The next two characters expand a bit on the whole magic thing - one is another magician and also touches on the subject of souls, the other is very much the quintessential healing priest, but with a little twist. They are both part of the last group, the “dungeon delvers”. Members of this group are level 3.
This first character is a Clockwork. Essentially a robot, that is powered by a soul.
As I already mentioned, in the lore of SotDL, most mortal ancestries have souls. There is a cycle of reincarnation going on. After death, souls get trapped in hell; they are cleansed of corruption and forget their former lives before they are released back to reincarnate.
Clockworks are created by building a Mechanical Body and then magically retrieving a soul from the underworld and then magically storing/imprisoning it in said body. Sometimes these souls retain knowledge of who they were. The Mechanical Bodies are usually cumbersome, but not having a biological body has its advantages. Also, usually these bodies are in a familiar humanoid shape, but there are no limits.
One special piece each of these bodies has is a Key which needs to be turned for the Clockwork to be active. Instead of dying the key stops and the Clockwork turns into an object without any agency, until someone turns the key again. Notably, Clockworks can turn their own keys, as they are normally placed somewhere out of reach.
For the novice path this one is another Magician, but unlike the last one this one isn’t vanilla, but takes advantage of the specialized alternative talents. I intend for this character to also use the Fire tradition, so not too much new here, but the other one is the Arcana tradition and this is the one I take the alternative talents for.
Arcana is about enhancing other magic and general magical utility. I replace Cantrip with Arcana Focus which means this character gets to learn less rank 0 spells, but they can cast the ones learned more often. Sense Magic is replaced by Dismiss Magic which is fairly self explanatory - can not detect magic, but can disable it. Lastly Spell Recovery is replaced by Magical Rejuvenation which changes the way spells are regained - instead of just regaining one casting the character regains a casting of each spell used for 1 round(/within the next 10 seconds) after using the talent.
For the expert path at level 3 I choose Magister, a magic path that is not focused on mastering a specific tradition, but instead on defense, especially against dark magic.
In terms of spells, for Fire this character gets Fire Missile like the last one, but also Fire Blast, Sword of Fire and Fiery Volley. For Arcana I choose Helping Hand, Arcane Armor, Arcane Sight (which kinda replaces Sense Magic) and Potent Magic.
On the tables I rolled that the soul for this character was ripped from hell and is corrupt, which means this Clockwork will be weeping blood. Fun. Also I rolled Wilderness - Refugee as a profession and “A silver engagement ring worth 1 ss.” as the interesting thing.
My thoughts are that this is someone who came from far away and found a partner here. After the original body of this soul had died the partner tried to return it to life in form of a Clockwork.
Huệ came into this land quite some time ago, originally running from dark events happening in her old home. She arrived in Llynburgh and found a new home here. A partner and teacher who taught her the history of this land and instructed her in arcane and fire magic.
Even though everything seemed peaceful, misfortune struck. At first it came to a deadly accident after which her partner put all his effort in the construction of a finely crafted clockwork body and to return her soul to this body as soon as possible. Secondly, shortly after her soul was saved, the city fell into darkness and during this second escape, she lost her partner.
Now, after a couple years has passed and the city is destroyed, she has returned, to find out what exactly happened and maybe to find remains of that short, peaceful period in her life.