The Tavern

Remove Sublimation of Blood and maybe Petrify from the Book of Alchemy and add Sting and Sticks to Snakes. New magic-user background that focuses on transmutations, with a splash of poison magic.

Alternatively, instead of Sting, give them Beastly Appendage or maybe a new level 1 tmut spell that targets MR to deal wretched status or something, and make them a Warrior-Mage with a weapon, if Sting / Ignite Poison is just too good or having any spells not in theme for a background other than wizard is forbidden.

Could be a fun background. Posted in CYC because it's not a terribly serious suggestion.

I suggest giving it this book:

Sting
Sure Blade
Projected Noise
Mephitic Cloud
Poison Weapon
Invisibility

and name it as the book of Stalking

I was sure someone was going to bring up distillation/evaporate here, but I guess that's up to me.

Stalkers should have been renamed when the spellbook was changed. It's not right to completely change a background but keep the name. Is it too late to file a complaint?

(Now I feel bad about not winning a Stalker, old or new.)

My first win was with a Kobold Stalker! I really kinda miss Distillation/Evaporate though. It was really interesting.

When Stalkers were being removed I went back and played a MDSt for stats. Got the highscore, the only one I've ever had, because literally no one else ever tried to 15-rune a MDSt.

I am an old newbie and I just barely caught the end of evaporation. Why was it removed?

I like spells that let you use every part of the dungeon.

I guess it was considered to be OP.

I think it was more the incredibly tedious playstyle it encouraged (required?).

I think it was that it both gave the player access to an unlimited supply of fog and meph clouds, and also that it encouraged a very tedious playstyle.

the reason evaporate was removed is that it's really hard to find a part of the spell that was actually a good idea

if you bump it up to level 6 as its power level deserves (actually it probably shouldve been level 7, since the two cloud spells are 3-school whereas evap was 2, and evap could also produce miasma clouds from some potions) then it has even more overlap with the existing cloud spells and probably wouldn't see too much use anyway
it also made players go scrounge up a bunch of otherwise-useless items that you would only use for evap
the potions weren't even a real ammo limit, since fulsome distillation existed, so it just used up item slots and encumbrance for no benefit (and encouraged lots of going back to grab the potions you dropped everywhere, because you didn't want to carry all 100 that you had)
if you remove fulsome distillation then the limited ammo + high level spell (after you bump it up to fix its power level) means no one uses it

so yeah