Elsecaller Path Optimisation Guide for the Cosmere RPG

Transform the world around you and transport between realms with this intellectual, utility radiant path for the Cosmere RPG.

About elsecallers

While elsecallers can vary wildly in personality and characteristics, there are certain attributes that they share in common:

Elsecaller talents

Knowing which talents are best and will work well for your character is more important in the Cosmere RPG than in D&D. This is because you have a lot more choice over which talents you take rather than the more rigid progression found in D&D classes.

To help you pick the right talents for your character, I’ve split them into the various bond and surge talent trees and I’ve also divided them by level. This shows the fewest number of levels you need to gain this talent when following the most direct path down the talent tree (ignoring any talents taken at level 1 through a heroic path). This is just to help you know how quickly you can get each talent.

I’ve also rated each talent to give you an idea of how good I think it is. This is a rough rating. Some builds may find different talents more important or integral to their build so don’t be put off by a low score if you think it’s going to help your character or work for them.

Bond and surge talent trees

To take any radiant path, you must first take the key talent and its associated surges.

Level 1 talents

First ideal (5/5)

So the 3 actions you get to use immediately when you take this talent are breathe Stormlight, enhance and regenerate. Breathe Stormlight is more a practical element for regaining expended stormlight. As long as you have a decent number of marks, it should be hard for you to completely run out of investiture. I’d just make sure you breathe stormlight ahead of combat where possible. You can also do this while unconscious so you can breathe stormlight and heal yourself if knocked down to 0HP allowing for easy recovery if you need it (though it won’t be a lot of HP).

Enhance is going to be quite nice, basically adding 1 to attack tests and other physical tests. Be aware that your movement speed might increase with this too. At this stage, you can only use enhance and regenerate so I’d suggest switching this on early in tricky encounters and keep it switched on for better attacks and defense.

This talent will grant you the surges of transformation and transportation once you speak the first ideal, but you’ll have to wait a bit for those.

Transformation surge (5/5)

You can transform inanimate material from one form to another. For example, you can turn rock into water, air into fog or basically whatever other non-living things you want.

The size of this is determined by your ranks in transformation and the investiture you’re willing/able to invest. Transforming between different material types is also harder and the more challenging this is, the harder the DC of the skill test you make.

There are a lot of practical and creative ways to use this, but I’d think of what’s going to be easiest and still create the desired effect. For example, you may want to slow enemies down or make it harder for them to fight, in which case, you could remove the ground beneath their feet by turning rock into air. However, this has a DC of 25 which is very high. You could create a similar effect by turning the rock into a vapour like smoke or fog for a 20 DC or for something easier, but perhaps less impactful, you could transform the rock into oil for a 15 DC.

You may want to consider size and distance together. Because you need to touch what you transform, but may not want to get within 5ft of the enemy, you may want to transform a larger size object to avoid getting too close to enemies.

The big aspect of this is going to be creativity. There’s a lot you can do with transformation, but can you think outside the box enough to make it work for you? You can cut holes in the sides of buildings, create traps, obscure vision with fog, create barriers and all sorts of interesting things.

Sneakily, the surge of transformation also allows you to peer into the cognitive realm in a limited form of the transportation surge which is also important to be aware of as this isn’t mentioned in the main surge text.

Transportation surge (2/5)

The transportation surge lets you identify emotions, motives, locations and sense investiture. There are obvious use cases here. Understanding motivations without an insight check, for example, can be helpful in some social situations. Knowing if someone is invested is handy too.

However, there are both limitations here and question marks over just how useful this is. Understanding emotions and motivations is the most likely to be useful, but it remains situational and often unimpactful (or could be accomplished with a strong insight skill).

Determining location is limited to your spren bond range. This never gets huge and starts off quite small making it only useful for identifying someone if they’re hidden and close by, which is again, quite situational.

Again, knowing if someone is invested is occasionally handy, but usually not, making this a very situational talent.

Inkspren bond

Level 2 talents

Second ideal (5/5)

Enhance as a free action and without spending investiture is really good! That’s extra speed and damage which means better attacks, faster movement, more carrying capacity and better physical skills. All without spending resources. I’d grab this pretty quickly if you can.

Elsecaller’s perspicacity (4/5)

Advantage on deduction tests is a situational boon, as is information gathering when peering through the cognitive realm though if you get cognitive vision, this becomes much more commonly useful.

Possibly the most useful part of this though, is advantage on reaction tests. This means opportunity attacks and things like realmic evasion are more likely to be successful. At first, this seems like a limiting list of options, but if built into, it can become something quite potent.

