So here's the deal. I want to include naming and sympathy from The Kingkiller Chronicles in a campaign I'll be running. They will not be tools that can be used willy nilly like in the books, but they will be available on the "once every long/short rest" kind of basis depending on level. The purpose of this is to make things a little more fun and include a small plot device that can make things more interesting. I would love some weigh in from other people who have read the books about how to keep these rules interesting and fun. I expect the spell to be just a little bit broken and a good/fun storytelling tool. PLEASE NOTE: I just want constructive feedback guys. Please don't get nasty. 

Below is the first draft of my Sympathy Rules.

Sympathy

Sympathy is the art of connecting two similar objects (or sometimes creatures) using your mental strength (alar). To perform this spell you will need:

1. An object that you can make a mental/elemental connection with your target.
2. A heat source. The stronger the heat source the easier it will be.
3. A mind that can will things to be.

Connecting to objects that are alike is not difficult. A stick can be easily connected to a stick. But when connected those things become the same weight. If connected, a small rock will become as heavy as a boulder. If one coin is connected to another coin, they will both weigh the same as two coins. Connecting living things together is difficult, but can be done. However, this form of sympathy is considered dark and is illegal within the arcane community. Player casting sympathy may explain what they would like to do and results are up to the DM. These rolls will be charisma checks but intelligence will be required to understand connections occasionally.

Simple connections would be to elements that are either the same (two rocks, two sticks) or two halves of the same object. Charisma DC 16 (Heat requirement: Small. Candle, lamp, etc.)

More difficult connections would be connecting things that are a bit of a stretch or small creatures with a will (a feather to a bird, a piece of wood to a wooden door). Until the player reaches level 6, these checks are made with disadvantage and the caster receives one level of exhaustion until they complete a long rest. Charisma DC 20 (Heat Requirement: Torch, Brazier, campfire.)

Legendarily difficult connections cannot be made below level 6. An intense heat source is needed to perform these connections and the check requires an intelligence check before the charisma check. DC 18/DC 26. In addition, the caster will receive one level of exhaustion. Two if the heat source is not strong enough. (Heat requirement: An immense fire, magical/arcane heat.)

Blood may be used for heat, but the caster must succeed on a constitution saving throw or get binder’s chill. DC 20 (simple)/25 (Difficult)/30 (Legendary) Each fail on the save adds a level of exhaustion. Three fails and the caster falls unconscious and must make death saving throws.

Anybody?

I would love to see this fleshed out. I bet Pat already knows exactly how he would setup the rules for Sympathy and Naming in an RPG. Note: Harass Pat about a KKC RPG book. 

For Sympathy and a characters Alar I might want to move towards something like spell and spell slots.

A Spell might be something along the lines of the "Sympathetic Binding of Parallel Motion" which allows the player to move two items that they have linked. 

A simple binding might just expend a lvl 1 spell slot but a more complex binding would need a higher level spell slot. If the character has expended all of their spell slots perhaps allow them to convert HP or Hit Dice into additional bindings as they use the heat from their own bodies.

If they had an outside heat source like a bonfire or a poorboy would give them access to more spell slots but not more concurrent bindings then their alar can handle. 

As far as how many bindings a character can do at a time perhaps something like their INT modifier with a +1 every 5 or 6 levels. At low level you would only be able to maintain a few bindings but a Master could handle 5 or 6. Your PC's would likely better then the common rabble at the university and would have an Alar like a Blade of Ramston steel. 

I like it! Thank you!

I think the sympathy checks are too difficult. You could homebrew a wizard subclass that can sacrifice spell slots to use sympathy. Naming should be something like a daily d100 roll that determines your skill at naming that day. 100 means you learn a new name and gain mastery over the old one. That could be your naming level. Dang, now i want to make this! It would be a class. Maybe regular xp could be replaced by naming xp!

I've been attempting to create a Sympathist class for the past two weeks or so. And the recurring problem I run into, is that its nigh impossible to combine playability and the actual concept of the Sympathist. The Sympathist is such a versatile class that the sky (your DM's imagination and tolerance) is the limit of what it could do.

The issue with this conceptually true, versatile approach is that it relies so heavily on the DM knowing about the KKC series, or having studied whatever source Patrick might have pulled the idea from. Then, if you try to limit the sympathist to fit more easily into D&D, you run into other problems. What of abilities will the class have? How do bindings work? How do you  acurately translate number of times a character can split their mind, and their A'lar? How should bindings be balanced? 

