Skip to main content

Blood Of The Rose

Recently my players have been asking if there are any more classes aside from the quintessential four I've made for my Oddhack. So, I've been making a few more classes. My goal is to have all the classes that 5e has, except with different more free-form mechanics to allow for player customization. I present:

The Barbarian & The Druid
(Jakub Rebelka) 

I've also got a few notes and credits as always:

- The barbarian was heavily inspired by this barbarian from this amazing blog, check them out but don't try to pronounce the name because you may get a headache. The first draft of mine was almost a complete rip of their barbarian. I later made the conduit part a bit more minor and the rage less complex and slightly less powerful.

- The druid was heavily inspired by my own gibberish in my last post. It's basically a ripped version of the mask's ability, but made less powerful, and with less damning consequences. Of course, if you think that this class is too tame, you could always add back the consequence that they are stuck in their transformation.

- I'm reworking the thief and the cleric, it will be posted once I'm done with them. I realized that I'm falling into this weird design trap of having pretty much two types of classes. Ones that have one singular ability that is really versatile and ones that can choose from multiple abilities and are stuck with whatever they choose. I don't like the latter. These kinds of classes end up not using all of their abilities and end up being really hard to digest since the multiple abilities tends to form a giant wall of text that scares off players. I figure that if I can't find a way to fit in some player customization that I will add a kind of secondary ability that allows for further customization. I did this sort of with the barbarian and their sin. I could have completely left out the whole sin bit and the class would be mechanically the same, but I really want players to feel like they had some decision over their character. I'll let you all know how my reworking goes.

- If you're playing online, I've got two google docs that you can copy and use. Here's the barbarian and here's the druid.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spells + Rituals

In the spirit of October-For-People-In-Denial, I've been working on a few spooky things that probably should've been posted in Actual-October. One thing that I really enjoy is witches, in fact, I love them so much that all of my recent campaign's quintessential four classes  includes them ( Fighter , Thief , Witch, and Warlock , in my case). So far while GMing GLOG, the four have worked very well together. I've never quite written down solid rules surrounding the witch, so I guess now's the time. Just so we're all clear on what I view as "witches" and what this class will entail, I think that covens are like giant magical conspiracy-networks. Veteran witches live in this constant state of nightmare where complex rituals must be done, subtle games must be played, and horrible deeds must be completed for some final goal you would never understand. That being said, you can learn the game they play and participate if you're willing to risk a little h

Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

No plan survives first contact with the player, at least no plan of yours, my fellow GMs. I often find that heavy planning isn't worth it. I specifically find that improvisation is advantageous in play, for it can lead to even more interesting results than your original planning may have ever yielded. Attached to my GM screen I have four pages. The first is a giant list of random names, surnames, quirks, appearance, and secrets, all on D100 tables in some almost too tiny text. The second is a set of "templates" for magical items. The third is the player-facing rules to my hack. The fourth is simply for taking notes. I tend to run lots of my games pretty off-the-cuff since I am only an efficient writer when it's about an hour before the game starts and I'm panicking - anxiety is a horrible curse to have. Now, in interest of making interesting content, I'm going to share the magical item templates, since I'm almost sure everybody has seen their fair shar

This Will Work, For Now

I have some pretty bad anxiety. This only really shows itself during major occasions and when I'm GMing. Early on in my career of "forever GM", I found that I'd panic quite a bit, whether it was because I totally didn't expect the players to make a particular decision or because they'd talk to an NPC I didn't prepare whatsoever. This panic led to some pretty disastrous sessions, and to make it worse, I had the stupid idea that by just doing sessions completely unprepared I would cure myself of this anxiety around improvisation. No matter how many times you throw yourself into the flame, you won't stop getting burns. I learned that I needed a cope, a safety net to help the process because the panic is inevitable. I've taken comfort in this page I made to help improv. In fact, despite my original purpose for it being highly situational, I find that I refer to this page the most out of all my pages when GMing. It's helped me ride with the