buff your Constitutions to get a chunk of HP to survive harder hits! Sure, you become a little less wise, smart, or charismatic for a while, but it’s just a -2 penalty. Nothing debilitating.
In fact, if you’re an Alchemist already, you don’t get debilitated at all. Your Mutagen becomes purified and no longer penalizes you, and it becomes even beefier, tacking another +2 onto everything it boosts! I cannot even BEGIN to describe how powerful that is, especially if you remain a pure Alchemist or class into Evangelist and use Aligned Class onto Alchemist. Why? Because this purification also applies to your Greater Mutagen, Grand Mutagen, and True Mutagen Discoveries, removing all of the downsides associated with buffing two or even all of your physical ability scores to a ridiculously stupid degree. Grand Mutagen becomes a +10/+8/+6 distributed as you wish to your physical scores with zero downsides besides the nightmare of mucking with all of the numbers on your character sheet. But, because Alchemists can eventually make their Mutagen last for an hour per character level, you can basically always have your Mutagen on. Who needs to keep track of numbers if you’re just always like that?
God. I LOVE Alchemists so much, you have no idea, and this just makes me want to make one that’d actually worship this guy. Especially because…
Boon 3: Immortal Chymist. You truly perform the Divine Experiment, becoming a perfect immortal. You no longer age, nor can you die of old age, and your body is transformed into a perfect version of you in the prime of your life; you no longer suffer age-related penalties but keep any increase to your mental ability scores. In addition, each time you perform the Divine Experiment (such as for your Obedience), you generate a dose of potent, mystic quicksilver that has two functions: a dose can be poured over one pound of lead to transform it into one pound of gold (worth approximately 50gp), or a dose can be mixed with a Potion of Cure Serious Wounds to create a vial of Oil of Life. Oil of Life can be sprinkled over a corpse–or a portion of one–to affect it with True Resurrection. The quicksilver evaporates after 24 hours, or if you perform the Divine Experiment again.
… once you reach level 16, your devotion is richly, richly rewarded. All of your practice with the Divine Experiment finally allows you to reap its benefits four entire levels before Alchemists can get their own Philosopher’s Stone. Sure, yours isn’t quite as potent–the quicksilver inside a true Philosopher’s Stone can transmute thousands of pounds of material and can be mixed with even a Potion of Cure Light Wounds to produce an Oil of Life–but you can crank it out with alarming regularity by using materials with no listed cost.
You go from practicing the Divine Experiment to actually performing the Divine Experiment, an ability you just… get. There’s no real restriction to it anymore. The only thing that’s really holding your world takeover back is your access to Potions of Cure Serious Wounds, which cost about 700 gold market price, or around 300 to make. If you’re a pure Alchemist, you likely already have Cure Serious Wounds on your spell list to crank out the potions yourself, and even if you didn’t, Novice Philosopher grants you access to the spell to let you craft the potions anyway.
Also, unlike the quicksilver itself, the Oil of Life will never evaporate. You can stockpile bottled True Resurrections. That 300 gold per bottle will pay for itself very quickly once you start selling them for thousands of gold per drink. This ability won’t solve combat instantly, but it will save you a lot of headaches, especially considering that applying the Oil of Life is a single standard action, letting you mid-combat rez people. God, that alone is just… It’s worth an entire Boon all by itself, but the fact it comes on top of immortality and eternal youth is magnificent.
Speaking of which, because the Divine Experiment itself is the source of your power in this case, it can be argued that you can’t lose the bonuses you get from this ability for breaking things off with Haagenti. That’s more subjective, though; talk things out with your DM before you lose your faith.
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EXALTED
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Boon 1: Truth in the Flesh. Gain Enlarge Person 3/day, Alter Self 2/day, or Beast Shape I 1/day.
Nice! All three of these options are really good, though I’d argue Beast Shape I is pretty mediocre. Alter Self is a godsend for infiltration missions, or simply needing to quietly disappear into a crowd, and Enlarge Person is less useful for you than it is for the big, beefy Fighters and Barbarians who could make full use of the extended reach to make an enemy’s life miserable.
There’s not really much else to say here. Most first Boons go “good spell, niche spell, bad spell,” but there isn’t really a bad spell among these. Even though I said Beast Shape I was mediocre, it still lets you turn into inconspicuous animals for sneaking purposes, or flying ones to escape.
Boon 2: Transformation. 1/day, you may cast Extended Transformation on yourself as a spell-like ability.
I never did like the ‘Transformation’ spell, simply because it’s just an awful name. It’s not fancy! It’s not evocative at all! Combat Form or Fighting Machine or Mindless Might or something, anything but just Transformation! But, I digress.
