Arcanist

“Other scholars devote a lifetime to one tradition and call it mastery. I learned two and discovered they were never separate at all.”

Scholars dedicate themselves to the study of magic as a discipline — not a gift, not a birthright, but a craft refined through study, practice, and uncompromising attention to detail. Where warriors train their bodies and knaves train their instincts, scholars train their minds against the architecture of magic itself. An Arcanist is the scholar who refused to stop at one tradition.

Most casters spend their lives within a single magical discipline, learning its forms and respecting its boundaries. An Arcanist studies the boundaries themselves. They learn how Arcane logic interlocks with Primal fury, how Holy weight settles into the structure beneath both, and how a caster who understands the seams between traditions can do things no single-discipline practitioner could ever reach. To watch an Arcanist work is to watch someone read magic the way a master jeweler reads cut stone — patient, precise, and aware of structures the rest of the world can only feel.

Role & Identity

A controlled magical practitioner who masters two disciplines and exploits their intersection. The Arcanist works through Sparks — persistent motes of discipline energy that hang around them as they cast, granting passive benefits that escalate the more of one discipline they hold. They generate Sparks naturally through spellcasting and shape their loadout with the Ignite Spark action, choosing between deep specialization in one discipline or broader coverage across two. As they advance, they gain access to a second discipline at level 4 and eventually all three discipline Sparks at level 7. They lean Exploration and Combat — battlefield control, sustained utility, and adaptable problem-solving — with strong Social applications drawn from their spell selection.

Choose an Arcanist if you want to be the scholar who refuses to pick a side, weaving two magical traditions together with deliberate, patient mastery.

Profession Table

Profession Group: Scholar · Hit Die: 1d4 · Trained DR: Ward · Skills: 2 · Profession Resource: Flux

Linked Paths: Summoner, Bloodweaver, Witchmark, Manashaper, Arcbolt — all currently concept-stage only (name + theme, see /paths/), except Bloodweaver, which already has a landed Path Feature (Blood Magic — see /paths/path-features/).

Magical Discipline (Level 1)

“You don’t choose a discipline. You recognize the one that already chose you, and you study hard enough to deserve it.”

You have devoted yourself to the study of magic. At level 1, choose Arcane or Primal as your starting discipline. You may learn and cast spells from your chosen discipline’s spell list up to the highest Tier available to you, as shown on the Profession Table. You begin with three spells of 1st Tier from your discipline and learn additional spells as you advance.

When you learn a new spell at level-up, you may also replace one spell you already know with another of the same Tier or lower.

Sparks

“They drift around me when I cast — small, bright things, the residue of magic noticed by no one but me. Some scholars laugh. They’ve never seen what happens when I let them gather.”

When you cast a spell, you draw discipline energy into yourself in the form of a Spark — a persistent mote of magical resonance that hovers near you and grants passive benefits while held. Sparks come in three types matching the three magical disciplines: Arcane, Primal, and Holy. Each Spark you hold occupies a Spark slot. At level 1, you have one Spark slot. You gain additional slots at higher levels.

Generating Sparks. Whenever you cast a spell, you immediately generate one Spark of that spell’s discipline at no additional cost. You may also generate additional Sparks of that same discipline by paying 1 extra Flux per additional Spark at the time of casting. Sparks may also be generated through the Ignite Spark action. At level 1, you may only generate Sparks of your starting discipline.

Holding Sparks. Sparks persist until displaced. Their effects are passive and always active while held. When a new Spark would be generated and all of your Spark slots are full, you choose one existing Spark to release and replace.

Stacking Effects. When you hold multiple Sparks of the same discipline, their effects accumulate. Holding two Arcane Sparks grants both the 1-Spark and 2-Spark Arcane effects simultaneously.

Arcane Sparks

Primal Sparks

Holy Sparks

Ignite Spark

“A lesser caster waits for the right spell to fall into their hand. I just reach into the air and pull what I need.”

