Trilodroid: OSE's Mage Class, gonna try. Here are some ppl's thoughts

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Mage class from Carcass Crawler 1 Zine.

I used mage and acolyte as replacments for standard classes for solo play. Worked wonders in terms of reducing bookkeeping.

I can see the Mage and Acolyte being pretty fun, especially if scrolls are fairly accessible.

Since they can scribe scrolls since level one, they are just a couple dungeon delves away. Also the utilitarian magic abilities really let you be creative with unconventional tactics. I just now remembered I’ve allowed the Gargantua race as class in my OSE campaign with players. They are a cool concept and a nice fighter variant. Wood elf is also allowed but my players are elf and magic averse so it hasn’t seen the table yet :D

The mage seems great if that’s the archetype you want. Very Gandalf. They need scrolls even more than magic users, though.
I’ve got a Mage at my table. Everyone’s having a lot of fun and they seem to enjoy playing one.

BTW, the Kineticist is voted WAY overpowered by like 3+ ppl on there.

Yeah this is a thing people do I believe, I have a mage in my game currently and they have not been able to do much spell wise so far. I thought the price of scribing for a mage was a bit too steep at power level so I changed it from 500gp and a week to active to 10 x the spell level and 1-day per spell level, so a level 3 spell with cost 300gp and take 3 days

Yep! We use a d6 (like thief) for the Mage skills as well, I should have also mentioned that :)

So instead I've tried giving the Mage's skills to the Magic User to give them more utility. I haven't used the Acolyte yet, but I love the idea.

Not so far. The low HP means that lethality is still high, and the Mage's abilities really just add utility. The more powerful abilities are not all that reliable at low levels to become overpowered. So far it's mostly just given my Magic User players a bit more to do at low level.
Having Read Magic available as an ability makes the game a bit more fun too, because Read Magic often reveals interesting things, but using your only lvl 1 spell slot on Read Magic is a painful choice, especially when it doesn't pay off very much.

Trilodroid