Soul Salvager (3.5e Prestige Class)

Author: Luigifan18 (talk) Date Created: November 18, 2015 Status: Complete aside from fluff Editing: Clarity edits only please

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An agent of religion who seeks to destroy pact magic by restoring the vestiges binders draw their power from to reality. Ironically, he has to be a binder himself in order to achieve his goal, and his actions are motivated just as much by a desire to help the vestiges themselves as a desire to eliminate the heretical practice of soul binding. 10 6 Moderate Good Poor Good

Divine Spellcasting,

"Pact Magic" is not in the list (Prepared Arcane Spellcasting, Spontaneous Arcane Spellcasting, Prepared Divine Spellcasting, Spontaneous Divine Spellcasting, Arcane Spellcasting, Divine Spellcasting, Prepared Spellcasting, Spontaneous Spellcasting, Alternate Magic, Psionics, ...) of allowed values for the "Class Ability" property.

Full

Soul Salvager

As a general rule, organized religions hate pact magic, and want to see it eradicated forever. After all, vestiges are beings that don't really exist, and are beyond the reach of the gods. Drawing upon their power is completely insane, and risks making reality more or less devour itself. (That, and it undermines the influence of the gods, which makes their clerics furious... outraged... sick with anger!!!)

But do the vestiges really deserve the hate and scorn they get? They were once perfectly ordinary beings who met an end so horrific, it catapulted them right out of existence. Now, all they want is a taste of reality, which they can only get by attaching themselves to the souls of others and essentially hitching a ride. This is the basis of pact magic, and it's not really the vestiges' fault that they are they way they are. If anything, they're the real victims of pact magic; they're essentially being exploited by godless heathens. Perhaps something can be done to restore them to reality, rebuilding their shattered souls. And, of course, making sure those goddamned binders can't use them anymore.

That is the mission of the soul salvager — to obliterate pact magic at its source by rescuing the vestiges they rely on from nonexistence. In fact, rescuing the vestiges is both a means and an end. The only problem is, he's going to have to employ pact magic himself in order to do it. Can he stay in the good graces of his church, even as he dabbles in the power forbidden by the gods?

Becoming a Soul Salvager

The soul salvager is something of an oxymoronic, paradoxical pariah. He studies pact magic with the ultimate goal of sabotaging it by rescuing the vestiges from its grip. This makes him very unpopular both among binders (he's trying to destroy pact magic itself) and among clerics (he's using pact magic). But until he has the power he needs to pull a vestige into reality, he has to make do with borrowing their power, like any other binder, and utilizing pact magic in tandem with his divine magic to fend off his enemies. Interestingly, the soul salvager is sort of an opposite of the anima mage; where the anima mage uses vestiges to enhance his arcane spellcasting, often to the detriment of the vestiges, the soul salvager uses divine magic to fuel his most noteworthy and fascinating ability — the ability to forcibly sever the pact between a vestige and a binder, something that would otherwise be utterly impossible. Furthermore, the soul salvager is an advocate of the vestiges; in his mind, they are hapless victims who have suffered the most terrible of fates, and are now having metaphorical salt rubbed in their wounds by the practice of pact magic.

Because he represents a fine line between divine and pact magic, the soul salvager needs the exact same ability scores that divine magic users and binders do — primarily Wisdom and Charisma.

Entry Requirements

Alignment:	Any nonevil.
Skills:	Concentration or Pactcraft 6 ranks, Knowledge (the planes) 6 ranks, Knowledge (religion) 6 ranks.
Feats:	Willing Influence.
Spellcasting:	Ability to cast 2nd-level divine spells.
Patron:	Must have a patron deity.
Special:	Ability to bind 2nd-level vestiges.

