Cogwork — Sagor från Valoris

You did not learn this at any academy. You found it: an engine of ancient make, small enough to carry, its casing crowded with a script no living scholar can read. Feed it a spell and it does not loose the magic — it winds it, holds it coiled behind its teeth, and releases it later on a schedule of its own. You don't know where its power comes from, only that the church would burn you for carrying it.

So you have stopped casting the way other wizards cast. You load the mechanism, set its triggers, and let it keep time. When the moment comes, the spell fires on its own — exact, patient, and never early.

The Tradition

Wizard Level	Feature
3rd	The Engine, Winding
6th	Regulated
10th	Precision Mechanism
14th	The Great Machine

Level 3

The Engine & Winding

The Engine is both your spellbook and your arcane focus — you prepare and cast your wizard spells through it. And you can do with it the thing it was built to do: wind a spell into its works and let it fire on a trigger of your choosing.

The Mechanism

The Engine's chambers are countless — the limit is you. Holding a spell wound and waiting takes a control of the machine that few bearers ever master. You can keep one spell wound at a time; as your command of the mechanism deepens, this rises to two at 6th level and three at 10th.

To wind a spell: when you cast a wizard spell of level 1+ that takes an action, doesn't require Concentration, and affects an area or a point (rather than a single creature by a spell attack), you can store it in an empty chamber instead of casting it. Expend the slot, fix the spell's point of origin within its range, and choose one trigger below. The spell releases automatically when the trigger trips — requiring no action from you, even on another creature's turn — resolving at the stored point and slot level. The chamber then empties.

DelayReleases at the start of your next turn.

ApproachReleases when a hostile creature first enters the spell's area. No two spells wound to Approach can cover the same area, so a single enemy never trips more than one.

WardReleases when you use your Reaction to trip it.

A wound spell holds for up to 1 minute; if its trigger hasn't tripped by then, the spell dissipates and its slot is spent. It is also lost if you finish a Long Rest.

Level 6

Regulated

Your command of the mechanism deepens: you can now keep two spells wound at once.

The machine does not vary. When a spell released from a chamber would roll dice — for damage or any other effect — you can forgo the roll and use the average result instead. What the mechanism outputs, it outputs the same every time.

Level 10

Precision Mechanism

Your command of the mechanism deepens further: you can keep three spells wound at once, and its workings answer you more finely.

You can now wind spells that require Concentration; such a spell only begins requiring your Concentration once it releases. And a wound spell's point of origin can be chosen at the moment it releases, rather than when you wind it — the Engine re-aims itself.

Level 14

The Great Machine

Once per Long Rest, as a Bonus Action, you give the Engine its head for 1 minute. For the duration, the limit falls away entirely — you can keep any number of spells wound at once, as many as you can pay for.

And once before the minute ends, you can, as a Bonus Action, release every wound spell at once, resolving the stored spells in any order you choose. The whole program, executed in a single turn of the gears.