Blood Mage Class

Disclaimer, this whole thing doesn't really work quite so well if you aren't using James' Death and Dismemberment rules. It requires at least the Death Spiral and So Much Blood sections of the system to work properly, but here's the important parts for this class:

• Each Bleed Token is a type of Death Token that deals you a point of damage at the end of your turn unless you Stay Down and take no actions.
• When at 0 HP, damage that would reduce you to below 0 HP instead causes you to roll all of your accrued Death Tokens (d6s), add the damage you took past 0 HP to the total, and compare that to his death and dismemberment table.

The whole system is really intricate and complicated, but plays well at the table once you get the hang of it. However the only class that really did anything with it was the Barbarian. I felt like it could be used for more though, so I made another class that is built to play with the system in neat ways. Without further ado, The Blood Mage.

(To my players, this is not playable yet, but if you want to playtest it, shoot me a message)

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The Blood Mage

Base Class: HD, Saves and XP track of the Magic-User
Hemophiliac: Bleed dice take twice as much healing to remove from a Blood Mage.
Bleeder: Blood Mages cannot cast any spells that directly recover hit points.
Blood Magic: Blood Mages do not have spell slots, instead using their blood as a conduit for magic. Rather than preparing spells, they can cast any spell they know by gaining a number of bleed dice equal to the spell's level.
Blood Magic (Levelless): (For systems with scaling 1st level spells) This instead allows the Blood Mage to take a number of Bleed Dice equal to the level they want to cast the spell at, up to their own level.

Still a wizard: Blood Mages cannot double up on spells and may flip reversible spells upon casting. They spend the same amount of time on research and transcription as a normal wizard.

Hemophiliac is here to give the class a bit of a drawback to being able to potentially cast a lot of spells. Blood naturally flows out of them, and it can be difficult to keep it in.

Bleeder is another safeguard to keep Blood Mages from being able to infinitely cast spells. I might change this to make healing spells not work on them so they need food, but food heals so well in my game already that I don't think I'll need to.

Blood Magic I think still needs some sort of balancing, but that stems from how I'm still in the middle of flip-flopping between levelless and traditional spells in my system. Should be fixed if I rewrite the spell list, but it'll take a while.

Still a Wizard keeps this as an alternate wizard like muscle wizards or necromancers.