Table: The Soul Salvager

Hit Die: d8

Level	Base Attack Bonus	Saving Throws			Special	Spellcasting
		Fort	Ref	Will
1st	+1	+2	+0	+2	Acclimate Vestige +1, Soul Binding +1	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
2nd	+2	+3	+0	+3	Greater Suppress Sign, Soul Binding +2	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
3rd	+3	+3	+1	+3	Acclimate Vestige +2, Soul Binding +3	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
4th	+3	+4	+1	+4	Soul Binding +4	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
5th	+4	+4	+1	+4	Unbind Vestige, Soul Binding +5	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
6th	+5	+5	+2	+5	Acclimate Vestige +3, Soul Binding +6	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
7th	+6/+1	+5	+2	+5	Resist Vestige, Soul Binding +7	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
8th	+6/+1	+6	+2	+6	Consolidate Vestige, Soul Binding +8	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
9th	+7/+2	+6	+3	+6	Acclimate Vestige +4, Soul Binding +9	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
10th	+8/+3	+7	+3	+7	Advanced Unbind Vestige, Embody Vestige, Soul Binding +10	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
Class Skills (4 + Int modifier per level.) Bluff (Cha), Concentration (Con), Decipher Script (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), Disguise (Cha), Forgery (Int), Gather Information (Cha), Knowledge (Int), Listen (Wis), Pactcraft (), Search (Int), Sense Motive (Wis), Speak Language (None), Spellcraft (Int), Spot (Wis).

Table: The Epic Soul Salvager

Level	Special	Spellcasting
11th	Soul Binding +11	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
12th	Acclimate Vestige +5, Soul Binding +12	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
13th	Soul Binding +13, Bonus Feat	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
14th	Reactive Resist Vestige, Soul Binding +14	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
15th	Acclimate Vestige +6, Soul Binding +15	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
16th	Soul Binding +16, Bonus Feat	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
17th	Soul Binding +17	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
18th	Acclimate Vestige +7, Soul Binding +18	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
19th	Soul Binding +19, Bonus Feat	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class
20th	Soul Binding +20	+1 level of existing divine spellcasting class

Class Features

All of the following are class features of the soul salvager.

Soul Binding Bonus: At each soul salvager level, your soul binding ability improves as though you had also gained a level in the binder class. Your soul salvager and binder levels stack to determine your bonus on binding checks, the effectiveness of your vestige-granted abilities, your ability to bind higher-level vestiges, and the number of vestiges you can bind. You do not, however, gain any other benefits that a binder would have gained.

Spellcasting: At each level, you gain new spells per day and an increase in caster level (and spells known, if applicable) as if you had also gained a level in a divine spellcasting class to which you belonged before adding the soul salvager class level. You do not, however, gain any other benefit a character of that class would have gained. If you had more than one divine spellcasting class before becoming a soul salvager, you must decide to which class to add each level for the purpose of determining spells per day, caster level, and spells known. Unlike many prestige classes, this choice is made strictly at the 1st level of soul salvager, and cannot be changed later; it is crucial to a few class features.

Acclimate Vestige (Su): As part of their mission to restore vestiges to reality, soul salvagers seek to give the vestiges they host a stronger taste of reality than those filthy heathens who would heartlessly attach other beings to their souls for the sake of cheap power. Ironically, the vestiges tend to reward this gesture of goodwill with more power. A soul salvager who makes a good pact with a vestige is placed under the vestige's influence anyways, but in exchange, he gets a +1 bonus to attack rolls, saving throws, and checks until the vestige leaves him. These bonuses are increased by +1 at 3rd level and again for every 3 soul salvager levels after 3rd (+3 at 6th, +4 at 9th, etc.). However, if the soul salvager acts in a manner contrary to the vestige's influence, his bonuses are reduced by +1 per violation, to a minimum of +0 (i.e. no bonus at all); a soul salvager who has made a good pact with a vestige cannot suffer penalties for violating the vestige's influence, only lose his bonuses. These bonuses stack for multiple vestiges (at the cost of the soul salvager having several influences to deal with).
Note that this applies only for good pacts. A soul salvager who makes a bad pact must abide by the vestige's influence or else suffer a −1 penalty to attack rolls, saving throws, and checks, and suffers cumulative penalties for each violation, just like any other binder.