Level 3 talents

Third ideal (5/5)

Shardblades are great and will really enhance your melee capabilities with bigger damage and more injuries. This is obviously best on melee-focused characters, especially those that can manage multiple attacks in a round. That may not be the case for an elsecaller, but your attacks will still get better regardless.

Invested (4/5)

More investiture means using more powerful talents and less time taken breathing in Stormlight mid-encounter.

Level 4 talents

Fourth ideal (5/5)

Shardplate is an excellent form of protection and can seriously enhance your durability and attacks. You’ve got 5 deflect plus charges that can increase that deflect value further. You get +2 speed and strength (so even better attacks, speed and physical skills) and it can be easily summoned and recharged.

Just be aware, being enhanced by Shardplate won’t increase your HP or physical defense. Shardplate, especially radiant shardplate, is still really good though!

Wound regeneration (3/5)

Technically situational, but very useful when it comes up. There are other ways to recover from injuries, but it’s harder and takes more time. How much you get injured will likely depend on your GM, but this is definitely a good option to have available.

Deepened bond (3/5)

Realmic step gets a further range meaning much further teleportation, which is very handy. You can also locate and view things in the cognitive realm from further away. The reduced focus cost is decent if this is going to be used a fair bit too.

Take squire (4/5)

Granting others your surges can be useful. However, this will typically be NPCs (most PCs will likely bond a spren of their own).

How good this is will depend on the quality of your squires. I can imagine having multiple squires a challenge to manage, but that doesn’t stop this being good.

Transportation

Level 2 talents

Cognitive farsight (2/5)

Further range when peering into the cognitive realm makes some talents more useful, but these remain situational. Knowing direction and where settlements are is only useful for more exploration and survival focused adventures. Many adventures won’t be like this, making this often useless.

Realmic evasion (4/5)

Easy evasion is great. Weirdly, this is most useful on low defense characters. Because the DC is determined by the attack roll, lower defense characters will not only need this more, they’ll also be up against a lower DC. If your defense (especially your physical defense) is quite high, the DC for this will often be high making avoidance harder.

Once you get the realmwalker talent though, this will be an automatic success, but that is likely to come a fair bit later in your progression.

Alternatively, you can save this for nasty effects that are often tied to cognitive and spiritual defenses.

Level 3 talents

Cognitive vision (4/5)

Learning intentions and locating objects is OK, but again, this is an extension of your transportation surge, and these remain situational. However, a free action to grant disadvantage on a test to an enemy can be quite good. It’s not limited to conversations either. You can do this in combat, making this much more useful. A great option if you have plenty of investiture to use.

Realmic step (3/5)

Teleportation is often useful. Depending on your spren bond range, it may not be further than normal movement, but it can become much more than this. It also means you can traverse vertically and move without allowing opportunity attacks.

There is a decent possibility of this failing, which loses it a point, however, this restriction is removed when you get the realmwalker talent.

Level 4 talents

Elsecalling (3/5)

Transporting between the cognitive and physical realms can be very convenient and it’s one of those powers that is technically, very powerful. The problem is that if an adventure requires cognitive and physical realm traversal, that the GM should provide a way to do this. True, it may be harder, but I suspect it’s rare that this will be needed or useful. While this talent may not allow the entire group to do this yet, shared transportation will eventually allow this.

However, there are potential ways to use this that may be useful beyond just trying to be in one realm or the other. For example, if you want to get into a locked building, you could attempt to elsecall to the cognitive realm, enter that area and then elsecall back inside that location. There’s no guarantee that this will be an easier process, but it could be.

In some respects, this could be a frustrating talent for a GM to accommodate. They’ll need to be prepared for elsecalling at any moment, meaning knowing what might be there in the cognitive realm as well as the physical. So GMs, be prepared. It might also mean characters bypassing some carefully laid plans so be ready for this too.

Level 5 talents

Shared transportation (4/5)

This is where elsecalling becomes really easy to bypass GM prepared encounters by having the whole group elsecall with you. Of course, that could be some major investiture expenditure so larger parties may struggle here.

This means you can transport the whole party between realms, but you may find shared realmic step more regularly useful. Now you can transport allies around the battlefield to where they’re needed.

Elsegate (2/5)

Travelling to highly invested locations is again, powerful magic, but for the purposes of an adventure, is more of a convenience than useful. It’s likely more useful for a GM to easily get players from one locale to another than for players themselves, and even then, a friendly elsecaller NPC could assist with that. Sadly, for playing purposes, as great as it is, it’s not that useful in actual play.

Realmwalker (5/5)

Transportation tests now automatically succeed. This is useful for a few talents. Specifically, this affects; realmic step, realmic evasion, elsecalling and cognitive vision. It turns some of your better talents into even better talents.

