Making the Ancient One from Dr. Strange [closed]

Question

After seeing her in action in the movie, it looked like a fun character to try and make. Though, despite being called the sorcerer supreme, she feels like a variant of monk (with the magister template from Faerûn) while Strange himself is more of a wizard.

So, what would be the best direction to start for a melee/conjured weapon character that can port around on this plane and others, as her situations require? Sorry to be a nuisance if this or similar post has been asked already

Answer 1

First and foremost, as we often say with such requests, you have to keep in mind the differences between the RPG you’re playing, and the source material’s setting. D&D is not the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It operates under entirely different rules, and has entirely different expectations. The Ancient One would probably do better in D&D than a lot of characters might,¹ being heavily magical and ready to handle magical foes, but nonetheless the things that make her special are kind of... not special in D&D. D&D is extremely high-magic; it’s everywhere and dominates everything.

The solution to this is to play a character inspired by the Ancient One, but made appropriate for the world of D&D. The Ancient One as she might be if she grew up in Faerûn instead of Earth-199999.

Second, monk is one of the weakest characters in the game. A couple of levels of monk can be useful, mostly for the bonus feats, but by 2nd level you have already gotten just about everything valuable in the monk class.²

However, common classes used by players who wish to play a “monk” while avoiding the problems with the monk class can work very well for the Ancient One. For example, both the psychic warrior from Expanded Psionics Handbook and the swordsage from Tome of Battle fit her pretty well. The two could even be mixed, or the war mind could be used on top of a swordsage base instead of the psychic warrior. The ardent from Complete Psionic is pretty good too, and fits her character like a glove (the ardent is kind of like a philosopher to the cleric’s priest).

If you look at the other psionic classes, the soulknife might also look tempting—after all, the soulknife is all about her mind blade. Unfortunately, the soulknife is one of the few classes that is even weaker than the monk. However, the ardent and the psychic warrior each get access to call weaponry, which is even closer to the Ancient One than the soulknife, and there is even a soulbound weapon alternate feature for psychic warriors in this Mind’s Eye article that revolves around call weaponry.³

The other nice thing about psionics is that psionics naturally excels at time manipulation, which is obviously extremely fitting for any character inspired by the Ancient One. Both the ardent and the psychic warrior get a number of these, such as time hop, temporal acceleration, or in the ardent’s case, at high level, the incredible time regression (which we know well is among the Eye of Agamotto’s greatest powers).

Unfortunately, even with soulbound weapon, call weaponry is kind of mediocre at higher levels. It takes a long time to manifest, and it will be weaker than a magic weapon you could just buy. This is where I favor the swordsage: the martial disciplines in Tome of Battle are very good at sort of “solving” a lot of difficulties, allowing you to just rely on the maneuvers and not have to worry so much about maximizing your weapons and your feats and so on. And the Diamond Mind discipline is fantastic for the Ancient One: it is all about perfect timing, perfect motion, absolute efficiency and grace. The discipline’s ultimate maneuver is even called time stands still.

And the swordsage’s Shadow Hand discipline is perfect for emulating the fact that the Ancient One has been abusing the power of the Dungeon Dimensions.

Some homebrew can even get us a more psionic swordsage: the well-regarded Sleeping Goddess discipline includes a number of swift-action boosts that generate weapons for you: in a lot of ways, these are even better than call weaponry, and they’re right there in the swordsage. If homebrew is allowed, and this is a pretty high-quality one, a swordsage specializing in Diamond Mind, Shadow Hand, and Sleeping Goddess is almost-certainly the best approach to the Ancient One.

Without homebrew, we probably want to mix swordsage, focusing on Diamond Mind and Shadow Hand, with ardent, psychic warrior, or war mind. Ardent is the most multiclass-friendly of these, so that’s what I favor here. Just a dip of cleric—after all, the Ancient One is a religious leader—to get Knowledge Devotion and Travel Devotion from Complete Champion might fit pretty well, too. Travel Devotion helps a lot with mobility. Or cleric can help a lot with the master of the nine prestige class.

1. _{Including both of those asked about in the previously-linked questions.}

2. _{Barring a wild monk, but that wouldn’t be appropriate to the Ancient One.}

3. _{You could also argue that a reverse of the mantled warrior option just above soulbound weapon would get an ardent the 2nd-level bonus feat required by soulbound weapon, i.e. that you could swap your 2nd-level mantle for a bonus feat by reversing mantled warrior, and then swap that bonus feat for soulbound weapon. Ask your DM. I would certainly allow it, but it’s not really sanctioned by the rules.}

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An actual build

I’m thinking something like this:

The Ancient One, female neutral good¹ kalashtar² cloistered cleric/ardent/swordsage/master of nine

Level	Class	Special	Feat	ML³	IL⁴
1st	Cloistered⁵ cleric	Darkness⁶ & Time⁷ domains, Knowledge Devotion⁸	Dodge⁹	—	½
2nd	Ardent	Freedom¹⁰ & Justice¹¹ mantles		1st	1st
3rd		Physical Power¹² mantle	Practiced Manifester¹³	2nd	1½
4th				3rd	2nd
5th	Unarmed¹⁴ swordsage¹⁵	Weapon foci,¹⁶ quick to act +1, unarmed strike		5th	3rd
6th	Ardent		Adaptive Style	6th	3½
7th		Time¹⁷ mantle		7th	4th
8th	Master of nine			8th	5th
9th	Ardent		any	9th	5½
10th				10th	6th
11th	Master of nine	Dual stance		11th	7th
12th	Ardent		any	12th	7½
13th				13th	8th
14th	Master of nine	Perfect form		13th	9th
15th	Ardent	Dominant ideal¹⁸	any	14th	9½
16th				15th	10th
17th	Master of nine	Counter stance		15th	11th
18th	Ardent		any	16th	11½
19th				17th	12th
20th	Master of nine	Mastery of Nine		17th	13th