Greater Suppress Sign (Su): Soul salvagers are part of a religious community, and if other clerics learned that the soul salvager was dabbling in pact magic and consorting with vestiges, they probably wouldn't take it well. Which is actually putting it mildly; they would in all likelihood rather lynch him on the spot than listen to his claims that he's working just as hard towards the eradication of pact magic as any other cleric. As such, the soul salvager quickly learns to make sure that his peers don't find out that he's working with vestiges. A 2nd-level soul salvager can suppress the signs of vestiges he makes pacts with, even when he makes a bad pact. Of course, the nature of a bad pact is that the vestige gets to be partially one and the same entity as the binder, and so vestiges don't like it much when their signs are suppressed. When the soul salvager uses this ability to suppress the sign of a vestige which he's made a bad pact with, he takes a −1 penalty to his effective binder level for the purpose of using that vestige's abilities until he stops suppressing that vestige's sign.
(Of course, this only applies to a bad pact; there is no penalty for suppressing the sign of a good pact.)

Unbind Vestige (Su): Opposing other binders is a core facet of the soul salvager's mission. After all, binders attach vestiges to their souls for petty gain. As the soul salvager's relationship with the vestiges grows — specifically, by the time he's reached level 5 — he can use it to attempt to coax a vestige to leave another binder, using his own divine magic to supply the energy needed to sunder the pact.

To attempt to unbind a vestige, the soul salvager must first identify the vestige in question. Once the soul salvager knows what vestige an enemy binder has bound, he can attempt to unbind it. In order to do so, he must be bound to that vestige himself, as he must be able to communicate with the vestige and request for it to leave the enemy binder. Since vestiges can't leave a binder of their own volition until the pact naturally ends, the soul salvager has to supply some sort of energy to break the pact. Thankfully, the soul salvager's patron deity can help him to generate that energy.

As a full-round action, the soul salvager can designate a vestige he has identified on an enemy binder within Long Range, which he himself must also have bound, and expend some of his divine energy in the form of a divine spell slot. (Expending a spell slot in this way is not the same thing as actually casting that spell.) This acts as a catalyst for the chosen vestige to leave an enemy binder before its pact has expired, causing the soul salvager and enemy binder to make opposed binder level checks as the pact tries to withstand the assault. The soul salvager gets a bonus on his check equal to twice the level of the divine spell slot he sacrificed to use this ability. (Note that this cares about the actual level of the sacrificed spell, not the level of the spell slot it was prepared in or cast with, and metamagic other than Heighten Spell does not cause a spell to be treated as having a higher spell level for this purpose.) The enemy binder gets a bonus on his check equal to the vestige's level, plus ¼ of its binding DC (rounded down); if he belongs to a prestige class which is devoted to the vestige (such as knight of the sacred seal (with the chosen vestige selected as the patron vestige), scion of Dantalion (Dantalion), or tenebrous apostate (Tenebrous)), he gets an additional +4 bonus.

If the soul salvager wins, the enemy binder's pact with the chosen vestige is broken, as if by the Expel Vestige feat. The enemy binder takes the full penalties of expelling a vestige with Expel Vestige (even if he has Improved Expel Vestige), and does not use up a usage of Expel Vestige if he actually has it.

If the enemy binder wins, the soul salvager's pact with the chosen vestige is strained. If he had made a good pact with the vestige, it becomes a bad pact, instantly costing him whatever Acclimate Vestige bonuses he had from that vestige. If his pact with the vestige is bad (either by being a bad pact in the first place or having already failed to unbind the vestige from a foe), he is treated as having violated the vestige's influence, suffering a −1 penalty to attack rolls, saving throws, and checks until his pact with that vestige ends. As normal for influence violations, this penalty can stack with itself.

The opposed binder level check for Unbind Vestige is treated like a binder level check to bind the vestige in the first place. Any bonuses or penalties to binder level that specifically apply to binding checks (such as having the Skilled Pact Making feat) apply to the opposed check for this ability, and if both the soul salvager and enemy binder fail to beat the vestige's binding DC, both of them lose the opposed check and suffer the consequences, regardless of which one of them rolled the higher result. If both the soul salvager and the enemy binder beat the vestige's binding DC, and their check results are tied, both of them win the opposed check, and nothing happens except for the soul salvager having wasted a full-round action and divine spell slot. (This is an exception to the usual rules for tied opposed checks.)

