LEGATEE — ESSENCER CLASS
Salorras Path: Legatee (the asaar’adins) · 5e 2024 base class: Legatee (a custom Salorras essencer class) The legatee is Salorras’s living wellspring of inborn power — one whose gift sleeps in the blood itself and wakes, often through some fierce or wounding ordeal, into something the world mistakes for a sorcerer or a bard but which is stranger than either. The legatee has no official 5e equivalent: its power is not magic but a bloodborne mastery of the body’s own essence. It is therefore authored here as a custom class built strictly to 5e 2024 design conventions around its unique essence subsystem — the one homebrew class in this book, kept because the essence apparatus is the legatee’s whole reason to exist and 5e has nothing to fold it into. The elite traditions of the gift (the Echoe, the Grafted Agent) are this class’s subclasses — its Paragon Traditions — chosen at 3rd level. (A third legatee-blooded tradition, the Omenar, is a priest-essencer built as a Cleric subclass; it lives with the apostle Path, not here.)
This file is a self-contained 5e 2024 reference. Everything except the essence subsystem follows standard 5e 2024 conventions; the essence catalogue itself — every essence and what it does — lives in the essence catalogue in the Magic section of this system.
Canon note. In Salorras a legatee’s essences are not magic — they are a bloodborne mastery of the body’s own substance, and outsiders only confuse them with arcane casters. Essences are therefore not spells: they don’t use spell slots, can’t be counterspelled or dispelled, function inside an antimagic field, and can’t be scribed onto scrolls or brewed into potions.
The Legatee in the World
Legatees, known in the Free Cities of South as asaar’adins, can reshape the essences that underlie a living body. Through meditation and self-hypnosis they master these essences, weakening and then empowering their own flesh, senses, and mind by methods only a legatee understands. The gift lives in the blood: legend traces it to the Era of the Second Moon, when the starborn Abdri received the boon of the goddess Orya, and his blood became the inheritance of the generations after him. In the last fifty years the gift ceased to be the sole province of Abdri’s line — the Citadel Researchers, through their experiments, propagated the legatee strain into the other peoples of Salorras, even the monstrous ones.
A legatee is usually unaware of the power at first; the gifted blood ignites after some intense or traumatic experience. Legatees tend to be strong-willed, with a flair for leadership and an exotic beauty, and their abilities — flexible enhancement of nearly any physical, sensory, or vital trait — make them superb warriors, spies, or both.
Core Traits
| Primary Ability | Charisma |
| Hit Point Die | d8 per Legatee level |
| Saving Throw Proficiencies | Constitution and Charisma |
| Skill Proficiencies | Choose 2: Acrobatics, Athletics, Deception, Insight, Intimidation, Perception, Persuasion, Stealth |
| Weapon Proficiencies | Simple and martial weapons |
| Armor Training | Light and medium armor, shields |
| Starting Equipment | Chain shirt, spear, shield, 2 daggers, explorer’s pack, 15 GP — or 75 GP |
Hit Points: Start with 8 + Con modifier; gain 1d8 (or 5) + Con modifier per level after 1st.
Why Charisma. Salorras already names Charisma the legatee’s defining trait — it set the number and strength of essences a legatee could command. The gift is a force of personality made flesh, so every essence save and the size of the thalamus key off it.
Becoming a Legatee
The legatee is a martially capable enhancer, not a caster: it wears armor, bears a shield, and closes to melee, buffing itself with essences rather than flinging spells. Because essences are not magic, armor never hinders them, and the class needs no focus. A legatee makes a strong front-line skirmisher or a supremely adaptable infiltrator — the “warrior-spy” of the lore.
