A class! This is another draft of one I’ve done before, except I cleaned up the layout a lot. This art is by Alphonse Mucha–the previous picture by neev is going elsewhere in the zine now.
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| click me i get bigger |
You can get a pdf of the witch class here.
And yeah, I’m thinking that San Serafín is going to get some sort of print release. I’ve finally figured out the look of it, I think.
Early edition monks manage to be both incredibly boring and hideously complicated. Later editions are just kind of enhh. I want something 1. simple 2. wuxia-ish 3. appropriate in terms of power level for old school D&D. Here’s a try.
HP, XP, Attack Bonus, and Saving Throws as cleric. In LotFP, monks receive the non-fighter attack bonus, but only suffer a -2 penalty to attack rolls or AC when they Press or Parry. They also learn two Techniques of their choice and invention (and Referee’s approval) every level.
Techniques allows monks to recreate the effects of a particular weapon or armor their bare hands. A monk who has mastered the Hundredweight Hand (Battleaxe) technique can chop lumber, bash through doors, and deal battleaxe damage just with the edges of their hands.
Techniques bring all the advantages and disadvantages of the weapon or armor, so if it mimics a two-handed weapon, a technique requires two free hands. If a technique mimics plate armor, the monk must move as slowly as if they were in heavy armor to maintain the effect. Also, armor-based techniques require the monk to limber up for as long as it would take to don armor of the same AC.
All techniques must be be justifiable fictionally. A monk with the Heron Fist (Spear) technique could use it to probe for traps (as someone with an actual spear might) and claim to avoid the pitfall or whatever by virtue of the technique’s speed. But they couldn’t use it to hook the guard’s keys off her belt from far away.
Oh, and players get to make up names for their techniques.
I’d suggest being generous for techniques that are odd/interesting/useful in non-obvious ways and conservative with techniques that are very powerful and direct (e.g. a technique based on heavy artillery). Here are a few weirder possibilities for starters:
So ideally you have an unarmed and unarmored warrior encouraged to use a combination of lateral thinking and direct confrontation in their fights, with enough weird talents that they can be of use in that crazy heist the party has just planned.
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| by sydney sime |
You are an intangible, invisible spiritual presence, unable to interact with the physical world except through your shrine and those who worship it. You can speak with anyone in earshot of your shrine, and you can see anything in line of sight. If your shrine is destroyed, you lose your only connection with the real world until someone decides to build a new one for you.
The Cult
Worshipers are a mercenary lot, so inducting someone into your cult requires you to hire pay them like any other retainer (LotFP has good procedures for this). Once you’ve indoctrinated/bribed someone into your religion, you perceive everything they sense. You can also speak directly to your retainers, as well as anyone in line of site of them.
If you wish, you can possess one of your retainers. When you do so, you control them directly and use your abilities and attributes in place of theirs, including HP (so rolling Strength during character creation wasn’t a waste). However, if you are reduced to 0 HP while possessing a character, you both die. Extricating yourself from a retainer’s body takes a number of turns equal to your level and causes them to make a Loyalty/Morale check as soon as you’ve left them.
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| by harry clarke |
Starting at level 3, you can acquire a Saint, who functions as a henchman in LotFP (they are a classed character two levels behind you, and get half of your treasure). Saints never check Morale, and all followers in their presence get a +1 to Morale.
Miracles
In a typical D&D system, you cast spells just like a cleric. If your DM is cool and has Wonders and Wickedness, you cast spells as a specialist sorcerer. Your school of magic and flavor of Maleficence determines your portfolio as a minor divinity. You don’t need to prepare spells–you can expend a spell slot to cast any spell you know.
Casting a spell does not require any of your retainers to take an action–it’s your divine intervention, after all. However, you must use one of your retainers as the origin point for any spell you cast so if a spell has a range of 100 ft, your target must be in 100 ft of your shrine or one of your followers). Furthermore, your might probably have some funny ideas about what participation in a cult entitles them to and get mad when you ignore their invocations (when a retainer calls on your power and you don’t provide a miracle, they make a Morale check).
You can’t learn new spells through research or transcription. Instead, whenever your followers burn a scroll or spellbook in your name, you learn all spells inscribed therein. If your followers sacrifice a wizard to you, you can choose to learn a single spell he or she had memorized.
Apostasy
If a hireling fails a Morale check, you can’t perceive with their senses, possess them, or use them as the origin for spell/miracles. However, if you manage to reconvert/rehire them, they get a permanent and cumulative +1 bonus to Morale/Loyalty.
