The Tavern

The concept behind Castamour is pretty simple: a god that allows you to cast spells ignoring armour-induced casting penalty.

Active powers:

* : Unimpeded Casting. You can choose a spell to cast without armour penalty. You will then be exhausted (downtime). The piety price increases with spell level (from 3 for a lvl 1 spell to 30 for a lvl 9 spell).

**** : Casting time: Removes armour casting penalty on a duration (increased by invo and stoppable when you want). The ability itself is gratis, but, while active, all spells you cast will cost you twice the piety as if cast with unimpeded casting. The advantage is that you don't get exhausted, so you can cast them without a pause (MP costs still apply).


Passive powers:

* : Armour penalty never applies to lvl 1 spells.
*** : Armour penalty never applies to lvl 2 spells.
**** : Armour penalty never applies to lvl 3 spells.
***** : Armour penalty never applies to lvl 4 spells.

Casting Time does not have you pay piety to cast spells you can passively cast without penalty.

Any opinions?

I think I would be more interested in having casting which ignores encumbrance apply to all spells as a passive rather than only some levels. Could be something like removing 20% of armor penalty each * of piety, so at *****. or above encumbrance does not affect you.

Other things which I think would be neat to mix martial combat and magic:

• Incentivizing switching between martial attacks and magic by way of one giving a buff to the other. For example, repeatedly hitting with melee could give you a buff that scales with melee damage done, and is used up when a spell is cast to increase the damage/spellpower.
• Letting you attack and cast at once-casting a spell in a direction also makes you swing your currently held weapon in that direction. Possibly a tempory piety cost buff?
• Making martial skills(perhaps only armor/dodging) crosstrain with Spellcasting?

I think simply removing the armor penalty isn't all that interesting, and on its own isn't strong enough to be an entire god. Also, the armor penalty being removed from low level spells isn't really important - those are the spells you can train enough to negate the penalty for - it's the high level spells you can't ever effectively cast in heavy armor.

Something like shard's suggested free melee attacks in the direction you cast a spell in or casting spells when you attack could be more interesting though.

The deity as written so far is almost completely useless. Nullifying the casting penalty for wearing armor has a very similar effect as both Vehumet's wizardry for qualifying spells and Ashenzari's bonus to magic skills and armour skill, but is much worse at the job in almost all cases before the latest parts of the game. An exhaustion timer on spell use is crippling on all book backgrounds that actually use their spells as their primary source of damage, and improved versions at high piety won't actually help get your hybrid off the ground.

Best case scenario with infinite piety, you're using your god slot to get a wizardry bonus that exactly cancels out your armor penalty. This is pretty weak for your entire benefit from your deity.

I'd recommend sticking with the two deities that already include a similar power in their list of perks, but if you really wanted a deity with an ability that exactly cancels out your armor penalty you should probably stick it as a minor power on a deity with broader utility.

Thank you everyone for the answers. Here's another build:

Castamour the Eagle, God of Freedom

Castamour was a legendarily skilled battlemage and the founder of a military monastic order. His efforts finally led him to illumination, turning him into a guide for whoever wishes to become like he is: fully unencumbered and unchained. He also lends his mastery of battle magic to those who want to blend martial and arcane prowess.

* Armour penalties (see below) reduced by 20% | fighting and spellcasting crosstrain

** Armour penalties reduced by 40% | +40 to MR

*** Armour penalties reduced by 60% | Choose and Inscribe Vessel Weapon (see below)

**** Armour penalties reduced by 80% | +40 more to MR

***** Armour penalties fully removed

****** moar MR?

More stuff I came up with because of the "Freedom" theme but I am not sure about because of how many different effects they are, and they could cause confusion in the player:

* Immunity to curses
** Immunity to entanglement (nets, webs), roots and constriction
*** Immunity to frozen, napalm and petrification
**** Immunity to slow and paralysis (from all sources, magic or poison like curare or hornets)
***** Not slowed or impeded by shallow water
(maybe they could be dumped all together as ****** passives).

Titles

. Moulting (species name)
* Merlin
** Sparrowhawk
*** Goshawk
**** Peregrine
***** Gyrfalcon
****** Soaring Eagle

The main difference is that most armour and shield penalties are gone: Evasion, spellcasting, aim, and attack speed. Stealth penalties should remain or only be halved, because stealth is exceptional defense (also, it would mean that Shadow Dragon Armour would have no stealth penalty and also give you a +++++ bonus, that you can sum with rings and randarts...).

Actives need work. The fluff too.

About martial + magic skill interplay, I need to think a bit about how to make it. There are a couple of ways to do this.
One is delayed spells, stored into a weapon, that come out when you use said weapon. So you store e.g. silence in a dagger, when you run out of MP, you pull out the dagger and silence the whole place.

Another way that I would like more is the ability to inscribe a spell to a weapon. The weapon then behaves like a branded weapon, but you can choose more and more powerful brands (all your spells), like "stone arrow" or "mephitic cloud". You still pay the cost of casting the spell each time the weapon triggers it, but it is cast at the same time as the melee attack. There are some questions: how should spell failure chance influence the weapon activation chance? And how often should the ability be usable/how should it be limited? The options are:
- free use, but it takes turns to inscribe a weapon, so no changes on the fly (like changing armour). I don't like this idea, because spells are better when you can alternate between them (debuff + area attack + single target etc.) On the other hand, you could carry five different scimitars, each inscribed with a different spell while in a safe location, but I think that there also is such a thing as too much swapping. This could be countered by making inscriptions temporary, but I hate charms because they are temporary and you have to recast them before each fight, which is very boring to me.
- drain (so always usable, but with lingering aftereffects)
- small-large piety cost
- MP or HP allocation (every inscribed weapon takes some of yur MP or HP until you delete the inscription)
- The option I prefer: you have to choose a single weapon you can inscribe (let's call it "vessel weapon"). It would work a bit like the "weapon blessing" by TSO etc, with the difference that, if you find a better weapon later, you demote your old vessel weapon and choose a new one (only one vessel weapon at a time, no costs for changing it). Inscribing a spell is instantaneous, but takes piety.

I would add that the vessel weapon skill crosstrains with the primary school of the inscribed spell.

Should the vessel weapon possibly be an artifact?

The vessel weapon could have an evocable option to disable it (to give the player better MP management).

There should be no way to waste MP by spell failure when using the vessel weapon. It's better to lower trigger chance instead.

Maybe a general spellpower increase as you gain piety or vessel weapon skill?

If there's no cost for changing a vessel weapon and you can do it more than once, why have only one weapon enabled for this behavior at once? Seems like more hassle whenever you wanna switch weapons for not much reason.

just look out if the band starts playing "the rains of castamour"