Order of Scribes Wizard Handbook: DnD 5e Subclass Guide – RPGBOT

Introduction

If you want to collect every wizard spell every published (like me), Order of Scribes is a great choice. They get some unique capabilities to address many challenges commonly faced while adventuring, but they’re not focused on any one small part of wizardry. Rather, Order of Scribes is a sort of generic wizard subclass that emphasizes, complements, and celebrates some of the best things about being a wizard (like collecting all of the spells).

Order of Scribes has a unique balancing mechanic: knowing more spells makes you more powerful. Sure, rituals work for any wizard, and having access to more spells makes you more able to adapt to challenges. But Order of Scribes goes beyond that. Having an abnormally large number of spells in your spellbook allows you to change the damage type of spells, and at high levels to negate damage by temporarily blocking off access to spells in your spellbook. Due to these unique mechanics, you’re dependent on learning as many spells as you possibly can. Expect to spend gold and time putting spells into your spellbook at every opportunity.

Unfortunately, that unique capability comes with risk. The Wizard learns a total of just 44 spells by the time they reach 20th level unless you can add additional spells to your spellbook. Depending on the game you’re in, you may never get access to ways to add more spells to your spellbook (other wizards’ spellbooks, spell scrolls, etc.). In campaigns which take place in the wilderness or in a megadungeon, Order of Scribes is a risky choice. In games set in cities with libraries or wizard schools, easy access to spellbooks will make the Order of Scribes effective, reliable, versatile, and fun. If you don’t know the nature of the campaign, check with your DM before you commit to this. You will eventually get access to things like teleportation and then you may be able to go looking for sources of new spells, but you probably don’t want to suffer the total absence of options until that point.

Taken as a whole, Order of Scribes is very much the “wizard’s wizard”. If you like the Wizard and you’re comfortable with the mechanics which make the Wizard great, Order of Scribes is a great choice. But if you’re looking for an easy route to a powerful character that works in any campaign, Order of Scribes isn’t what you’re looking for.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Order of Scribes Features
  • Every Damage Type at Every Level
• Order of Scribes Ability Scores
• Order of Scribes Races
• Order of Scribes Feats
• Multiclassing
• Example Build – RPGBOT Self-Insert
  • Abilities
  • Race
  • Background
  • Skills and Tools
  • Feats
  • Levels

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

• Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
• Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
• Green: Good options. Useful often.
• Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Order of Scribes Features

2. Wizardly Quill: Copying a spells normally takes two hours per spell level. This reduces that time considerably. Time spent learning spells is typically handled “off screen”, but if you’re tracking Downtime this means that you can copy 60 times as many spells in the same amount of time as other wizards.

   The quill also allows you to vandalize stuff for free. The ink doesn’t magically adhere to things, but given time you could scribble over every book in a library, rendering them illegible until you decide to erase your scribbles. Tragically, the free ink doesn’t make it free to add more spells to your spellbook, so expect to spend the bulk of your money on copying new spells.

2. Awakened Spellbook: The ability to change the damage type of your spells makes it much easier to use damage spells. Look for spells which deal damage types that are rarely resisted like Force (Magic Missile, Disintegrate), Thunder (Shatter), Psychic, Necrotic, and Radiant damage. If you know enough spells and know your enemies’ resistances, you may go your entire career without dealing damage to a creature which has resistance to that damage type. But, again, you need to learn as many spells as possible to get the most out of this feature, so if your DM doesn’t give your access to more spells you may struggle to make this work.

   The third benefit lets you cast a ritual more quickly once per day. That’s great for options like Detect Magic and if you need them in a hurry, but hopefully you won’t need it often.

6. Manifest Mind: Similar in many ways to Arcane Eye, though certainly less subtle since it’s not invisible. This allows you to examine distant objects, peek around corners, keep watch in two places at once, and even explore small spaces where you can’t physically fit. It even has Darkvision even if you don’t, so it can mostly serve in place of your own eyes in dark places. Think of it like one of those quadcopter drones, but your controls only work out to a range of 300 feet and you can shoot fireballs through it.

   You also gain the ability to cast spells using your spectral mind as the origin point. This allows you to cast spells while you’re safely behind cover, or to deliver short-range spells like Burning Hands or Thunderclap without the risk of being in near-melee range and potentially even without the targets being aware of your presence. However, the number of times you can do this per day is small so look for other ways to solve the same problems if you can.

10. Master Scrivener: Since you can’t share this (the scroll is unintelligible to anyone else), this is basically just a free spell per day. Find your favorite 2nd-level spell with a decent effect for being upcast to 3rd level. You don’t need to have the spell prepared, so this is good for spells with long durations which you know you will cast, but which you won’t cast more than once.
14. One with the Word: Advantage on Arcana checks is really nice, especially if you’re using the rules for identifying spells presented in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and if your DM allows you to use skill checks to identify monsters and their weaknesses.