Transformation is an enormous combat buff, turning you into a hulking version of yourself and giving you +4 to all of your physical ability scores, +4 natural armor, +5 to Fortitude saves, proficiency with a whole lot of weapons AND grants you a BAB equal to your level. All of this translates to +2 to attack and damage rolls and reflex saves, +6 AC (4 natural, 2 from Dex increase), and +2 temporary HP per level (usually +26) for 2 rounds/level thanks to the fact the spell’s Extended. Realistically, the +2 to attack rolls is likely more like +8 or so because the Exalted and the Demonologist don’t have the greatest of BAB, and neither do many of the caster classes you need to be in before classing into those two.
The downside is that Transformation removes your ability to cast any spells during its duration, and that the bonuses it grants to your ability scores are enhancement bonuses, so they won’t stack with most buff spells you slap on first. Unless, of course, you’re an Alchemist-Demonologist, since the alchemical bonuses of your Mutagen stack with the enchantment bonuses from Transformation. The upside, however, is that Transformation’s usual components include a Potion of Bull’s Strength, but since your ability is a spell-like, you can just hulk out whenever you feel like without needing the potion.
Not being able to cast spells is a pretty brutal downside, and Transformation cannot be dismissed early–you have to wait through the full 10+ round duration–so the Exalted path is best suited for the Alchemist-Demonologist or the combat-Cleric path. And make sure to cast all your buffs before you transform!
Boon 3: Master of Shapes. You gain the Shapechanger subtype. Your body can react instantaneously
to mitigate attacks, granting you immunity to critical hits and sneak
attacks (which are treated as normal attacks). Whenever you are affected
by a polymorph effect, you regain 4d8 hit points.
Stronger than it looks at first, despite being so short and simple! Sadly, gaining the Shapechanger subtype does little but make you more vulnerable to niche spells since the Change Shape ability isn’t conferred by the subtype, but complete immunity to both critical hits and sneak attacks is huge when you consider your potential to hulk out for minutes a day. Putting yourself in the fray becomes more feasible when you don’t have to worry about enemy Rogues figuring out where your liver is, or the crit-built Fighter instantly cutting you in half. It ALSO means that it’s harder to get an alpha strike out against you, since sneaky or invisible enemies won’t be able to take as much of an advantage against your vulnerable throat/ribcage before revealing themselves.
Unfortunately it’s also a really boring ability. Exalted of Haagenti are just ‘effective but dull’ in this lineup. The last line at least gives this something of a spark, regaining a potentially decent amount of HP each time a friend or foe slaps you with a new form. You can even grant yourself this HP by using the Alter Self or Beast Shape I spell-likes gained from Truth in the Flesh! Both of those spells give you a small combat bonus as well to make using them just to heal less of a waste.
It also triggers when your enemy polymorphs you! I wouldn’t go throwing yourself in the path of those spells, though. There’s a lot worse ways to die than losing all your HP, and being transmogrified into a rat is one of them.
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SENTINEL
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Boon 1: Alchemical Armaments. Lead Blades 3/day, Alchemical Allocation 2/day, or Versatile Weapon 1/day.
Here’s a trio we’ve never seen before! So we’ll quickly go over each in turn:
Lead Blades makes a single weapon deal damage as if it were one size category larger without actually changing its weight or size, and lasts for 1 min/level.
Alchemical Allocation allows you to drink a potion, recieve its effects, and then spit the potion back into its bottle without expending it.
Versatile Weapon allows you to alter a weapons in a subtle way that allows it to bypass one specific form of damage reduction, such as cold iron, silver, or DR/slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning.
So! Good spell: Alchemical Allocation. Niche spell: Lead Blades. Bad spell: Versatile Weapon. Nice of them to put it in order for us!
… Alright I’ll be fair. Versatile Weapon is alright, and it keeps the party from having to lug around a thousand different weapons to deal with any conceivable foe, but at only 1/day and without modifying the weapon’s actual stats (the spell description notes it functions like Greater Magic Weapon, not as Greater Magic Weapon, so if it DOES actually give +1 bonuses it’d rank much higher but I assume it does not), why would you waste your action casting this spell instead of using Lead Blades and hitting things harder anyway? Lead Blades lasts for the same 1 minute/level and can be cast three times!
The usefulness of Alchemical Allocation is easy to overlook if you’re not used to it, but it more or less allows you to gain infinite use out of a single potion so long as no one drinks the thing for real. At 2/day, it’d let you stretch that Potion of Cure Serious Wounds or Potion of Fly really, really far into your day, and if your DM doesn’t realize how strong this is and gives you an extremely valuable potion–such as a Potion of Haste or a Potion of Stoneskin–you’ll quickly make them reconsider having potions drop after battles. If you’ve got valuable potions in your inventory, or have someone who can craft them, I’d scoop up Alchemical Allocation every day.
