Eldritch Lance is the signature attack cantrip of the Akashic connection mystics, who draw their power from the psycho-dimensional archive containing every thought and memory across all timelines.
Each lance is a concentrated sliver of that infinite data-stream, weaponized: victims report feeling their thoughts fragment, foreign memories bleeding through, or a momentary sense of everything happening at once before the pain hits.
Chronologist combat-mages favor it for breaching operations because mental damage bypasses most physical defenses—hull plating, energy shields, and power armor mean nothing when the attack strikes your mind directly.
Azure Archivists use it for "non-lethal" suppression, reasoning that a psychic jolt leaves fewer corpses to clean up than kinetic rounds.
The spell's main tactical weakness: many high-threat targets (constructs, undead, heavily augmented cyborgs, and Rift-entities) have mental immunity, making Eldritch Lance situational in mixed combat.
Eldritch Lance is the cantrip for casters who want to reach into the dark between the stars and pull out a beam of concentrated wrongness. Mystics, witchwarpers, and occult scholars use it to fire condensed packets of mind-assaulting energy—raw Rift-current shaped into a psychic lance that bypasses armor and strikes directly at consciousness.
The spell manifests as a rippling distortion in space, like heat-shimmer made visible and malevolent, that streaks toward the target with an audible hum of displaced reality. Witnesses describe it as "the sound of a scream trapped in reverse."
Eldritch Lance Cantrip 1
Source Player Core pg. 328
(Two Actions)
Traditions: Divine, Occult
Range 30 feet Targets 1 creature
Defense AC
You condense a beam of mind-assaulting eldritch energy from the dark spaces between the stars and fire it at a target. Make a ranged spell attack roll against the target's AC. If you hit, you deal 2d6 mental damage. On a critical success, you deal double damage.
Heightened (+1) The damage increases by 1d6.
Devotion and themes
Blue Devotion (primary): treats Eldritch Lance as weaponized information, a data-spike overloading the target's cognitive processors.
Black Devotion: weaponizes forbidden knowledge, each lance a fragment of truth too terrible to process.
In Starfall play, Eldritch Lance is the thinking-person's damage cantrip: it hits AC (often lower than Will saves for martials), delivers respectable damage, and can disrupt enemy spellcasters with stupefied on a crit. Just remember to have a backup option for constructs, undead, and the inevitable Rift-horror with mental immunity.
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