Greetings fellow Blades, long time Lurk here. I am just about to start my first campaign full of my friends. By full I mean there are 7 players, with only 7 core playbooks I opened it up to my players for new ideas.
One of my players suggested a spirit over taking a bear body to make a were-bear. While I didn’t see bears running around Duskvol I did give it a spin.
The concept would be, that the Skovlanders have an ancient ritual that allows their warriors consume the heart of animal, and thus part of the animals spirit. Depending on the animal you could be a berserker, protector or a sly infiltrator.
Here is the Playbook and Attributes
TOTEMIC (fylgja) – a warrior with the heart of an animal
Heart of the Beast – You have completed an ancient Skovlander ritual and consumed the heart of a great animal. Your animal spirit aids you but it takes from you, you gain additional stress boxes (12 total) however it takes additional XP to advance. As you take trauma, more of your animal takes over, at 4 trauma instead of getting to retire it takes control of you. Mudane weapons have a reduced effect against you, however arcane and silvered weapons have potent effect.
System notes:
– gave the player no reason to stash any cash, this may unbalance downtime actions
– 8 Xp per advance
Totemic Aspect – Pick Prowl, Hunt or Skirmish. When you use this ability you can push yourself by spending 1 stress, if you spend 2 stress you gain a greater effect, however if you spend 2 stress.
Spirit Hunger – You are immune to possession of spirits and gain potency against spirits. Your animal spirit still hungers, if you destroy a spirit or butcher a human you can consume it’s spirit, doing so removes 1 stress.
Natural Warrior – Your animal spirit can transform your body, take 1 stress to gain either a fine natural weapon, a fine natural armor, or a fine natural shadow cloak.
Terrible Power – Same as vampire
I would love any and all feedback. Thanks!
I think the concept is kind of cool. Implementation could use a little work. I would like to see a cool vice replacement. Spirit Hunger looks like a good candidate
Heart of the Beast kinda powerful as its like permanent armor. Maybe its okay though.
Terrible Power is an okay start. Consider writing something new. I woudl make a few abilities that are bestial qualities. Like a versatile rage ability. Or a sneaky one for spirit of the snake or panther. Flying one for birds and general spirit-ness..
Sounds very cool – if I were in this situation as a GM, I’d probably whip out the Vampire/Ghost/Hull sheets and see who’s interested…
There are some other playbooks already knocking around, you might want to check those out.
I wouldn’t worry about the stash, I’ve yet to see someone use it. Removing a stress for eating a human seems pretty powerful for a melee bruiser. Maybe it also gives them level 1 harm, spirit headache.
Mark Cleveland Massengale Thanks Mark, I thought over a vice change, but I really wanted to keep the playbook as a mostly human with some exceptional abilities. Though I was thinking of replacing the Trauma tags to something more bestial to better represent their slipping humanity. I kinda want to see how the reduced effect when taking harm works out, it may be very broken, we will see. Same with Terrible Power, I might end up taking some feedback from the player and looping it into the playbook.
Mark Griffin The playbook will still have a stash it’s just that the character doesn’t retire per the normal rules. However I player of a core rule book could just as easily ignore the stash and spends those extra coins for downtime and such so I am not ass worried about it.
As for the the idea of consuming the soul of the recently deceased, I tried to put a little verbiage in there to point out that it will be a bloody, violent and probably time consuming step. Most likely the player would have to consume the heart of the dead person in order to get the stress back and at that point I almost feel like 1 stress is to little. My other thought was to flip it and let it decrease the tier of a wound, but they take stress.
Not to dampen your creative ideas Kyle, they are cool! But you can run multiple playbooks in a crew. In fact a crew of just one playbook type can be kinds cool.