Well, I could go on for ages. Long story short, I've found that balance is the problem. Making the class too true to the concept makes it so situational, that its barely playable (because honestly, how often do you bring a bonfires worth of energy with you?). Removing a few of the limiting factors makes it so god damn overpowered that it's laughable. And keep in mind that this is simply Sympathy I'm talking about, the moment you start pulling Naming into the mix, you get the same problems all over again. 

Quote from Athaele>>

(because honestly, how often do you bring a bonfires worth of energy with you?). 

Sympathy requires three things, the A’lar which is the ability to believe in something unwaveringly, regardless of what you might know to be true. The sympathetic link between two things, the more similar, the more effective, a twig broken in two is a perfect example of a good link as it was originally whole. Then depending on the kind of binding you create, you need the requisite energy to make it happen. This energy can come from pretty much any source of heat or kinetic energy. 

That’s about all i can recall and write of the top of my head.

Quote from Athale >>

Sympathy requires three things, the A’lar which is the ability to believe in something unwaveringly, regardless of what you might know to be true. The sympathetic link between two things, the more similar, the more effective, a twig broken in two is a perfect example of a good link as it was originally whole. Then depending on the kind of binding you create, you need the requisite energy to make it happen. This energy can come from pretty much any source of heat or kinetic energy.

The Golden Bough is a book that should descripe the principals of Sympathy.

But that aside, taking some examples of sympathy from the KKC books. The main character uses Sympathy to bind numerous candles, and then snuffing one of them with his fingers to extinguish all of them. After that he keeps the binding on all the candles, and using the heat of his blood ignites them all again.

With a mommet or a doll representing another person, you can afflict all kinds of damage to the doll, and if you keep the A'lar that the doll and person are the same, then that damage is inflicted to the person.

If you carry a brittle piece of iron, while holding the A'lar that both that piece and a sword are the same, you can snap that piece causing the sword to snap as well.

You can bind another humans body to a mommet, and stop this person from moving by opposing their movements by an equal or stronger force, locking them in place. You could also force a person to move against their will in this way.

The main character also does some rather complicated, and largely unexplained bindings between an arrow that he sinks into the ground and an arrow that's been shot into a tree. This piece of sympathy transforms the tree into such an effective lightning rod, that several lightning strikes happen almost instantly and simultaneously.

That's most of the different ones I can think of at the moment.

There is a TLDR at the end if you want to skip straight down.

I've recently re-read both KKC books and was re-inspired to do just this, devise a homebrew Symapthist class. There are however a few big problem I've run into; none of which are really problems with incorporating Sympathy into DnD but problems with Pat Rothfuss' original concept of sympathy. Let me explain.

First, to those who aren't familiar with the concept of sympathy, yes above it is kind of explained, but allow me to elaborate and simplify.

With Sympathy, your power of will is so strong that by believing in something is true, it becomes true. The different kinds of believing are different kinds of bindings; only a few are kind of explained in the book but there seems to be hundreds. But believing in something is only half the battle, the more reasonable the belief, the easier it is to do something with. If I believe my black ballpoint pen is the same entity/object as my second black ballpoint pen, I can bind them with the "parallel motion" binding. Then if I move my first pen 3 inches across the desk, the second pen moves 3 inch across the desk. The pens are so similar I get a "good" and efficient binding. To move the one pen, and thus the second as well, I have to exert force against the first pen equal to the force required to move the weight of both pens. in a separate example, If I believe my first pen is the same as my dog and I try to slide my pen across the desk three inches, the force required to move the pen will be equal to the force required to slide the pen three inches, plus the force required to slide the dog three inches, plus an extra amount of force that is lost in the inefficiency of the binding, because the pen is nothing like the dog and thus hard to believe to be true. In this case its probably more like trying to slide a baby elephant three inches. In order to move the pen-dog binding, I need extra energy. Here is where everything falls apart. We've talked about heat sources but nowhere in the books does Rothfuss explain how energy is actually utilized to move things/do things. There is some kind of energy-to-work binding that is never explained. But more on that later, lets look at these other reason why Sympathy would be so over powered in combat, it wouldn't be viable for a balanced game.

In the first book Kvothe binds the air in his lungs with the air outside. Air has mass to it, and now the air outside (a lot of it, its very heavy) is bound to the air in Kvothe's lungs. If he tried to breath, i.e. move the air in his lungs, he is also trying to move the air outside. With his lungs. Only his lungs. In the book he suddenly can't breath and almost suffocates.

