Lightweaver Path Optimisation Guide for the Cosmere RPG

Transform the world around you and weave illusions with this sneaky, utility radiant path for the Cosmere RPG.

About lightweavers

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

Lightweaver 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 illumination and transformation once you speak the first ideal, but you’ll have to wait a bit for those.

Illumination surge (5/5)

This is a really flexible surge capable of maintaining a disguise on yourself without expending investiture. On its own, this is a really strong power making you an excellent scout or spy. But you can also create other illusions too that can move and even speak. This does require investiture, and you’ll want ranks in illumination to allow for bigger illusions and illusions that are less easy to spot.

You’ll also want to make sure your presence is high. Partly for those improved illumination tests, partly for the extra investiture it will provide and partly because it’ll be easier to deceive people with a higher presence.

Keep in mind that rounds vary in length depending on what kind of encounter is being run. A round in combat is only 10 seconds, but a round of conversation or an endeavour is much longer allowing you to do more.

I’d also talk to your GM about how you might plan to use your illusions and how they might react to these approaches. For example, you may want to use an illusion as a distraction in combat (maybe creating the illusion of a chasmfiend). You’ll want to make sure those efforts aren’t wasted if your GM chooses to interpret these quite fluid situations without the desired effect.

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.

Cryptic 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.

Invested (4/5)

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

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 a lightweaver, but your attacks will still get better regardless.

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.

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!

Physical illusion (5/5)

Produce an illusion using the normal rules, except it is physical and can interact with the physical world as one might expect. For example, if your physical illusion is a person, they can open a door, write a letter or make an attack. Basically any of the standard actions anyone can take.

Part of the challenge is you must be able to sense what your illusion is attempting to do. You could be in a crowded room with your illusion and have them pick someone’s pocket or discreetly open a forbidden door from safety, but once inside that door, senses become a bit more of an issue.

The Cosmere RPG allows for sensing things even when completely obscured by sight. You’ll have a senses range which shows how far you can sense during these periods. You may have some limited ability to sense for your illusion and use this to guide them when not seen, but you may need to stay particularly close and may have disadvantage on skill checks with your physical illusion in this kind of scenario.

Your illusion can make attacks for you too. These (and all other illusion tests) are boosted by your skills in illusion so making this high will be important here. The damage is increased by your ranks in transformation. Weapon damage is generally higher for your physical illusion than for normal attacks. It’s also safer, allowing you to hang back while it jumps into danger.

It’s not clear whether making an attack with your physical illusion counts as you taking the strike action. Based on the wording and the fact that you don’t take the strike action (instead your action is ordering your physical illusion) and the fact that a melee attack is mentioned in the talent, not the strike action, I’m inclined to think it doesn’t. If that’s the case, this essentially gives you the option of an additional attack on your turn, and one that’s safer and potentially more damaging (especially when you have higher ranks in transformation and illusion).

Basically, you can do loads with a physical illusion, especially with some creativity and it’ll help you both in and out of combat.

Deepened bond (3/5)

The extra bond range with your spren is more useful for creating and maintaining illusions than it is for most radiant paths so you can stay a little further from potential danger and discovery. 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.

Illumination

Level 2 talents

Distracting illusion (5/5)

Disadvantage against you or an ally is really good. Unlike taking the dodge action for example, this applies to all incoming attacks and only requires one action to activate for potentially, multiple turns. A great way to help your party tank survive a fair bit longer.

Lingering lightweaving (4/5)

Now you can extend the duration of illusions by having them expend less investiture. I’d expect you to be making a lot of illusions if you’re playing a lightweaver so this will make your investiture go much further. I’d say it’s worth using this for most illusions you create just to reduce their cost.

Level 3 talents

Disorienting flash (3/5)

Potentially disorient a few characters. The main benefit here is to prevent reactions and to stop these enemies making attacks outside of their senses range. This will be best against ranged enemies. You could also use it as a distraction during stealth segments to reduce chances of being seen, but it will also likely alert guards that someone is up to something so be cautious here.

Stormlight reclamation (2/5)

You can now reclaim over-infused investiture on things you’ve infused. This means you can be a bit more cavalier with how you infuse certain things, knowing you can reclaim that investiture with a free action. How often this is going to be useful is the bigger question. I’m not sure it’s going to be loads.