• Advanced Unbind Vestige (Su): At 10th level, the soul salvager has built up quite a reputation among the vestiges; they know that he's a person who is firmly on their side. Because the vestiges themselves have faith in him, the soul salvager can unbind a vestige on an enemy binder that he doesn't currently have bound himself. However, because of the difficulty in communicating with a vestige in the absence of a pact, he suffers a −4 penalty on his opposed check for doing so. Furthermore, in the absence of a pact with the vestige to be unbound, the soul salvager suffers different (and harsher) consequences for failure. If the soul salvager loses the opposed check for a vestige he doesn't have bound, he loses one divine spell slot of the same level as the vestige (for instance, if he fails to unbind a 6th-level vestige, he loses a 6th-level spell slot). If he prepares divine spells, he chooses which spell is lost. If he doesn't have a divine spell slot of that level available to lose, he instead takes Xd6 backlash damage, where X is the level of the vestige (for example, a 6th-level vestige would inflict 6d6 backlash damage). Backlash damage cannot be resisted by any means, and a character killed by it loses an extra level if and when he is brought back to life.

Resist Vestige (Ex): A 7th-level soul salvager has grown popular enough among the vestiges that they don't particularly want to hurt him. A binder who attempts to use a vestige-granted ability against the soul salvager must succeed on a binder level check against a DC of (10 + soul salvager's class level + soul salvager's Wisdom modifier), or else that use of the ability fails to have any effect against the soul salvager. (Essentially, he gets a sort of spell resistance that applies to vestige-based attacks.) Note that this only applies to vestige-granted abilities, not supernatural special attacks in general (for instance, it provides no protection from a shadowcaster's mysteries).

• Reactive Resist Vestige (Ex): A 14th-level soul salvager can draw upon his god's power to enhance his resistance to vestige-based attacks. As an immediate action, the soul salvager can sacrifice a divine spell slot to increase his vestige resistance by the level of the sacrificed spell (not the sacrificed spell slot) for 1 round. Like most immediate actions, this ability cannot be used if the soul salvager is flat-footed.

Consolidate Vestige (Su): At 8th level, the soul salvager doesn't even need to actively rend enemy binders' pacts asunder to keep them from employing their pact magic. When you are bound to a vestige, your presence draws the fractured fragments of the vestige to yourself and makes it more whole while preventing others from accessing their abilities. Creatures bound to the same vestige as you that are within 60 ft automatically have their vestige suppressed and are unable to activate any of their abilities, as if they were no longer bound to the vestige; you do not need to identify the enemy binder's vestige to absorb and suppress it in this manner. This lasts until they leave the area, and you can choose to exclude creatures from its effect. Indeed, while you have suppressed an enemy binder's vestige with this ability, you can't attempt to completely unbind it (though suppressing it is almost as good most of the time, and due to the way this ability works, helps to "pseudo-identify" enemy binders' vestiges by narrowing down possibilities).

Embody Vestige (Sp): A 10th-level soul salvager is capable of creating living vessels to act as hosts for vestiges, giving them a unique autonomy they lack when simply bound as a vestige. This functions like simulacrum, except it has none of the soul salvager's class features except for Consolidate Vestige. Instead, it is permanently bound to a single vestige of your choice, and takes on the full mannerisms and influence of the vestige in question, while expressing a more extreme form of their sign. They have a binder level equal to your own level, and while they are still technically under your control (as per simulacrum), they show and express a great deal of their own will, personality, and motives.

You can only have one simulacrum per vestige; if you want to make a new simulacrum for a vestige, you must first destroy the old one. You can only maintain control over a number of these simulacra equal to the number of vestiges that you would be able to bind. If you exceed your limit, the oldest simulacrum fully breaks free from your control, effectively becoming an NPC, and will begin to pursue its own agenda, regardless of whether that agenda helps or hurts you. An embodied vestige that is out of your control still prevents you from creating a new simulacrum for that vestige.

