The greatest twist of all, all the friends are actually five generations of the same line of chronomancers all on their 18th birthday coming of age quest to seek wisdom and power from their ancestors. Disturbingly, they all have an ancestral patron in the squad.

Ooo, sounds like a coven of Seneschal Witches from Pathfinder 2e!

This could actually be a fun way to add a character building twist where an individual’s powers don’t match their own personality, but that of one of their friends.

The Sweet One gets their great old one powers from the Spacy One, who gets their fiend powers from the Hot-Tempered One, who gets their undead powers from the Goth One, who gets their archfey powers from the Goofy One, who gets their celestial powers from the Sweet One.

Linkplz?

Try Runequest!

Starting characters are usually from the same clan so have familial bonds and a shared history.

Obviously, you can add mysterious traveller PCs later, but having the majority of the party know each other and be interconnected makes for an easy start.

Oh thats cool, ill look into it. Im all for that kinda thing, its one reason I love the funnels in DCC/MCC so much.

I have been working on a scenario setup based on a previous posting of this idea. MLM, multi-level magicking. Boil-down is that the party is a group of newbie mages (warlocks in DnD terms) at one or more of the local ‘Mages guilds,’ (which guild is determined by subclass) organizations which send out Mages to ‘help’ in one way or another. Some of the work is paid, but plenty of it is pro bono publica. The guilds have a great reputation because of the pro bono work, so PCs start with a very high-fantasy power rangers feel, but they got their powers by entering a magical loyalty contract to their ‘Mentor,’ and some of the jobs they get sent on will seem kind of ‘…off’ compared to the others, and they find out the only way to become more powerful (literally to gain levels, XP is meaningless/capped) is to find their Mentor’s Mentor and take their Mentor’s place, removing their Mentor’s power, which their mentor doesn’t want. So the party slowly gets to see that only the sneakiest, most conniving and underhanded Mages are able to advance, but now they have to either advance, or quit and become commoners.

Welcome to the Tremere.

It’s not fully documented, but there are notes on it. It’s called the Empathy Domain, custom for one of the characters on Critical Role season 3.

What’s the community for accidentalpolyamory

Think someone did a Pathfinder conversion.

I love it. “Ugh I love you girl but why did you have to give me ridiculous bullshit magic instead of something cool like I gave!” [Voice from the other room]“The skeletons are gross not cool”

VtM meets Unseen University

Yeah, warlocks are just cutthroat clerics with off-market gods. If each of them had enough magical power to fuel another warlock’s power, they wouldn’t need to be a warlock at all.

that looks fun to play