1. _{Alignment is irrelevant to this build, it’s just my guess for the best fit for the Ancient One. Not worth arguing about: if you disagree, just use something else.}

2. _{Kalashtar is a race from Eberron Campaign Setting, humans who long ago made a pact with dream spirits, so that kalashtar are now creatures with two spirits. Being from Eberron may make it ineligible in a Forgotten Realms campaign. If so, elan seems if anything even more perfect for her story (they’re ageless psionic humans), and is pretty good too, but the kalashtar’s +1 power point per level is far greater than the flat +2 power points that elans get, particularly when multiclassing. Human isn’t bad either; bonus feats are nice.}

3. _{Ardent manifester level. Ardents choose their powers based on their manifester level, rather than class level, which is why they are so multiclass-friendly.}

4. _{Swordsage initiator level. You add half your non-initiating levels to your initiator level, and you choose your maneuvers based on initiator level much as ardents choose powers based on manifester level, which makes all of Tome of Battle’s initiators quite multiclass-friendly as well.}

5. _{Cloistered cleric is an Unearthed Arcana variant that trades HD and BAB for far more skills and the knowledge domain as a third domain. Well worth it, particularly when we only get that HD and BAB for one level.}

6. _{The darkness domain grants Blind-Fight as a bonus feat, which we need for master of nine. Also appropriate considering, well, you know.}

7. _{The time domain is obvious, and also grants Improved Initiative as a bonus feat—again, something we need for master of nine.}

8. _{The knowledge domain from cloistered cleric isn’t so useful to us, but Complete Champion allows clerics to trade their domains for the corresponding domain feat. In this case, Knowledge Devotion—which is a minimum of +1 to attack and damage, and can be more based on your Knowledge check.}

9. _{Dodge is a terrible feat, and would never be worth taking except that master of nine requires it. There are other feats that count as Dodge, including Desert Wind Dodge from Tome of Battle itself, but since we only get one feat between our first swordsage level and when we want to start master of nine, and it also requires Adaptive Style, we don’t qualify for it. Midnight Dodge from Magic of Incarnum could be a good replacement if you wanted to use your later feats for Shape Soulmeld and Open Chakra, which is certainly thematic enough. Expeditious Dodge from Races of the Wild is the only other I know of, and considering the Freedom mantle’s speed boost it might be worthwhile.}

10. _{“Freedom” itself might be a stretch, but the actual powers on here are too perfect for the Ancient One. A speed bonus while psionically focused, expend focus to escape a grapple, and then dimension hop, hustle, fly, freedom of movement, and teleport are all the kinds of things that the Ancient One was doing all the time.}

11. _{The justice mantle is the only one that includes the call weaponry power. Otherwise pretty dull, and doesn’t seem particularly appropriate. You may want to ask your DM about substitute powers per this Mind’s Eye article, getting call weaponry on some more-appropriate mantle.}

12. _{Mostly, vigor is a fantastic power, and worth taking the physical power mantle for that alone.}

13. _{Feat from Complete Psionic, gives you a +4 bonus to manifester level, but cannot exceed your character level. Helps when multiclassing.}

14. _{The unarmed variant of the swordsage is listed as an adaptation in that section of Tome of Battle, and trades armor and weapon proficiency for the monk’s unarmed strike feature. Since that feature includes Improved Unarmed Strike as part of its benefits, that allows us to secure that prerequisite for master of nine. You most likely will not actually fight unarmed most of the time, but now you can.}

15. _{Delaying our 1st level of swordsage until character level 5th allows us to have initiator level 3rd—and thus choose 2nd-level maneuvers and stances—with our large initial manuever selection. This is part of what makes Tome of Battle so multiclass-friendly. We keep this up throughout the character’s progression: two levels of ardent between levels of master of nine means we have a new maneuver level each time we learn new maneuvers, making the most of what we get.}

16. _{Your discipline focus probably won’t matter: you are only getting Weapon Focus, and since you want to use call weaponry anyway, you won’t even get its mediocre benefit all the time.}

17. _{Chosen for the obvious reasons. Delayed because we wanted 1st-level powers from freedom, justice, and physical power, while the time mantle’s powers are kinda meh until time hop, and it kind of makes sense since she didn’t have the Eye of Agamotto when she started out.}

18. _{Dominant ideal is an alternate class feature featured in the same Mind’s Eye article as the substitute powers. Makes the powers of one of your mantles vastly cheaper to augment and apply metapsionic feats to. Very much better than a fifth mantle.}

This build could be stronger if you are in a campaign using flaws, and you skip cloistered cleric in favor of getting Dodge and Improved Initiative that way. You can then get Blind-Fight from a fiendish ear graft—which requires you to be non-Good, and drives you mad unless you’re actually Evil—which means you can fit Track in as a feat prior to 7th. The point of Track is that you can then take slayer instead of ardent from 7th level onwards. A 5th-level ardent/1st-level swordsage/9th-level slayer/5th-level master of nine ends up very similar to this one, only you have much better BAB and you get the great class features of the slayer class, with cerebral blind as a kind of “capstone” at 19th. All you miss out on are some early skill points—which slayer will get you back later—and dominant ideal, which is great but not as great as everything slayer offers.