Bardic College: College of the Crossroads [Second Draft]

It's funny, sometimes I see problems in my content that just don't exist. I thought flavor was weak in the rough draft this one, but you guys unilaterally disagreed. I'm betting it's because I've been staring at this option off and on for about half a year.

BUT, that's not to say the rough draft didn't have issues. Rough drafts always have issues. That's why there are second drafts.

CHANGELOG:

• You can now summon or dismiss your Precious Instrument similar to a warlock's pact blade.
• Silver Tongue no longer requires you to be holding your Precious Instrument, because it needed a little streamlining.
• Fiendish Tempo doesn't negate resistance or immunity, because that's just a bad mechanic to add when there's already a feat that confers it. 
• Infernal Orchestra and the Fiendish Instrumentalist have been buffed, as the ability now summons twice as many instrumentalists, and the instrumentalists have their damage and to-hit slightly increased.

CONCERNS:

• Nothing right now, aside from me still sucking at monster math. I'm beginning to believe that monster math is more of an art than a science, anyway.

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Always bug-check old content for mechanics you thought were a great idea half a year ago, that you've since learned are a terrible idea. 

Bardic College: College of the Crossroads [ROUGH DRAFT]

Sometimes, I sit on projects for a really really REALLY long time. If you look, you can see that I made a reference to this project in July of last year.

True to its name, the Bardic College of the Crossroads is a Devil-Went-Down-To-Georgia deal, gaining infernal musical power through besting a devil, or simply by cutting a deal or stealing from the forces of Hell.

Originally, I planned to have this as a sort of answer to a warlock's pact, with options dealing with the fey and great old ones, but I ended up feeling this was ill-advised for a couple of reasons. For one, it made the option feel very indistinct, like it didn't know what it was trying to do. For two, the Glamour Bard UA came out and undercut me with a fey bard. Such is the price of going on hiatus and dragging my ass, I guess.

What's worth playing about a Crossroads bard? Well:

FEATURES:

• A precious instrument that is the source of your powers, made of gold, silver, ruby, or similar.
• Self-focused Bardic Inspiration powers to keep you (and only you) safe from harm.
• Conjure a band of backup demons, good for helping in combat AND cheating at fiddle contests.

CONCERNS:

• Surprisingly, flavor might be weaker than I'd like. It IS a rough draft, though, and usually you guys are very good at helping me with flavor. 
• Bard capstones are hard to balance against one another, but I think this one was just about right. If it's too weak, it'll be easy to tweak and rebalance. 

WHAT I LEARNED:

• Apparently I'm sitting on a wealth of almost-finished work. Time to fix that.