The first thing that I knew about this build was that I wanted to be a magus, and more specifically, I wanted to be a magus that played drastically differently from the stereotypical “shocking grasp gatling gun” magus that you always see. With this in mind, I found an archetype that REALLY intrigued me-the puppetmaster magus from Pathfinder Player Companion: Arcane Anthology. This archetype focuses rather heavily on trading out the high-damage output of the magus for more subtle magics. Among other things, it loses the ability to enhance its weapon, gains bard AND magus spells, and doesn’t have spellstrike. Instead of spellstrike, it gets the ability to “charmstrike,” which allows it to cast a 1 st-level spell as a swift action whenever a foe fails a saving throw that the puppetmaster casts. I really, really liked the look of this base mechanic, so I decided to dig deeper and see what I could come up with. The first thing that I noticed is that getting bard spellcasting REALLY expanded my enchantment pool. The big spell that I get as a 1 st-level spell that wizards wouldn’t normally have is hideous laughter. Yeah, bards have hideous laughter as a 1 st-level spell, so puppetmaster magi do as well. Now expanding this further, I found a delightful combination of abilities that I could take realitively quickly. First, there’s a trait called domineering. This trait (from Quests and Companions) allows you to pick one 1 st-level enchantment spell that you are capable of casting and gain a +1 trait bonus to that spell’s DC. Nice! The other one is wayang spell hunter, which is a VERY infamous trait. For wayang spell hunter (which is a region trait), you choose one 3 rd level or lower spell and gain the ability to reduce the metamagic level increase of that spell by 1. After scouring for a bit more, I found the perfect feat to use it with-Trick Spell.
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