You can now automatically succeed when transporting from the cognitive realm into the physical, imposing disadvantage as a free action always works, as does your teleportation and realmic evasion will always allow you to evade an attack. All combined, this is very strong.

Transformation

Level 2 talents

Soulcast defense (4/5)

Use a reaction and an investiture to turn a projectile hit into either a graze or a miss. Really good safety option with a definite benefit regardless of the result. You’ll have a better chance of completely nullifying an attack that’s barely a hit, making these better options for expending investiture on. The same goes for higher damage attacks too as defending against these will also be more impactful.

It’s possible you could transform the projectile into something useful (like food), but chances are, this is mostly a flavour option.

Living soulcasting (4/5)

With a few ranks in transformation, this becomes quite a strong attack option, but there’s a higher cost than a strike action. It’ll take 2 actions and an investiture to use. This is obviously more than a standard strike action, but you get the benefit of 3 weapon damage rolls (the size of the die depending on your transformation ranks). Assuming the same size weapon dice, this means a bit more than double the damage (when you factor in the damage bonus from skill ranks). This obviously varies depending on your ranks in transformation and the damage dice you’re using.

The other benefit here is that you now have an option for a second strike action on your turn if you take a slow turn and have no other actions you need to use.

Level 3 talents

Soulcast parry (4/5)

You can now use soulcast defense on melee attacks too making you even more resilient. It’s not clear whether a successful parry transforms the weapon into something else. The words of soulcast defense state that the projectile is transformed, but the whole point of defending here is by transforming the thing hitting you into something less harmful (or perhaps creating a defensive item from thin air, it’s not explicitly stated though the former version is implied and the latter isn’t). I’d be inclined to say that’s the intention behind the rules, but I think this is a decision for your GM (or Brotherwise themselves). You obviously won’t be able to transform an invested weapon (like a shardblade), but I think the parry still works against these things.

Bloodcasting (3/5)

Remove poisons from blood and reduce injury times. Poisoned is maybe a tad situational. Technically so are injuries, but both are common enough that you should have need of these reasonably often. Both also happen to be problems you probably want solving reasonably quickly.

Level 4 talents

Distant surgebinding (4/5)

20ft surgebinding is really useful. Now you don’t need to get close to enemies to transform the ground beneath their feet or their weapons. Soulcast defense works on allies too. Now you can protect allies up to 20ft away. Especially useful if you’re a backline warrior protecting your frontline tanks.

Flamecasting (4/5)

With a decent transformation rank, you can cover a large area here and really spread out your damage. It’ll also increase the damage die to the point where you could be dealing 2d12 per enemy. It takes some investment, but it’s strong and in theory, could create additional problems if you’re removing things that were there before or setting flammable things alight.

Combine this with something like persistent transformation and you can create a pit in the rock that immerses enemies in fire with just a 15DC skill test.

Level 5 talents

Persistent transformation (4/5)

This makes transforming what you want, when you want, considerably easier. You want enemies to suddenly be standing on fire. That DC 30 is now halved. Even for more reasonable transformations like turning smoke or air into a barrier, this is much easier to accomplish giving you loads more utility.

Expansive transmuter (4/5)

Soulcasting large objects gets pricey when it comes to investiture, reducing that by 2 makes it significantly easier to use transformations multiple times per encounter without having to spend the time breathing in more Stormlight. This might make large transformations more standard as they’ll cost as much as a small one and huge and gargantuan transformations more accessible.

---

Building an optimised elsecaller

In this section, I’ll give some advice on which options to consider when building an optimised elsecaller.

Ancestry

Both the Human and Singer ancestries work for an optimised elsecaller.

Human: Humans will get you heroic talents quicker as you’ll be able to choose extra talents from heroic paths as you progress levels. You won’t get elsecaller talents quicker though, but plenty of heroic talents can enhance your radiant capabilities. You’ll get an extra talent at levels 1, 6, 11, 16 and 21.

Singer: Singers get a unique path that gives them different forms they can transform into. Workform, envoyform, decayform and nightform are all good options for an elsecaller.

Heroic paths

Matching up capabilities between your radiant and heroic paths can be important as it allows you to focus more on a few different attributes and skills rather than spreading yourself too thin across many areas.

