College of Tablature

Bards have known for a long time the magic that is hidden within performance and music. However, only the Bards of the College of Tablature have found a way to put this fleeting kind of magic onto paper, creating musical sheets, scores and songbooks, that brim with arcane energy.

Proficient Musician

When you join the College of Tablature at 3rd level, you gain proficiency in the Performance skill.

Arcane Tablature

You have created your own personal Arcane Tablature, in which you keep all the spells you have turned into sheet music. At 3rd level you can scribe into it one Bard spell of your choice. Every time you gain an uneven Bard level, you can transcribe one of your known spells into it and learn a new Bard spell, of a level for which you have spell slots, in its place. Spells you have copied in you book don’t count against the number of bard spells you know. You can cast these spells using your spell slots or through the Arcane Performance feature.

You can create non-magical copies of your Arcane Tablature, which other creatures can only discern from the original with a successful Arcana or Intelligence check against your Spell DC. To anyone that tries to play music from the sheets in your book, the music will appear as just that, music without any arcane bearing. 

If you lose your Arcane Tablature, you have up to 24 hours to recreate the sheets you have stored in there. After that they will start to fade from your memory at a rate of 1 every 2 hours. However, you can turn any copy of your book into your new Arcane Tablature. This takes an uninterrupted magical ritual for one hour. After you finish your ritual, the original book, should it still exist, loses any magical features and turns into a normal copy.

Arcane Performance

The familiarity and personal connection you have to the spells you have written into your Arcane Tablature, allows you to cast them as an Arcane Performance, which does not cost a spell slot.

To do so you take an action spend one use of your Bardic Inspiration and declare what spell you want to cast and at which level. Then roll a Bardic Inspiration Die and subtract 2 from the result. If the result is lower than the level you wanted to cast the spell, the Arcane Performance fails and the attempted performance fades away without impact. Otherwise, the Arcane Performance goes ahead as planned.

Spells that are being cast as an Arcane Performance use your Performance bonus as a spell attack modifier instead of the usual modifier. 

The Spell save DC for an Arcane Performance is changed to 8 + your Performance bonus.

Encore

Starting at 6th level, whenever you successfully perform an Arcane Performance, you can cast another spell of up to 1st level, that would usually cost an action, as your bonus action. Instead of using a spell slot you can choose to expend another use of Bardic Inspiration to cast this spell.

My Own Orchestra

At 14th level, you learn how to teach others to perform your music from your magical tablature. At the end of a long rest, you can transcribe a number of spells equal to half your proficiency modifier, from your Arcane Tablature onto empty pages. These can be any bard spells of up to 3rd level, that require 1 action or bonus action to cast. As you do so, you can determine which creature are able to use it and which are not.

While holding this page, a creature can spend an action to cast this spell, using your Arcane Performance spell attack modifier and spell save DC. If the spell requires concentration, the creature must concentrate. After the spell is used in this way it turns back into an empty page.

Once you use this feature again, all former pages that have been created with this feature lose their power.