Grow in Power
You don’t get experience just by collecting money. Instead, you get 1 xp for every gold piece spent improving your shrine. You also gain xp for building additional shrines. Establishing a shrine costs 2,000 gp. You can acquire worshipers in any town you have a shrine.
In addition to your HP, saving throw, and spell progression, you must issue an edict each time you gain an even level. An edict is a behavioral restriction that all of your followers must carry out. This might make adventuring life more difficult for them, but each gives all followers a permanent +1 bonus to Morale.
Other Stuff
LotFP has a bunch of kinds of retainers, but weirdly doesn’t include easy options for hiring mercenaries singly or day by day. I’ll say godlings (and only godlings) can hire cultists (who function as 0th level fighters, elves, halfings, or dwarves, to be randomly determined) for 10 sp a day + 10% cut of the treasure. Otherwise it’s linkboy’s and butlers.
An angry employer/divinity can compel a retainer or follower to reroll a Morale/Loyalty check through intimidation, threats, or show of force, but this causes a permanent -1 to Morale/Loyalty.
Witch, a class for old school D&D
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| source unknown. would really like to know who made this. |
HP, attack bonus, saving throws, and XP progression as cleric. Equipment restrictions as magic-user.
Witches don’t cast spells. They know minor acts of magic known as arcana. A witch can use any arcanum as much as she wants, though some arcana have situational requirements or material components.
To learn an arcanum, a witch must belong to its School. A witch starts out in a single School of her choice; to be inducted into others, she must find a member and induce them to let her join. A witch can only belong to a number of Schools equal to 1/3 her level, rounded up. Witches do not learn arcana as they level up; they must learn them from books, research, or tutors.
A level 1 witch is a member of a single School and knows 1d3 arcana from it.
School of Knot Making
It takes 1 exploration turn to tie a knot. I say “string”, but it can be a rope, cord, cable, whatever, as long as it is flexible– a big chain isn’t going to work.
School of Hexwork
School of Maskmaking
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| from dorohedoro |
You can make magic masks from the corpses of creatures you’ve killed personally. Wearing these masks allows you to polymorph into the creature for a number of turns equal to your level, at which point the mask breaks and you resume your natural form. A mask takes up a number of significant items equal to 1+half HD, rounded down, and requires an hour to make.
School of Summoning
School of Dancing
Magic dances are exhausting. For every turn you spend dancing, make a Constitution check. If you fail, take 1 point of Constitution damage. This damage heals at a rate of 1 point per week.
Been playing Shantae. Aggressively nostalgic, exceedingly Crayola, surprisingly excellent. Been have interested in playing it since it came out for the Game Boy Color. Anyway, it has me thinking about dancing. Also been thinking about Gus L’s Imperial Cultists. So here’s a prancing bardlike that mashes the two together.
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| from Etrian Odyssey |
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| from black swan |
HP, attack bonus and XP as Cleric. Saves and Equipment as Thief.
Dancers perform magic dances, which aren’t memorized and forgotten like spells–they can be attempted as often as the dancer wishes.
Each Dance function like Lamentations of the Flame Princess skill. You start out with a 1-in-6 chance of succeeding on checks pertaining to the relevant dance, but you can increase the odds of success with skill points. At level 1, you start out with 4 skill points to allocate however you wish; every time you level up, you gain 2 more. You can only improve Dances you’ve learned, naturally. A Dance cannot exceed a 5-in-6 chance of success. If all of this is too complicated for you, just use the thief’s Hear Noise skill odds for all known dances.
Dances always work, but for every turn you perform a Dance, you must make a check with the relevant skill. If you succeed, you continue your performance unfazed; if you fail, you take a level of exhaustion. (There are a lot of ways to do this. In my games, for each level of exhaustion, you suffer a -1 penalty to all attribute, attack, and skill rolls, and move as if you were encumbered by an additional level. If you roll a negative number on a roll while exhausted or reach a movement speed of 0, you fall unconscious for d4 Turns. Eating a ration and resting for a Turn removes one level of exhaustion.) When you are dancing, you move no faster than 30′. If you are struck by an attack while dancing, you must make a Save vs Breath or end the dance.
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| from Shantae |
Dances
You begin play knowing two Mysterious Dances dances. To acquire more, you must find them in your travels. Learning a dance from a tutor takes a week. Learning a dance from written instructions takes a month.
Mysterious Dances
Forbidden Dances
Known to no one. Can only be learned from forgotten texts.
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| from Magi |
So the idea behind all of this is you have multiple pressures on the character, most of which revolve around the overloaded encounter die/Hazard System.
