Does Rainbow Servant allow a full-list spontaneous caster to cast all cleric spells?

Question

A full-list spontaneous arcane caster (Warmage, Beguiler or Dread Necromancer) does not pick spells to learn each level, like a Wizard or a Sorcerer, and cannot copy spells from other sources to a spellbook like a Wizard can. Their spellcasting instead functions very similar to each other, I'll use the Beguiler as an example:

Spells: A beguiler casts arcane spells, which are drawn from the beguiler spell list on page 11. When you gain access to a new level of spells, you automatically know all the spells for that level on the beguiler's spell list. You can cast any spell you know without preparing it ahead of time. Essentially, your spell list is the same as your spells known list. You also have the option of adding to your existing spell list through your advanced learning class feature (see below) as you increase in level.

[...]

A beguiler need not prepare spells in advance. You can cast any spell you know at any time, assuming you have not yet used up your spells per day for that spell level.

The Advanced Learning class feature mentioned in the text looks like this:

Advanced Learning (Ex): At 3rd level, you can add a new spell to your list, representing the result of personal study and experimentation. The spell must be a sorcerer/wizard spell of the enchantment or illusion school and of a level no higher than that of the highest-level spell you already know. Once a new spell is selected, it is forever added to your spell list and can be cast just like any other spell on your list.

You gain another new spell at 7th, 11th, 15th, and 19th level.

A Rainbow Servant gets the following feature:

Cleric Spell Access: A 10th-level rainbow servant can learn and cast spells from the cleric list, even if they don't appear on the lists of any spellcasting class he has. Such spells are cast as divine spells if they don't appear on the sorcerer/wizard or bard spell lists. This class feature grants access to the spells, but not extra spells per day. The 10th-level rainbow servant can likewise read scrolls with cleric spells on them and use wands and staffs that contain cleric spells.

It seems to me that Rainbow Servant is written with Wizard, Sorcerer and Bard in mind, all arcane caster classes that learn new spells each level. So:

How does this prestige class interact with full-list spontaneous casters, who have no per-level mechanic for "learning" new spells?

Does Rainbow Servant allow them to automatically know and be able to cast all cleric spells?

If not, are they limited to the Advanced Learning feature to "add" cleric spells to their list, or are there other ways?

Or does not even the Advanced Learning feature allow them to take advantage of the Cleric Spell Access feature, since it uses the word "add" and not "learn"?

Answer 1

Everyone thinks “yes,” but it’s actually quite doubtful, RAW

I’m guilty myself of spreading this misinformation, including on this site; it was only recently I noticed the problem here:

Cleric Spell Access: A 10th-level rainbow servant can learn and cast spells from the cleric list, even if they don't appear on the lists of any spellcasting class he has. Such spells are cast as divine spells if they don't appear on the sorcerer/wizard or bard spell lists. This class feature grants access to the spells, but not extra spells per day. The 10th-level rainbow servant can likewise read scrolls with cleric spells on them and use wands and staffs that contain cleric spells.

This feature is generally considered near-useless to sorcerers, because you have to learn the cleric spells as spells known before you can cast them. For beguiler, dread necromancer, and warmage, the thinking goes, they learn the entire list automatically because they cast from their entire spell list.

There’s just one problem: this class feature never says it adds these spells to your spell list.

It gives you, effectively, four features:

• Can learn these spells
• Can cast these spells
• Can read scrolls of these spells (one presumes they mean “activate” since anyone with read magic can read a scroll, it’s activating that cares about what spellcasting you actually have)
• Can use wands and staffs (presumably, all spell-trigger items, though strict-RAW scepters would be out).

For most spellcasters, these are the same things you’re able to do with spells on your spell list; for them, there is no difference between “add these spells to your spell list” and “you are allowed to do these four things with these spells.”

But for full-list spellcasters, we have this:

A beguiler casts arcane spells, which are drawn from the beguiler spell list on page 11. When you gain access to a new level of spells, you automatically know all the spells for that level on the beguiler’s spell list. […] You also have the option of adding to your existing spell list through your advanced learning class feature (see below) as you increase in level.

^{(Player’s Handbook II, pg. 6-7; dread necromancer and warmage have similar text)}

This text is quite explicit that the spells you know have to be on your spell list, or added through advanced learning. Since cleric spell access doesn’t say the spells are added to your spell list, and instead spells out all the usual benefits of adding them to a spell list without doing so, it’s very hard to argue that a beguiler, dread necromancer, or warmage should automatically learn all of these spells.

There is an argument you can make, but it’s very much reading between the lines: you could argue that the four features listed for cleric spell access add up to adding the spell on your list. Instead of being an exception where you can do these things to spells that aren’t on your list, you might read the list and say “if you can do these things with them, then they must be on your spell list, because you can only do these things with spells on your spell list.” This is dubious in an exception-based ruleset, though.

The other argument is more meta: that in a core + Complete Divine environment, there are no full-list spellcasters, so they were likely not considered by the authors. That would make this an ambiguous corner-case that requires DM intervention to rule one way or the other, and not—by this argument—something that can truly be resolved by the rules as written. And if that’s the case, you could argue that they were spelling things out to be helpful to players, who might not have known immediately what all the ramifications of adding the spells to your list are. You can also point out that Wizards was weirdly reluctant to modify spell lists with other features, particularly early on, even when it would have been clearer; the way they worded a specialist wizard’s lack of access to their prohibited schools would have been much simpler if they just said those schools were removed from the wizard’s spell list, but for some reason they didn’t. On the other hand, Complete Arcane and the warmage were published before Complete Divine and the rainbow servant, and there’s significant overlap among the development and editing teams, so maybe this was done intentionally. It would have been easy to say they were added to your spell list, and then expand on what that means. And in any event, it’s plausible that spelling out exactly what you got—and not adding them to the spell list which might have ramifications beyond what the author expected—could have been a form of future-proofing. So the meta argument is very weak indeed, I think.

Finally, a note on the ramifications here: The word “learn” is never used in the rules text for the beguiler, dread necromancer, or warmage classes; even their advanced learning features don’t use it, despite their names. Moreover, those advanced learning features have very specific rules, and cleric spell access doesn’t very specifically alter those rules. It’s not at all clear that cleric spell access even lets these classes learn these spells with advanced learning. That has a much stronger meta argument, but the rules as written are decidedly iffy on it.

Answer 2

Browsing through the FAQ (don't judge me!) I noticed this paragraph:

D&D FAQ v.3.5 29 Update Version: 6/30/08

If a warmage (CAr 10) gains access to all the cleric spells though the rainbow servant prestige class (CD 54), does he really have all those spells to choose from each time he casts a spell?

If a warmage takes ten levels of rainbow servant, he adds all of the spells from the cleric spell list to his own spell list and can choose from all of them when he casts spells

(For whatever the FAQ is worth.)