Erlendheim

I began a series of posts last week detailing the character options I introduced to my Planescape flavoured D&D campaign a few years ago. It was quite epic in scale and involved gods and legendary monstrosities and elemental powers as well as travelling across multiple planes of existence and saving the universe from the domination of a narcissistic sea spirit. I hadn’t planned it in advance but, at one point, the Warlock needed to switch her patron so I came up with a new one which you can read about here. After that, I was hooked. I started making new character options, features and powers for every PC in the party. You know when you max out your rep with your party members in CRPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect and they get access to new abilities? That’s the way I was thinking of it. As a result, these new character options were designed with our specific players, characters, shared world and story in mind. I left balance at the door. Balance was not relevant to what I wanted to achieve. In fact, I wanted the PCs to feel special, powerful and impacted in a very concrete way by the events of the campaign. I think I largely achieved that. Take a look, here, at the powers I gave the party’s Druid when he became a kind of a shitty god. I think it exemplifies my philosophy when designing these abilities.

Celebrating the Mundane

I think the next big character advancement arc to culminate was that of Xarune, our Githzerai Fighter. Xarune, despite his background as an adventurer in his younger days, had a solid view of the world. He believed in the shield in his hand, the guardsman at his side and the firmness of the ground beneath his feet. He had developed a dependable reputation in a position of some responsibility as a sergeant in the Yeomanry of the town of Dor’s Hill. Magic was anathema to him and, indeed, he went to extremes to explain away magical phenomena in entirely mundane terms. But then the ground beneath his feet turned out to be the ancient tower of an unknown faction from a city in the shape of a donut floating above the top of an infinitely tall spire at the centre of the Outer Planes. It became increasingly difficult for him to hand-wave the obvious magic in the world around him, especially once he ended up in Sigil. In fact, I instituted a special mechanic, specific to Xarune. Each time he witnessed something truly magical that he could not explain, he would roll a Wisdom Saving Throw. When he failed, he lost a point of Wisdom, making it more-and-more likely that he would fail with each successive failed save. My goal here was to get Xarune under 10 Wisdom. Once that happened, his aura of confusion and his inability to square his beliefs with the facts of reality brought him to the attention of a small, new Faction in Sigil. They were called the Mundane. When Xarune ran into their leader, another Githzerai warrior named Sarafem, who noticed his unique state of disorientation through her natural psychic abilities. We had another short mini-game at this point, after Sarafem introduced the Faction and its tenets. She presented to him her shield, with, emblazoned upon it, the emblem of a shield. She asked him to take and examine it.

Here is how I presented Xarune’s inner struggle in my notes:

Sarafem will encourage Xarune to use detect thoughts while examining the shield. In essence, this will allow Xarune to detect his own thoughts, to interrogate his own beliefs.
If he does so, he will replay some of the more recent encounters he has had with “magic.” Ask him to recount them and indicate that he is unable, in retrospect, to lie to himself and his own feelings. The truth is that the spells and magical effects did happen. In some cases he was able to shrug off the effects and in others he bore the full brunt of them. What becomes clear as he remembers these incidents is that, it is not objectively true that he or anything has to be subject to such effects. He begins to get so in touch with his feelings that he feels a new understanding blossom. He is able to apply the force of his will against this magic, a will that is every bit as strong as any wizard or demon thinks they are. For that is all it is in the end, a battle of wills.
He will want to fail his saving throw against detect thoughts. Give him three chances to fail it at various points through the process. Of course, it is a Wisdom saving throw but this time the DC will be 2 points higher than Xarune’s normal DC as it gains a bonus from the shield.
Whether he succeeds or fails, Sarafem will present to him the shield with a bow. It is a mundane +2 shield. There is nothing magical about it, but it is exceptionally well made from the hardest, lightest wood they have ever seen. (It is made of what she calls Steadfast.)
If he fails, with a barely perceptible twinkle in her eye she will ask him to join her budding faction, which she calls, “The Mundane.” She says they are still workshopping it. There are not many of them so far, but each of them has a very firm grasp of their true feelings and they know what is real. If he decides to take her up on her offer, they are usually to be found meeting in her house near the Statue of Bigby in the Lady’s Ward any evening.
Also, he will regain his lost points of Wisdom and he will gain the new abilities presented [in the section below]
If he succeeds, however, he will go on as before, he will not regain any points of Wisdom and he will continue to risk losing them. If he ever reaches 0 Wisdom, he will lose his mind completely and reject reality entirely, thus becoming an NPC.
However, he can continue to attempt the trick with the shield, trying to detect his own thoughts. He can do this whenever he has downtime using the same rules as are presented above.

Thankfully, he failed all his saves and his outlook and philosophy changed as a result. Not completely, it was still quite compatible with his no-magic stance from before, it just morphed into a more anti-magic one, bringing a few new abilities with it. And you can read about those below.

But that wasn’t all. Xarune’s player, Isaac, took the idea of the Mundane and ran with it. He quickly took the ideals of the Faction and began to codify them, even going so far as to write up a Mundane Manifesto! This did my withered old heart good to see. The campaign gave his character a concrete, mechanical advancement directly related to Xarune and the way he played him, and he gave back to the campaign and the world, adding to its story and its depth. Sigh so good.

New Fighter Features – Nullification (Anti-magic)

Erlendheim #DND

So, as I pointed out in the intro to this post, I created these features and options for, not only a specific class, but for a particular character. As a result, the features prestented below are unique to Xarune’s flavour of Fighter, a Battle Master who focused on using the Defense and Protection Fighting Styles. As always, if you think you could make use of any of this stuff, please feel free.

Fighting Style

Defense

Also add a +1 bonus to saving throws against magical effects

Protection

In addition to the regular advantage of this fighting style, if a creature you can see casts a spell that requires a saving throw against a target other than you within 5 ft of you, you can use your reaction to add your shield’s AC bonus (including magical or other bonuses if it has them) to their saving throw.

Martial Archetypes

Battle Master

Maneuvers

Deny

When another creature hits you with a spell attack or you fail a saving throw against a spell effect or magical effect, as a reaction you can expend a superiority die and reduce the amount of damage you take by the superiority die roll + Con modifier.

Reflect

When another creature hits you with a spell attack, as a reaction you can expend a superiority die to reflect the superiority die roll + Con modifier damage back at the spell caster.

Wake-up Call

When you take the attack action on your turn you can forego one of your attacks and instead use a bonus action to direct another creature who can hear you to make an immediate saving throw against a spell that they are currently affected by. You expend a superiority die and they can add the roll + your Con mod to their saving throw roll.

Indomitable

In addition to the regular benefits of this feature, starting at 9th level, if the Nullifying Fighter is subject to a magic spell or effect, they can roll any saving throw with advantage.