This seems like an easy way to murder F**king everybody. You encounter enemy X, who generally requires air to live. You bind the air in enemy X's lungs to the air around you. Enemy X dies and can't do anything because enemy X can't breathe.

You bind the water in enemy X's blood to the water in a pond. Enemy X's heart can't pump that much liquid. He dies.

Another example of how easy one could use sympathy to kill something is through binder's chills. Binders chills is what happens when you use sympathy to move heat from your blood into another object, i.e. a candle wick, to try to light it on fire, generally heat it up, whatever. During sympathy practice, Kvothe makes a binding that draws the energy from his blood in an attempt to ignite a candle wick. He drains so much body heat that he almost kills himself. Couldn't Kvothe bind say, enemy Y's blood to a large stick and try to light the large stick on fire? You suck the enemy Y's blood of enough heat and enemy Y is dead.

You don't even have to do any elaborate bindings with this, you just choose your energy source as the enemy's blood and then set about attempting to do some extremely inefficient task on purpose, knowing you'll never accomplish the task but you will kill your opponent in the attempt.

Also, with regard to my pen-to-dog example. If you use the parallel motion binding between an enemy and say, a tree, neither the enemy nor tree would be able to move, because to move one would require you to move the other, and unless the enemy is also a tree, the binding would be so inefficient due to a lack of similarity that the amount of energy required to move one/both would be astronomical. Which means, by being bad at sympathy you could paralyze any enemy. And then they wouldn't be able to move their diaphragm to breath. And they would die.

Lets go back to that never-explained heat-to-work binding. How does a sympathist *actual use* a heat source? How do you bind blood to a candle wick? They are nothing alike and thus shouldn't transfer any heat. And if you say "exactly, that why he almost dies of binders chills, the bond is so inefficient that he loses a lot of heat in the process." Okay, fine except every time the book mentions a source, the context seems to me to be implying you have a link between two objects/entities and the sympathist forms a link between a heat source and the initial link, not between the heat source and one/both of the objects. If I could represent what I mean with a drawing it would look like a long horizontal line between two objects, then in the middle of the line, a shorter vertical line would extend straight down (forming a T shape) with the heat source being at the end of the vertical line, show how pushing energy into the original horizontal line, or bin ding. Only one example from the book makes sense to me.

Kvothe lights a large brazier and gets a roaring fire. He lights a candle off the brazier. He binds the candle flame to the brazier's fire; good bond, the candle's flame came from the brazier and is almost exactly the same as the brazier's fire, easy to "believe" the candle flame is the same as the brazier flame. Then he burns someone severely using the small candle flame only. Normally the candle flame would only have the heat of a small fire, because that is what it is, a small candle flame, but instead the candle flame had the heat of a bonfire and burned the heck out of the target. Kinda makes sense, but think about it. He still had to put the target into the fire. He didn't just bind the brazier's heat to the target to burn the target.

So then how are heat sources used in other examples. At one point Kvothe uses the heat of his blood to saw through a bow string. Kvothe bound his bow string to another bow string of an enemy and the binding was bad, so cutting through his single string was like sawing through 10 bow strings; it was hard. So what does he do? He uses a heat source to help him make the cut! He even comments about how he wished he had an extra heat source to help him. But how does he do this?
He pulls heat from his blood, sure. But then what? How does raw thermal energy in his blood translate to his hand/muscles suddenly being strong enough to make the cut through the 10-times-tough string? There must be some binding that is not dependent on similarity (though the books explicitly states that similarity is one of the three key principles to make sympathy work) and can be made between any objects or entities to transfer thermal energy directly into "work".

Here is an example from real life of how we get thermal energy to do work. You light a constant, large, flow of natural gas on fire. If is like a large blow torch on a huge vat of pure water. The pure water vaporizes into steam but the vat is enclose with a pipe leading to a turbine. The pressure builds as the water vaporizes quickly and is forced through the pipe to a turbine. The turbine blades are pushed by the steam, causing the shaft of the turbine to spin. This is "work" (the spinning turbine from thermal energy is work being done), but I'll finish the whole thought to cement the point. The turbine shaft is long and extends out of the turbine into an induction motor. The shaft in the induction motor is connected to copper wires. When the shaft spins so do the copper wires, causing electrical induction to produce an electric charge. The electric charge is sent via wires to a large battery and bam, stored electricity to be used at your leisure. Sympath is supposed to be very scientific and not "storybook magic".