Class Features by Level
| Lvl | Prof | Features | 1st | 2nd | 3rd |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | +2 | Essences, Thalamus & Reactor | 2 | — | — |
| 2 | +2 | Essential Grace | 3 | — | — |
| 3 | +2 | Paragon Tradition | 3 | — | — |
| 4 | +2 | Ability Score Improvement | 4 | — | — |
| 5 | +3 | Essential Aura (faint) | 4 | 2 | — |
| 6 | +3 | Catalytic Combustion, Tradition feature | 4 | 2 | — |
| 7 | +3 | Body Restoration (1/long rest) | 4 | 3 | — |
| 8 | +3 | Ability Score Improvement | 4 | 3 | — |
| 9 | +4 | Purity of Body, Essential Aura (moderate) | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| 10 | +4 | Essential Reserve | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 11 | +4 | Wholeness of Body | 5 | 4 | 2 |
| 12 | +4 | Ability Score Improvement | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| 13 | +5 | Body Restoration (2/long rest) | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| 14 | +5 | Diamond Body, Essential Aura (strong), Tradition feature | 6 | 4 | 3 |
| 15 | +5 | Essential Grace (improved) | 6 | 5 | 3 |
| 16 | +5 | Ability Score Improvement | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| 17 | +6 | Undivided Focus | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| 18 | +6 | Tradition feature | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| 19 | +6 | Epic Boon | 7 | 6 | 5 |
| 20 | +6 | Unchanging Flesh | 7 | 6 | 5 |
The three rightmost columns show the essences you can produce per long rest by essence level — the capacity of your thalamus, which grows as the gift matures.
Level 1 — Essences
You do not cast spells. Instead you produce essences within your own body and burn them to enhance your flesh, senses, and mind. Full rules for producing and burning are under How Essences Work below; the essences themselves are catalogued in the essence catalogue.
The essences are grouped into three great families, the essential cores — Physical, Sensorial, and Vital — each with five subcores of related essences. Physical essences improve strength and combat, agility, health and stamina, travel, or toughness against blows; sensorial essences sharpen sight, hearing, taste, touch and danger-sense, or smell; vital essences reshape the organs, bend gravity, expand the mind, or warp space and time.
Essences Known. You know one more essence of each level than you can produce (so at 7th level: five 1st-level, four 2nd-level, and two 3rd-level essences), chosen freely across all three cores. You gain access to 1st-level essences at 1st level, 2nd-level essences at 5th, and 3rd-level essences at 9th. Whenever you gain a legatee level, you can replace one essence you know with another of a level you can produce — a new facet of the gift waking as an old one quiets. Essences are not studied from books and cannot be taught.
Essence Save DC = 8 + your Proficiency Bonus + your Charisma modifier. Essence attack modifier (where an essence calls for one) = Proficiency Bonus + Charisma modifier.
Thalamus and Reactor. At the gift’s awakening your body grows two inner organs: the thalamus, beside the liver, where produced essences are stored — its capacity is the per-level columns of the table — and the reactor, within the stomach, the burner in which essences are combusted.
Level 2 — Essential Grace
Your uncanny vitality steadies you against every kind of harm: you add +1 to all saving throws. This bonus rises to +2 at 15th level (Essential Grace, improved).
Level 3 — Paragon Tradition
You commit to one of the legatee’s elite traditions — an Echoe or a Grafted Agent — as your Paragon Tradition, gaining its feature now and further features at 6th, 14th, and 18th level. In the fiction the tradition’s initiation is woven into your character’s background rather than gated by a level.
Level 4 — Ability Score Improvement
You gain the Ability Score Improvement feature (increase one score by 2, or two scores by 1, to a maximum of 20; or take a feat). You gain this again at 8th, 12th, and 16th level.
Level 5 — Essential Aura
You permanently attune to one essential core (Physical, Sensorial, or Vital). As a Bonus Action you can sacrifice one produced essence of that core to wake an aura around yourself for 10 minutes, affecting you and allies within its radius. Its power and reach grow with your level, but it demands a higher essence to wake:
| Legatee Level | Aura | Radius | Bonus | Essence Sacrificed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5–8 | Faint | 10 ft. | +1 | 1st level |
| 9–13 | Moderate | 15 ft. | +2 | 2nd level |
| 14+ | Strong | 20 ft. | +3 | 3rd level |
The physical aura grants its bonus to Strength and Constitution saving throws and to Athletics checks. The sensorial aura grants its bonus to Initiative and to Wisdom (Perception) checks. The vital aura grants its bonus to Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saving throws, and lets you hold a silent telepathic link with a number of willing creatures within the aura equal to the bonus.