Been stuck on Arthur Asa’s Scarlet Hare Coven and now I want witchy druids. So here they are.
Circle of the Night
Eschewing the hippy bullshit of the more orthodox druids, members of the Circle of the Night treat nature and its magic as much a matter of study as a matter of religious obligation. They have a generally unsavory reputation, famous for trafficking with malign fey and the darker forces of the natural world.
Bonus Cantrip
Starting at 2nd level, you learn one cantrip of your choice from the Wizard list. The attribute for this cantrip is Wisdom.
Dark Knowledge
Starting at 2nd level, you can inscribe magical rituals onto your skin. Pick two 1st level spells from any class list that have the ritual tag. You can always cast these spells as rituals, and they do not count against spells you know or have prepared. If you find other ritual spells during your adventures, you can tattoo them onto yourself, though you can only cast it if its spell level is equal to your less than half your Druid level. This process takes 50 gp and 2 hours.You can fit as many rituals as you like onto yourself.
Unbreakable Vow
Starting at 6th level, anyone who signs a contract with or swears an oath to you must make a Wisdom save vs your spell save DC in order to break its terms. They only must follow the letter, not the spirit of the agreement. Paradoxical promises are null and void.
Witch’s Garden
Starting at 10th level, you acquire a garden in the form of a 1 acre demiplane. Its exact nature, climate, and contents are a matter between you and your DM. The garden is never more than half a day’s travel away, no matter where you go or where you are. Only you know the way there, though others can follow you (even without your knowledge)
Maleficence
Starting at 14th level, you can expend both uses of your Wild Shape ability to turn into an Adult Dragon with the chroma of your choice for 10 minutes. This transformation otherwise follows all Wild Shape rules.
HP and XP as Magic-users
Attack bonus and saves as Clerics
Also called Las Basiliscas, the Velvet People, Pretty Poisoners, Beauty Monks
Each major city has a House of Honey and Salt, which acts as the home and headquarters of all Saints in the region. These Houses are temple-brothel-hospitals; few injuries or illnesses are beyond the flesh-crawling curatives of the Saints, though they charge a high price.
Saints are the enemies of the medusae, the drow, and the Weaver’s Guild. Their cousins are the vampires. They have treaties with the basilisks, dryads, nymphs, succubi, and shadows. Saints make servants of bees and flesh golems.
Saints have a reputation for espionage, though nobody knows where their interests lie. They’re that good. A nation’s monarch having a Saint in their court is viewed the same way as having a child king or a doddering regent: a sign of instability and bad things to come.
The dogma of the Saints is Love and their doctrine is Spite. A Saint cannot wield weapons and must avoid inflicting pain wherever possible (This is interpreted liberally. The Saints as an organization make extensive use of poisons, and have no problem telling their underlings to do exceedingly painful things to their enemies). Saints also cannot wear armor, as it conceals their bodies.
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| from full metal alchemist |
A Saint is like this:
You’re always a little flushed, a little feverish, though you never seem to sweat. The whites of your eyes have no blood vessels, you tongue and lips are red; your hair is albino white or the iridescent black of crow feathers or else it shines like the sun on the sea etc etc. You look like the fervid imaginings of a court poet or a Raymond Chandler character or the lover of a hero from antiquity.
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| by Bernypisa, distributed under Creative Commons |
Level 2: Sweet Nothings
You can cast Suggestion at will by whispering into somebody’s ear for a full round, close enough that they can feel your breath on their face.
Level 3: Fascination
This bath costs 1,000 gp and works for a single person. You might have trouble finding the ingredients in backwater areas, though you can haul them around if you so choose; they count as 2 significant items.
Level 5: Carnation
Level 6: Pretty Poison
Level 7:
You can read someone’s mind as per ESP by staring into their eyes for a full round. They can feel you reading their mind, so usually they must be restrained or otherwise unable to look away.
Level 8: All Shall Love Me and Despair
Once a day, you can issue a Mass Command. (As Command, but afflicts everyone in earshot)
Level 9: House of Honey and Salt
You found your own House of Honey and Salt and gain 2d6 disciples.
Level 10: Only Lovers Left Alive
Once per day, you can kill someone with fewer HD than you have levels by touching their bare chest with your forefinger. No save.
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| christian dior |
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| from fire emblem awakening |
Queen Agorath is an incomprehensible goddess-behemoth that resides in the hadopelagic void beneath Creation. Nobody remembers how or when she became Queen of Albion, but inquirers into that particular subject have died in sufficiently discomfiting numbers that more or less everyone has stopped trying to figure it out. By all mortal measures, the Queen is quite insane, but despite a few fits of psychotic pique every few centuries, she does a rather passable job of keeping the country running, and her mortal Council can be counted on to attend to the details that might slip her royal mind.