Bonus Feats: <- any bonus feats gained in pre-epic levels->.

The epic soul salvager gains a bonus feat (selected from the list of epic soul salvager feats) every 3 levels after 10th.

Epic Soul Salvager Bonus Feat List: <-list of bonus epic feats->

Ex-Soul Salvagers

Being a soul salvager requires one to strike an extremely fine balance between one's devotion to pact magic and divine magic. Delve too deep into pact magic, and you're little more than one of the many ex-clerics (or druids, or paladins, or rangers, or whatever) who got a bit too intrigued by pact magic and fell to the temptation. Focus too much on your religion, and you're basically just another of those ultra-religious types who has a major bone to pick with anyone who uses pact magic, except you're a hypocrite because you use pact magic yourself. (Sure, soul salvagers consider pact magic to be heretical, just like most other clerics, but what sets the soul salvager apart is that he doesn't think the vestiges themselves deserve the bad rap they get; he considers the vestiges to be unfortunate victims, and other binders to be power-hungry fools who take advantage of the vestiges' plight for their own petty gain.) As such, if your levels in binder exceed your levels in the divine spellcasting class your soul salvager levels are applied to by more than 3 (or your levels in your divine spellcasting class exceed your levels in binder by the same amount), you lose the balance of viewpoints that is required in order to pursue the mission of the soul salvager, and as a consequence, you lose the soul salvager's unique class features and cannot advance in soul salvager (though you still get to apply your soul salvager level to both your binder level and divine caster level). Prestige classes that advance your binder level or divine spellcasting class count as levels in binder or your divine spellcasting class, respectively, for the purpose of determining whether or not you are out of balance. You regain your soul salvager features as soon as your binder levels and divine spellcasting levels return to being within 3 of each other. (If you have levels in multiple divine spellcasting classes, only your levels in the class you apply your soul salvager levels to are considered when determining whether your devotion to pact and divine magic is imbalanced.)

Campaign Information

Soul Salvager Lore

Characters with ranks in Knowledge (the planes) or Knowledge (religion) can research soul salvagers to learn more about them. When a character makes a skill check, read or paraphrase the following, including information from lower DCs.

Knowledge (the planes or religion)

DC	Result
11	Soul salvagers are divine spellcasters who also utilize pact magic.
16	Because most major religions oppose pact magic, soul salvagers are inherently heretical. Yet they remain just as devoted to their churches as any other cleric (though they do not want their churches to find out what they're up to, for obvious reasons).
21	Soul salvagers are hated by other binders, and the hatred is mutual. Soul salvagers hunt other binders with a zeal unmatched by any other cleric, for reasons that only they seem to understand; in turn, the binders are desperate to exterminate the soul salvagers, considering them to be a grave threat to their way of life.
26	The ultimate goal of a soul salvager is to rescue the vestiges from the realm of nonexistence they are trapped in, and cause the vestiges to become the beings that they once were. Of course, it is not quite possible to do that, but the soul salvager can come close — he can create a new body for a vestige to inhabit, and strip pieces of a vestige away from other binders to make the piece he hosts more whole.
31	Few soul salvagers want to consider this, but there are some vestiges that it would be a very bad idea to set loose upon the world. Seriously, could you imagine if Acererak returned and got the Tomb of Horrors up and running again, or Shax resumed bullying the storm giants and driving them to conquer everything in sight? The results could be unspeakably horrific! And the gods would not be happy about the resulting multiverse-spanning mess...

Soul Salvagers in the Game

Soul salvagers are essentially divine spellcasters who have delved into pact magic without abandoning their faith. Quite the opposite, actually; they seek to use pact magic to advance the goals of their faith — which, considering that we're talking about organized religion here, probably includes the eradication of pact magic. Soul salvagers play a very similar role in the world as witch slayers, hunting other binders and destroying them, while also trying to avoid being outed as being binders themselves.

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