Boon 2: Inventive Warfare. You treat all weapons as though you were proficient in them. Any feats or effects you have that apply specifically to battleaxes (such as Weapon Focus or the Sentinel’s Symbolic Weapon class feature) or to the axe weapon group (such as the Fighter’s Weapon Training class feature) apply to any weapon you wield. In addition, as a swift action, you can grant weapons you wield one of the following special weapon features for 1 round: brace, disarm, nonlethal, reach, or trip.
Much like Ahriman’s own second Sentinel Boon, Inventive Warfare is deceptively useless in most cases… If by “in most cases,” you mean “I stick to my sacred weapon and nothing else.” If you arm yourself only with a battleaxe you’ll almost never see the true power of this ability, but it makes you the single most versatile weaponsmaster in the entire party. Remember how I talked down to the thought of carrying a thousand different weapons to deal with different forms of damage reduction? With this, that not only becomes feasible, but encouraged.
Weapon Specialization and Weapon Focus just became +1 to attack and +2 to damage rolls for everything. Improved Critical just doubled the crit range of every single weapon you get your hands on. Your Symbolic Weapon Sentinel power now affects even the chairs, barstools, ladles, and buckets you grab off the floor. I think the fact these bonuses even apply to improvised weapons is hysterical, and it gets even better once you read the final sentence there: Once per round, you can apply brace, disarm, nonlethal, reach, or trip to any weapon you wield.
Any weapon you wield. Even ranged weapons.
Normally, disarming someone with ranged attacks requires specific feats and consumes your full round. Not so with Inventive Warfare, which allows you to knock weapons from people’s hands with slings, bows, and guns, or even knock their feet out from under them. There’s also the ever-tempting and ever-powerful ability to add reach to any weapon you hold, letting you threaten way more space than you have any right to with daggers and machetes, meaning you’re not held back by the usual weakness of reach weapons (most of them are two-handed or penalize you for attacking enemies that are too close).
When I first saw this ability, I wasn’t impressed. However, the more I thought about it and the more I bounced ideas around with my DM, the more I realized that Inventive Warfare is just that: Inventive. It rewards creative thinking, doing more than just arming yourself with your god’s sacred weapon and calling it a day. With this power, everything is your god’s sacred weapon, and you can do some frankly ridiculous stuff with weapons that takes a mallet to the normal boundaries of common sense and practical thinking. For example: You can make a siege weapon deal nonlethal damage if you stretch the boundaries of what “wield” means.
Boon 3: Adaptive Flesh and Twisting Steel. Whenever you are subjected to a polymorph effect, all your equipment is altered in whatever manner necessary to function with your new form (gaining the Ghost Touch quality in order to interact with you if you become incorporeal or becoming immune to Fire damage if you change into a Fire Elemental, for example). 1/day you may cast Shapechange as a spell-like ability. In addition, add Monstrous Physique IV, Undead Anatomy IV, and Vermin Shape II to the list of spells that Shapechange spells you cast can function as.
[Wipes the sweat off my brow]
Alright so, before we get into the Big Part of this ability, lets work on that first sentence, since this ability breaks the most fundamental rule of using Polymorph magic: Your gear no longer melds with you, but transforms with you. You can still use activated magic items and special equipment powers even when skittering around as a mouse or slamming people down as a troll. Your armor still protects you even as you shift into a being of pure air, whereas before you were wholly relying on AC bonuses from your new form while shifted. Now you get your armor and the stupidly high natural armor some forms grant! And you can use your full BAB to wail on people with a flurry of weapon attacks before socking someone with your natural attacks! Depending on the form you take, that could earn you anywhere from four to eight attacks a round!
Alright, alright. Now we get to the Big Deal. I’ve discussed Shapechange briefly before in the Lantern King spotlight, so just read over that for a quick refresher and come back. Done? Alright, good, because Haagenti’s version of Shapechange is dramatically more powerful than what a normal player usually has access to. Undead Anatomy IV alone breaks the game balance wide open by giving players access to the Incorporeal ability while still running off the titanic duration Shapechange has, because why go through a dungeon’s halls when you can go through a dungeon’s walls? And what, all of your gear becomes incorporeal with you as well so you can still peel people apart with your full-attack? Nice.
Shapechange BY ITSELF is powerful enough to be a Boon, but you not only get to keep all your equipment, you get hundreds of new shapes to transform into as well! Really, the only downside is that your gear changing with you means it’s a lot harder to infiltrate while in disguise, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn that particular function off.
It’s really no surprise why so many people have turned to Haagenti in the past, eh? Canonically, he’s the most brilliant alchemist in the setting, and it shows. It’s a pity he’s such a dick.