Queen Agorath is the goddess of black magic and bodily transformation. Her Royal Clerics can only cast the reversed versions of reversible spells. They cannot Turn Undead, but can transform into creatures.
When a Royal Cleric eats a beast’s heart and succeeds a saving throw, she gains the ability to transform into that creature once per day for 10×level minutes (a number of Turns equal to her level), gaining all its powers and abilities for that time. The cleric receives a +1 bonus to her saving throw for every ritually significant step she takes while eating the heart; the Queen’s ritual sensibilities tend towards the perversely elegant and darkly sumptuous.
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| from tale of tales |
Examples:
Eating the heart of a creature with more hit dice than the cleric has levels does nothing. Furthermore, a cleric’s flesh can only remember so many shapes; a Royal Cleric can only learn a number of forms equal to half her level rounded up. Successfully consuming a heart while at this limit requires that she forget one of her existing forms.
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| from bloodborne |
Lucifer is at the bottom of every encounter table in Albion. He is in the streets and in the dungeons, in parlors and tombs and dreams. He is unfathomably evil and incalculably powerful, but not all that difficult to deal with. Lucifer is the architect of human sin and warden of every wicked soul to ever die; the idea of wanton destruction for its own pleasure lost its luster several epochs ago. Ultimately, Lucifer is bored; he is possibly the most bored being in existence. He responds well to the amusing and poorly to the tedious, and will grant a Wish to either if he thinks the results will be interesting enough. When encountered in the field, he will converse and observe, but not intervene; however, he will often agree to officiate or judge contests and wagers.
Lucifer has stats as a Baalroch/Balrog/Balor and can cast Wish at another’s behest. In normal circumstances, he wears fine white clothes and possesses the wings of a bat. In a fight, he is as large as is convenient, though never bigger than a storm giant, and appears as an armored man bathed in excruciating actinic radiance.
His incarnation can be destroyed for a time, but killing him in truth, if it is even possible, requires a great deal more than a simple fight. A player whose character makes a deal with Lucifer can henceforth choose Cleric of Lucifer as the class of new characters, even if the original deal-making character died.
Clerics of Lucifer cannot cast reversed Cleric spells. They can Turn Undead as normal, allowing their patron to reclaim the fugitive souls of the damned. Their only commandment is Don’t Be Boring.
Most D&Dish barbarians don’t do it for me. Insane, screaming rage shouldn’t really be a question of resource management. So here’s an mystic order of heathens going into ecstatic rampages instead.
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| by Tiptoe distributed under Creative Commons |
(also maenads, berserkers, werewolves, bassarids)
HP: as dwarf
Saving throws: as dwarf
Experience: as elf
Attack bonus: as thief
Once every few centuries, the sleeping nature gods of Albion awaken and convene a Wild Hunt, running down all they come across. Those they overtake have a choice: join the Hunt and be consigned to an eternity of slumber and slaughter with Albion’s elder deities, or perish. The Beast Knights are an order of warriors founded by a Britonnic hero who escaped the Hunt after joining–a feat performed neither before nor since, not by angels or demons or the greatest of fairies.
The Beast Knights venerate wild animals: the grace of predators, the desperation of prey, nature red in tooth and claw etc etc. They’ll talk about it at great lengths if you let them. In any case, Beast Knights, upon initiation, take a spirit of the deepest forest into their minds and bodies. Its supernatural strength, rather than strict training, allows them to fight as effectively as any warrior. Beast Knights traditionally wear hoods or masks depicting the face of an animal, such as a wolf, bear, hart, or crow. Some believe these become a part of the knight’s body when they fight.
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| by Lulsa Uribe distributed under Creative Commons |
Beast Knights improve their skills as half as fast as a specialist/thief. In LotFP, they start with 2 skill points and gain 1 more every level.
When a beast knight spends a Turn calling up their spirit, they enter a frenzy. Knights in this state:
To come to their senses, a beast knight must roll equal to or under 1+half level on a d6. This takes a full Turn, and if they take damage during that time, they automatically fail. Every time a non-frenzied beast knight takes damage when their current HP is 50% or less than maximum, they must make an identical check to stop themselves from going into a frenzy.
The wild spirits that possess Beast Knights hate all the works of mankind; if a knight dons metal armor, their spirit will not allow them to frenzy until the next full moon.
Knights can use their Languages skill to determine if they can speak animal languages (Serpent; Bird; Swine; Mew, the language of cats; etc).