    The second benefit of this feature allows you to entirely negate sources of damage. However, this comes with a steep cost and a gamble. First, it eats your Reaction, so consider using Shield or Absorb Elements if either of them will suffice. Second, it dismisses your Spectral Mind, so you’ll need to re-manifest it as a Bonus Action on a later turn.

    Third, and most important, you temporarily lose access to some of the spells in your spellbook. This is honestly a pain to track, but it’s also easy to mitigate this cost. By learning a huge number of spells, you can accumulate enough spell levels worth of unused spells that you may be able to use this numerous times in succession. Just keep in mind that at an average of 10.5 spell levels, you need to spend an average of 525gp learning the spells to fuel a single use.

    Finally, if you roll the 3d6 and roll more spell levels than you can spend, you’re immediately reduced to 0 hit points. This can prevent you from immediately dying due to massive damage because the original damage is still prevented, but if the original damage wasn’t going to knock you down to 0 you’re going to feel silly for knocking yourself out because you don’t know enough spells.

Every Damage Type at Every Level

Awakened Spellbook allows us to swap damage types for our leveled spells. While typically we’ll do fine with a few damage types like psychic and force, the ability to deal any damage type is tantalizing. If we want every damage type available at every spell level, we’ll need to collect a long list of spells to collect them all.

Note that the damage type only needs to “appear” in the spell; the spell does not need the ability to inflict that damage type. As a result, spells which provide resistance to a damage type, or which might inflict damage to the caster (such as when you teleport into a wall and take force damage) apply. It seems odd that this would be intentional, but WotC could have written “replace its damage type with a type that could be dealt by another spell in your spellbook” so it appears that this is intentional.

The following table uses spells only from the Wizard’s spell list. Awakened Spellbook only cares about what’s in your spellbook, and multiclassing, feats, and racial traits don’t put spells in your spellbook. The table also ignores dragonmarks, which do allow you to add some unusual spells to your spellbook. Dunamancy spells are also not included since I can’t assume that those are available in your game.

As you can see, there are some gaps, but we enough options that damage resistance/immunity should never be a problem. Almost nothing in the game resists magical bludgeoning damage, which covers every spell level except 8. At 8th spell level we can use either psychic or radiant damage.

Order of Scribes Ability Scores

Order of scribes is the most wizard-y wizard there is, so our ability score needs are identical to other wizards. See our Wizard Handbook.

Order of Scribes Races

Order of Scribes is motivated by two things: the need to put spells into their spellbook and the need to survive doing it. Innate spellcasting is still useful, but doesn’t put spells in your spellbook, so if you do pick a race like the Drow or the Fairy, remember that those spells don’t count for Awakened Spellbook.

Beyond those considerations, order of scribes’ racial needs are the same as any other wizard. See our Wizard Races Breakdown.

Order of Scribes Feats

Order of Scribes doesn’t have any unique interaction with feats, so the advice in our Wizard Handbook should suffice.

Multiclassing

Multiclassing into other spellcasting classes does not allow you to add those spells to your spellbook, so you can’t use them for Awakened Spellbook’s damage switching. That said, multiclassing can still be very helpful. See the Wizard Handbook.

Example Build – RPGBOT Self-Insert

This is absolutely self-serving, but a warforged scribes wizard is about as RPGBOT as you can get, so here we go. Wizards are my favorite class, and Order of Scribes is the most wizard-y wizard that ever did wizard, and we are going wizard our hearts out. We’re going to throw bludgeoning fireballs and shoot chain lightning that deals force damage. We’re going to nuke encounters in one spell from hundreds of feet away around several corners. We’re going negate so much damage that we might as well be the party tank.

This build is one of our 10 favorite DnD 5e builds.

Abilities

We’ll use the ability scores suggested in the Wizard Handbook. We’re intentionally leaving Int and Con at odd numbers so that our modifiers increase when we take hybrid feats at levels 4 and 12.

Race

Custom origin Warforged. It adds a bunch of durability to our wizard, but doesn’t help us actively do wizard things so we’re on our own for that. We’ll be using the custom origin rules to swap the +2 to Intelligence and put the +1 into Constitution.

Background

Cloistered Scholar out of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide works great, but Acolyte would also suffice. If you’re feeling fancy you can trade the languages for tools of some kind, but it doesn’t really matter for this build.

Skills and Tools

We get a total of 5 skills between our race, class, and background. We’ll select Arcana, History, Investigation, Nature, and Religion, giving us every Intelligence-based skill. We also get one tool, so pick something cool like calligraphy tools or something.

If you want more skills, learn Borrowed Knowledge.

Feats

We’re going to take a hybrid feat at level 4. Telekinetic, Fey Touched, and Shadow Touched are all good options. Skill Expert is an option, but it’s a weird choice.

Levels