For an elsecaller, I’d recommend the following heroic paths and specialties:

• Agent: Elsecallers are not only great at deducing things, they can also be decent in social situations and great at finding things. Between transformation and transportation, they have some unique ways of breaking into places too (like cutting holes in walls or passing between the physical and cognitive realms).
• Envoy: Envoys tend to focus on willpower with intellect and presence also being important. Elsecallers naturally lean into willpower and intellect and presence is a solid option for them anyway. If you want to focus on a more intellectual orator, then envoy is a good match with elsecaller.
• Leader: Elsecallers and leaders share a high willpower and the ability to handle social situations making them a good fit for one another.
• Scholar: Elsecallers tend to have a higher intellect and scholars are very intellect focused. The strategist in particular with their deduction focus fits an elsecaller well.

Attributes

Recommended attributes

Speed: You’ll want an attribute for attacks and physical defence. Attack is unlikely to be your forte, and as elsecallers work quite well alongside stealth approaches, I’d opt for speed over strength.

Willpower: The strength of your transformation surge talents is reliant in part on your willpower. This will help you have plenty of focus too for while you’re not using invested talents.

Intellect: Transportation relies on a high intellect so you’ll want to make sure this is increased. It will also help you with tests like deduction which will help you in social situations. Intellect also helps with focus making elsecallers highly focused.

Presence: Presence isn’t a necessity for an elsecaller, but they certainly can benefit from it as they do lean into conversational capabilities.

Attributes to avoid

If you’ve opted for speed, then you may want to not bother too much with strength. Awareness is also an easy attribute to dump for an elsecaller.

Skills

You’ll want to focus on skills that lean into your strengths as an elsecaller. It’s generally better to have specialists in different areas in a party than lots of generalists.

Primarily, this means you’ll want skills related to intellect and willpower (and potentially speed or presence) which means those associated with knowing things and mental fortitude. Of course, much will come down to your chosen heroic path as well, but the best heroic paths for an elsecaller will share many of these aspects in common.

I’d recommend investing skill ranks in the following skills:

• Light weaponry: If you’ve invested in speed over strength, then ranks in light weaponry are the way to go. If you have gone for a strength build, you can invest in heavy weaponry instead. Either way, you’ll likely want some kind kind of attacking skill.
• Crafting: If you want to go down the crafting route, then elsecallers can do this well and skills in crafting will be important.
• Deduction: Elsecallers are good at deducing things so ranks in deduction make a good idea.
• Discipline: Discipline is good for holding your nerve, and with a strong willpower, elsecallers can be quite good at this.
• Intimidation: Without persuasion, this is the only natural charisma skill elsecallers are good at. As a fairly conversation-focused radiant path, this can end up as a good option.
• Lore: You likely want at least one character that knows stuff and elsecallers are a good option for this.
• Medicine: If you want a healer, elsecallers are a solid option with their intellect focus (though edgedancers and truthwatchers are your best options here).
• Transformation: Ranks in transformation will help you transform larger objects/areas and make you more capable of parrying attacks and dealing flame damage.
• Transportation: Ranks in transportation will help you be more successful at transportation skills, though this can become less important at later levels as you grab automatic success talents like realmwalker.

Expertises

Expertises can grant some special knowledge or benefits when using certain items. Largely, you can take whatever expertises fit your character, but there are a couple of things to consider:

• You’ll want decent armor until you can grab shardplate: You’ll likely want some decent armor, even if you don’t intend to be in melee combat too much. Since you likely won’t be investing a lot in strength, the best you can manage is by taking expertise in chain so you can avoid the cumbersome trait. If you have invested in strength (3 to be precise), then you can grab a breastplate or take expertise in half plate to avoid the cumbersome trait.
• Weapon expertises are going to be your most important: Elsecallers usually aren’t built for close combat and speed tends to suit them better meaning investing in light weaponry which means using light weapons. I’d consider using hit and run tactics (especially with teleportation as an option) or making ranged attacks. Shortbows can be a good choice or javelins. A short spear is your top damage melee option too, allowing you to wield it one handed.
• Use utility expertises to fill expertise gaps in the party: Depending on your focus might affect what utility expertise you want to take. For example, if you go for ranks in crafting, you may want expertise in equipment and fabrial crafting.
• Take whatever cultural expertise you like: You can take whatever cultural expertise fit your character best. You may want to consider taking cultural expertises that fill knowledge gaps in the group, but it’s not overly important.

---

Elsecallers kind of fit the role of wizards or bards from the D&D universe. They have magical capabilities that fit a range of utility needs. Teleportation and transformation can be used in some really creative ways. They can also use their intellect to influence others.

The main challenge with the transportation surge is that it only properly gets good in conjunction with later talents. But, elsecallers are high in focus making them great for characters that rely heavily on focus.

Do you have a strong elsecaller build? How have you built them? Let me know in the comments below.

Spotlight on the Cosmere RPG