Dragon Age RPG Demon Summoner Specialization -- In THREE flavors!

As a Blood Mage, Deorum's player requested the ability to summon demons. I really didn't care how lore accurate this ability was. It's something my player wanted to do, and as a GM, I love the Rule of Cool. Ultimately, there were 3 avenues I considered.

  1. Summoning Demons into corpses:

I didn't write this up because it didn't feel cool to me. But it could definitely work AND is the most lore accurate. The specialization would allow a blood mage to summon a demon into a dead enemy in combat and then get to control it. The corpses would take on the stats of the Enraged Corpse (Rage Demon) and Devouring Corpse (Hunger Demon) from the Adversaries section in the rulebook. Each level of the Specialization would allow access to different demon types and the summoning of multiple demons on the field (up to three).

2. Demons as Spell Delivery Systems:

Looking at other Mage specializations in the rulebook, most of them give access to specialized spells. I decided a blood mage could summon demons but these demons would have no other power than providing the mage access to certain Entropy spells. The benefit the caster receives is the spell can be cast at half cost, they can treat the school as blood, and they don't need to have the spell themselves or the prerequisite. The downside is, they have to spend actions keeping the demon under control, which could take up their whole turn, and if they fail to do so, the demon could turn on them on the battlefield (gaining all the stats from the Adversaries section).

3. Blood Mages Gain Demon Powers:

I asked the Green Ronin community for feedback on the above specialization. User Ammarath on the Green Ronin Discord came up with the idea of a Blood Mage summoning a demon into their own body to take on its powers. This is an insanely high risk / high reward build, and I would honestly be scared to attempt it as a player for fear of the risk of becoming an abomination. It also requires A LOT of blood. But it's super cool nonetheless.

I gave the player the choice of the three styles, and they went with 2!

Comments

  1. DauntingDecember 22, 2023 at 12:00 AM

    Demon Summoning is lore accurate! There are several examples of summoning across the books and games (E.G the elven blood mage summoning demons to attack you in the Kirkwall alienage). Spirits can be summoned with regular magic, and with blood magic you can take control of the spirit but this invariably corrupts the spirit into a demon if it wasn't one already.

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