Level 6 — Catalytic Combustion
You can burn an essence catalytically, forcing greater power from it at the cost of endurance: the essence’s effect is strengthened and its duration halved, as noted in its catalogue entry. You declare the choice as the burn begins.
Level 7 — Body Restoration
Your body knits its own substance back together. As an action, once per long rest, you end one effect on yourself that has reduced an ability score or imposed exhaustion (removing one level of exhaustion), or you restore your hit points equal to five times your Charisma modifier (minimum 5). You can do this twice per long rest at 13th level.
Level 9 — Purity of Body
You are immune to nonmagical disease, and you have Advantage on saving throws against poison.
Level 10 — Essential Reserve
Your reactor learns to hold a flame in check. When you burn an essence, you can keep it primed but unignited at no cost; igniting a primed essence later takes no action (once on any turn). You can hold one primed essence at a time, two at 17th level.
Level 11 — Wholeness of Body
You can close your own wounds by will. As a Bonus Action you can heal yourself; you have a pool of healing equal to twice your legatee level that refreshes on a long rest, and you can draw any amount from it with each use.
Level 14 — Diamond Body
Your mastery of your own substance turns your blood to something harder than flesh: you are immune to poison damage and the Poisoned condition.
Level 17 — Undivided Focus
The gift no longer scatters when you are struck. You can concentrate on two essence effects that require concentration at once, and you have Advantage on any saving throw made to maintain concentration on an essence.
Level 19 — Epic Boon
You gain an Epic Boon feat (or another feat of your choice), the standard 2024 capstone progression. The Boon of Fate or the Boon of Irresistible Offense suit the legatee’s blood-driven prowess.
Level 20 — Unchanging Flesh
Your mastery of your own substance becomes total. You no longer age and cannot be aged by any effect; you are immune to being Paralyzed and to magical sleep; and once per long rest, when you produce essences, you can produce them without paying any production penalty.
How Essences Work
Producing essences. Essences are not granted by a deity or written in any book — they are produced within your own body during a long rest, once per day. Production demands a production penalty: a temporary sacrifice of some ability, sense, or trait until your next long rest, noted in each essence’s catalogue entry. During the rest you choose which of your known essences to produce, up to your thalamus’s capacity for each essence level; produced essences remain stored until burned or until you next produce.
Burning essences. Burning a stored essence takes a Bonus Action unless its entry says otherwise, and expends it. Most essences then work passively on you — quickening your limbs, hardening your skin, opening your senses — for the duration in the catalogue; a few burn as an action to affect the world around you. A burning essence can be quenched at will (no action), ending it. Where an essence lets a target resist, the target makes a saving throw against your essence save DC. Some potent essences require Concentration (noted in the catalogue), as a spell would.
Ability Priorities
Lead with Charisma — your whole gift keys off it, from your thalamus to your essence DCs. Constitution for hit points and concentration; Strength or Dexterity for your weapon, since a legatee fights as readily as it enhances. The Echoe leans further into Charisma and foresight; the Grafted Agent leans on Constitution to bear its implanted augments.
Paragon Traditions (choose one at Level 3)
- Echoe — the foresight-touched legatee whose blood reads the moments just ahead; a diviner-skirmisher drawing on the Golden Thread of prophecy.
- Grafted Agent — the pure-blood asaar’adin remade by the Citadel Researchers and the Abominable Brigade, their innate gift fused with grafted steamtech and alchemical augments.
The legatee-blooded Omenar — a priest who marries divine prayer to essence-combustion — is built as a Cleric subclass rather than a legatee tradition, and lives with the apostle Path; a legatee who wants that path multiclasses into Cleric (Omenar).