You may shape a Spark from raw magical potential rather than waiting for spellcasting to produce one. Ignite Spark is a Magic Action that costs 1 AP. When you take this action, choose any number of Sparks to generate from disciplines you have access to. For each Spark generated, you spend 1 Flux. The Sparks you generate may be of different disciplines.

At level 1, you may only ignite Sparks of your starting discipline. At level 4, you gain access to your second discipline through Convergence. At level 7, Threefold Mastery extends your access to the third discipline.

(See /moments/combat/actions/ignite-spark.md for the combat-action write-up — that file was migrated already, held at draft pending this profession landing, and is promoted to locked alongside it.)

Convergence (Level 4)

“The boundaries between traditions are real, but they are not walls. A diligent mind can learn to stand on both sides of the line at once.”

At level 4, your study deepens to encompass a second magical discipline. Choose a second discipline from those available to you — if you began with Arcane, you may choose Primal or Holy; if you began with Primal, you may choose Arcane or Holy. From now on, you may learn and cast spells from this second discipline as freely as your first, and you may generate Sparks of this discipline through spellcasting or the Ignite Spark action.

You also gain a second Spark slot, allowing you to hold two Sparks simultaneously. You may hold Sparks of different disciplines at the same time, gaining the passive effects of each.

Threefold Mastery (Level 7)

“I never learned to cast their spells. But I learned what their magic feels like, and that turned out to be enough.”

At level 7, your understanding of magic has deepened beyond the two traditions you cast from. You now perceive the structure of the third discipline — the one you did not choose at level 1 or level 4 — clearly enough to draw it into yourself, even though you cannot cast its spells. You may now generate Sparks of any of the three disciplines through the Ignite Spark action.

You also gain a third Spark slot, allowing you to hold three Sparks simultaneously.

Additionally, when you cast a spell, you may choose to generate a Spark of either of your two casting disciplines rather than the discipline that matches the spell. Your mastery of magic has grown sufficient that the discipline imprint of your casting is yours to direct.

Apex Invocation (Level 10)

“They asked me whether I would learn restraint at my age, or learn to go further. I chose further.”

At level 10, you may now cast 5th Tier spells. You learn one 5th Tier spell from a discipline you have access to, and may learn additional 5th Tier spells as you advance.

Where other scholars must choose between deeper specialization and reaching the highest tier of spellcraft, the Arcanist makes no such trade. You simply continue past the threshold others stop at.

Apex Convergence (Level 12, Capstone)

“I held three at first. Then four. The fourth never settles — it drifts at the edge of the others like a fourth note in a chord that should not exist. And yet, it sounds.”

At level 12, you reach the culmination of your mastery. You gain a fourth Spark slot, allowing you to hold four Sparks simultaneously. Discipline effects still cap at three Sparks of a single type — the fourth slot is reserved for mixing, for holding Sparks of multiple disciplines while still maintaining peak depth in one.

Design Notes for Future Work

Arcanist carries no in-file design notes of its own on either source — the cleanest of the four professions landed so far. Two small items surfaced during migration, neither of them design gaps:

1. A naming inconsistency, corrected on landing, not flagged as open. The live Notion page’s own Role & Identity prose said the profession “shapes their loadout with the Invoke Spark action” — but the feature itself is named Ignite Spark everywhere else on the page, in the local cross-check doc, and in the already-migrated ignite-spark.md combat action. Read as a stray leftover from an earlier name, not a live alternate name; used Ignite Spark consistently throughout.
2. Two Scholar professions have now independently landed on level 10 for Tier 5 spell access (Arcanist’s Apex Invocation here; Lux’s Higher Calling for the Lector Calling). design/open-questions.md’s existing “Scholar-only Tier 5” item was framed around a group-wide perk at “level 10, maybe 11” rather than each profession’s own capstone-adjacent feature — worth a look now that two data points exist, though this doesn’t retire that question by itself (Warden hasn’t landed, and a shared group perk is a different mechanism than two professions convergently choosing the same level for their own features).