Level 4 talents

Spiritual illumination (2/5)

Make an ally determined and focused for a turn. This means an opportunity on failed tests and reduced focus cost of 1 for each ability used. The focused aspect is probably the more useful thing here so can be great with allies who may want to use a lot of focus abilities in one turn. At a cost of 2 investiture and your own action though, the cost to provide this is relatively high. I think for that reason, this will likely only be situationally useful.

Multiplicative lightweaving (4/5)

Create multiple lightweavings simultaneously. More ranks in illumination means more illusions. There’s no extra investiture required for these illusions allowing for much more complex illusions.

Level 5 talents

Painful truth (3/5)

2 investiture to slow a creature and make them move away next turn can be easily used to give reactive strikes to allies or to get a melee combatant away from the places they’re most harmful (for a turn anyway). It’s a bit situational, but not overly so.

Endless illusions (4/5)

Illusions within your spren bond range don’t require investiture meaning plenty of illusions that won’t run out.

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 often.

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.

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Building an optimised lightweaver

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

Ancestry

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

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 lightweaver 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. Artform, meditationform, workform and decayform are all good options for a lightweaver.

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 a lightweaver, I’d recommend the following heroic paths and specialties:

• Agent: Lightweavers work well as investigators, thieves and spies due to their natural presence and ability to disguise and distract.
• Hunter: Similarly, their capabilities with stealth and a natural inclination towards speed complements a lightweaver’s capabilities well.
• Envoy: Envoys tend to focus on presence and willpower which just so happen to be a lightweaver’s most important attributes. In particular, envoys tend to be quite charismatic which will help a lightweaver with their subterfuge.
• Leader: Lightweavers make quite charismatic individuals and leaders have pretty good synergy here. Like envoys, many leaders tend to focus on willpower and presence which is ideal for a lightweaver.

Attributes

Recommended attributes

Speed: You’ll want an attribute for attacks and physical defence, and as a disguise specialist, you’ll likely want to specialise in the one that lets you sneak, so speed is going to be better than 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.

Presence: Illumination relies on a strong presence. On top of that, you’ll likely want some strong face skills for talking your way into (or out of) trouble, especially as you sneak around in disguises.

Attributes to avoid

Lightweavers have little need for intellect so this can be dumped.

Strength can be useful for a bit more physical defense and HP, but I’d focus on hit and run or ranged attacks for most builds. Hit and run tactics are a tad easier with your illumination surges.

Lightweavers can make natural scouts so awareness isn’t a bad option, but you’ve got so many other attributes to focus on that this can be challenging to invest much in.

Skills

You’ll want to focus on skills that lean into your strengths as a lightweaver. 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 presence and willpower (and potentially speed) which means those associated with talking and possibly stealth. Of course, much will come down to your chosen heroic path as well, but the best heroic paths for a lightweaver will share many of these aspects in common.

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

• Stealth: If you’ve invested in speed and intend on plenty of subterfuge (which you probably should), then stealth can mix nicely with disguises.
• Light weaponry: If you’ve invested in speed over strength (which is recommend for a sneaky path), then ranks in light weaponry are the way to go.
• Agility: Will help you avoid the danger around you. I’d go with this over athletics as you’ll work better as a speed build.
• Perception: As a natural scout, you may want to invest in perception to stay aware of your surroundings, especially as you may not have invested much in awareness.
• Persuasion: You’ll likely want some decent persuasion when you try and explain why you’re skulking around the places you’re not supposed to be.
• Deception: The same goes for deception.
• Leadership: Also makes a good option for a high presence path.
• Intimidation: Another one that can work well for stealth if you need to handle a social situation with a bit more blunt force.
• Illumination: Ranks in illumination will help you pass off your illusions as real as well as allowing you to maintain more illusions simultaneously.
• Transformation: Ranks in transformation will help you transform larger objects/areas and make you more capable of parrying attacks and dealing flame damage.

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. As a speed leaning path, 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: Lightweavers should usually be investing ranks in light weaponry which means using light weapons. I’d consider using hit and run tactics 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: It’s not overly important what expertise you take, though if it might relate to speed or awareness, that will likely be best. You can however, use this to fill knowledge gaps in the party so there are a wide range of expertises in the group.
• 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.

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Lightweavers fulfil the equivalent roles of rogues and bards of the the D&D universe. They can weave illusions, sneak around, be very charismatic and have lots of utility both inside and outside of combat. They may not be as potent as some radiant orders when it comes to damage and combat, but they more than make up for that in their ability to avoid conflict altogether and accomplish things other characters might struggle with.

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

Spotlight on the Cosmere RPG