Occulant - Rank 2

Your next kill changes everything.

— Occultant divination

An occultant tracks the creatures and foes that a franchise has bested or killed, weighing them against the deeds the franchise has achieved. Using the eldritch abacus for which this position is named, an occultant measures the karmic coordinates of their franchise, hoping to gain portents of that which is yet to come.

Like all occultants, you are a grim and enigmatic figure. Even your closest companions might be wary of the power you channel — and nobody wears that aura of dark mystery like you do. You help advance your franchise by determining whether foes should live or die, prognosticating correctly (or at least authoritatively), keeping the rest of the party attuned to the importance of karma, and making the right calls on how best to “clean up” any incorrect readings or misunderstandings.

Noteworthy Occultants: Talanatha Three-Coins

Essential Functions: Track kills; assess the value to the franchise of the living and the dead

Position Proficiency: In addition to the proficiencies noted below, you can add your proficiency bonus to an ability check to intimidate a creature close to death, assess what disease or poison killed a creature, or explain what that dead body is doing under your bed at the inn.

Proficiencies and Starting Equipment

As a rank 1 occultant, you gain proficiency with one of the following of your choice: cook's utensils, leatherworker's tools or weaver's tools..

Head office also grants you the use of a tool kit for your chosen proficiency, a merchant’s scale, five waterproof belt pouches in which to store creature parts or other tools, and a unique item known as an occultant abacus (sometimes just referred to as an occultant), whose beads resemble tiny skulls.

Read the Kill

Also at rank 1, your occultant abacus not only tracks your franchise’s kills, it helps you determine the impact of those kills on the franchise’s fate. Over a period of 1 minute, you can study a creature killed by someone in your franchise within the last 24 hours, then grant the character who slew it a d10. Once within the next hour, that character can add the d10 to an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw. If it’s not clear who administered the killing blow, you grant this benefit to a random creature involved in the fight. Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.

TALANATHA THREE-COINS

Tiefling Occultant (Paladin)

Occultants know that the unsettled feeling in the pit of your stomach comes from somewhere and has a purpose — and nobody can measure out and use that purpose like they can. As Talanatha “reads” fallen foes, she charts her party’s cosmic effects and can even try to smooth out the fabric of causality. As a tiefling, she often generates a kind of ambient unease in others, but she is always certain to account for this carefully, lest it bloom into “the unforeseen” that is the enemy of every enterprise.

Ways to Read the Kill

Eldritch Occultant

Starting at rank 2, your occultant abacus becomes an uncommon magic item that can track lives both eliminated and saved. While holding your occultant abacus within 5 feet of a creature killed within the past 24 hours, you can cast the augury spell. The course of action you inquire about with the spell does not need to have any connection to the dead creature. This property of the occultant abacus can’t be used again until the next dawn.

Bring Out Your Dead

Also at rank 2, you regain the use of your Read the Kill feature after you finish a short or long rest.