Let say there is a binding called "Thermal energy to Work binding" that allows a sympathist to drain thermal or kinetic energy from any source to exert a separate force on the world. This would explain how heat sources are even relevant to Sympathy.

BUT! By that logic, you could bind a large heat source to anything else and allow the heat source to flow into the target. For example, if this were true, in the instance where Kvothe binds the brazier to the candle, the candle should have burnt up very quickly, consuming wick and wax, because the energy of the brazier (minus wasted energy due to inefficiency in the binding) was directly transfer to the candle.

In all of these instances it seems to me that the bindings allow for an equilibrium to be met. Like if you had a closed bucket of hot water and a closed bucket of cold water, then connected the two via a bar of metal that had 100% perfect heat transfer characteristics. Assuming no energy was lost to the surroundings, eventually the buckets would reach an equilibrium and both would be the same temperature. Heat would transfer form the hot bucket to the cold bucket across the metal.

However, looking back at the inefficiency with regard to binding the brazier to the candle we see another issue; if the brazier was the heat source used to empower the candle, such that the candle could burn a target, but only a fraction of the heat of the brazier was transferred (in this near perfect/really good link), how the heck does Kvothe get any kind of transfer from his blood to a candle wick. (I know it was technically a straw linked to a candle wick, but that is even harder to explain away). A heat-source-to-object binding should be awful per the sympathy rule of similarity. An example of a good binding for heat transfer would be burning candle wick to unlit candle wick in an attempt to light the unlit wick, that is how a heat source would actually work if we went off only what Rothfuss has already revealed. But even in that case, the starting lit candle should dim a bit until the second is lit.

So here is the TLDR bit:

Sympathy has key elements of its working unexplained, that must be rectified for it to be remotely balanced/used.

There appears to be a missing/unexplained thermal-energy-to-external-force binding that must exist for sympathy to work.

Assuming this binding exists, you can kill anything that required body heat (or lack thereof) to survive by either sapping it directly or by flowing in heat directly.

You can kill anything that requires breathing by binding the air in its lungs to the air outside.

You can paralyze any enemy by performing a terribly inefficient "parallel motion" binding between the enemy and a tree/boulder.

A member on Matt mursers live stream used it

In D&D, sympathy is represented by Material components & spellcasting foci, the Energy is represented by spell slots, and A’lar is represented by Spellcasting Ability & “Spellcasting Ability modifier + Proficiency bonus.”

EDIT: It occurs to me that my (infrequent) attempts at brevity usually get taken the wrong way. Please allow me to elaborate:

It has been my experience that D&D typically does not lend itself well to adapting/incorporating other IP, particularly when it comes to magic. I blame the Vancian system. As far back as 2e I have noticed that attempts to make D&D compatible with most other concepts tend to follow one of two typical approaches, and neither usually satisfy anyone.

1. Many attempt to faithfully recreate the original versions of their inspirations in D&D.
2. Many try to shoehorn the original inspiration anyway it can fit within the structure of D&D.

That first method usually fails to fit into D&D well enough to play. Most attempts end up disgustingly over or woefully under powered The creator  ends up upset and confused, and the player often ends up either frustrated, confused, and/or disinterested. That second method usually fits so well into D&D that the soul and feel of the original IP is diluted or abstracted to such an extent that the original is almost unrecognizable on the 

 I have always gotten the best results by trying to walk that line between the two. (results may vary.) When I have gotten it to work has been when  I can throw myself into it for a while and do lots of research. I usually manage to accomplish it by looking for ways to “represent” the original in D&D rather than “recreate” it, and let things “fit” how they want to rather than trying follow a strict adherence out of fear of being lambasted for OP design. 

So, since Sympathy is a form of magic, I would approach it like many other magic in D&D: as a spell/spells. I would find some way to incorporate the Material component aspect of Spellcasting as both a fluid aspect of sympathy, and also a more significant aspect than they are currently for spellcasting. I would directly draw the parallels between A’lar and Spellcasting ability & Proficiency. As to the energy aspect, I would either try to find some way to represent it with Spell Slots or Number of Uses, and maybe tie it to a short rest…? 

The really really tricky part about Rothfus Sympathy as a potential port into D&D is that he just uses a “soft magic” system where it is what he needs it to be at the time and if those are not consistent he doesn’t worry so much about it. Honestly, that’s fine if the readers don’t mind at all. By D&D is a game, and rules for games must be followed or else things break down. 

Good luck.