Aetrimonde

Heroic Roleplaying in a World of Swords, Sorcery, and Steam

I’d like to introduce Aetrimonde, a TTRPG I’ve been designing with heavy inspiration from the houserules my group used back in our Dungeons and Dragons 4e days. I’m not ready to publish Aetrimonde yet, but I’m opening up this blog to discuss its design principles, mechanics, and systems.

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Economist by profession. Game theorist, enjoyer, and designer by vocation.

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater VI: Advancement

    For the last post on Valdo the Bat-Eater, I’m going to provide a peek at how Valdo might advance over the course of his early adventures. Partly, I’m going to use this to show off some different kinds of Spiritual powers, because the powers I’ve given him to start with, which are tied to animal spirits, are only about a quarter of the powers available to Spiritual characters.

    As with any character, Valdo gains a power, a feat, and a perk per level.

    Level 1

    I’m building Valdo partly as an ambush predator; he has one power already that has heightened effects against flatfooted creatures. What he still needs is a way to make his ambushes easier. So, let’s give him Forest Growth, which will let him create an area of difficult and impeding terrain. Being difficult terrain, which costs twice as much movement, is useful, but the part of this power that will help Valdo pull of ambushes is that it is impeding terrain, which grants cover (one of two ways to hide) if line of effect passes through it. Like many Spiritual powers, the zone gets larger the longer Valdo concentrates, until it reaches a maximum size of 4 (which is to say, every square within 4 of the zone’s center) and then expires. This power has the Plant keyword, one of the keywords associated with elemental spirits.

    One thing that Valdo currently lacks is a good normal attack: he has good melee attacks, but they’re all powers, not anything that he can use to make an opportune strike with any kind of accuracy. Let’s fix that by taking Spirit-Touched Natural Weapons: in addition to letting Valdo use <WIS> instead of <STR> for normal unarmed attacks (including Carnivorous Bite!), it gives him the benefit of a lesser magical weapon and implement, which can overcome some forms of damage resistance.

    Finally, his perk: after fleeing Der Eisenvald and falling in with some adventurers, Valdo realizes that he needs a way of supporting himself. Luckily, he already has a calling, but he will now formalize his training as a monster hunter, and take the Profession [Monster Hunter] perk. In addition to giving him the benefit of training on checks related to the professional side of monster hunting (things like finding work, outfitting an expedition, and recruiting hirelings), it lets him earn a little extra cash in the downtime between adventures. This will not amount to much, but it could let him afford an extra healing potion every once in a while, which is nothing to sneeze at.

    Level 2

    With his newfound ability to create a stand of trees in which to hide, Valdo is now even better situated for ambushing than he was before. Let’s lean into this: Cunning Slash is essentially an upgraded version of Feline Cunning as a greater power, dealing even more damage to flatfooted creatures.

    And, further increasing his damage, Valdo will also take Mighty Spirits, allowing him to add his expertise bonus (+2, increasing to +3 as soon as level 5) to the damage rolls of certain Spiritual powers. This feat allows Valdo to choose two keywords that it applies to; since all of his damaging powers are either Bear or Panther powers, he’ll choose those two keywords.

    For his perk at this level, Valdo will take Contacts [Eisenvaldean Hunters]. He’s had enough time to cool off after fleeing Der Eisenvald, and he’s now thinking of going back and finishing off the vampires he offended earlier in his career…but when he does, he’s going in prepared.

    Level 3

    Valdo continues to seek allies in anticipation of a return to Der Eisenvald, but mortal hunters are not his only allies. He takes Irate Spirit as his power this level, allowing him to summon forth a spirit that piles on to his allies’ attacks. This power has the Destroyer keyword, which is associated with ancient spirits; these are most commonly spirits of ancient people, but since Valdo is a skinchanger, we’ll instead flavor this power as calling up the spirit of a great predatory beast. It won’t benefit from the Mighty Spirits feat Valdo took at his last level, since it lacks the Bear or Panther keyword, but it’ll still be a nice source of extra damage in conjunction with his allies’ attacks.

    Summoning Powers

    Summoning powers like Irate Spirit create a semi-independent creature that follows the instructions of the summoner. They take their turns simultaneously with the summoner, who can use their own actions to command that the summoned creature do things during their turn; many summoned creatures, like the Irate Spirit, can also be commanded to do certain things between the summoner’s turns. Summoned creatures have their own supply of movement and their own pool of hit points, although creatures summoned by lesser powers are generally destroyed as soon as they take damage.

    Let’s continue making Valdo’s powers more deadly by taking Razor Claws, allowing his already quite damaging Panther powers to also make their targets bleed out. A creature taking repeated damage incurs that damage at the end of each of their turns (rolling for damage each time), typically until they succeed on a recovery roll. Repeated damage does benefit from bonuses to damage rolls, so thanks to Mighty Spirits, this 1d4 damage already becomes 1d4 + 2. Adding in that bleed damage ignores armor resistance, this will make Valdo’s Panther powers increasingly deadly.

    Valdo is increasingly confused by the way that his preferred tactics (leaping onto a monster from hiding and messily tearing it to ribbons) makes people turn green and flee. So, for his perk, he will take Esoteric Knowledge [Ordinary Human Behavior]. It remains to be seen whether his painstaking observation of human behavior allows him to relate better to his would-be rescuees…

    Level 4

    Another thing that Valdo still lacks is a way to deal with several enemies at once. Let’s give him one using Thrashing Claws, which as a Bear power benefits from his Mighty Spirits feat but not Razor Claws. It will still be enough to help get him out of situations where he’s surrounded by a few weaker enemies.

    Valdo is beginning to feel the cost of his quite low AC; to shore that up, he will take Defensive Expertise, which gives a simple +1 feat bonus to AC.

    Valdo continues to make plans for his vengeful return to Der Eisenvald, and practices making a variety of holy symbols that he can use, in a pinch, to fend off a vampire. He gains the Craft [Holy Symbol] perk.

    Level 5

    As part of his preparations for another round of vampire hunting, Valdo bonds a spirit of the desert that one of his adventures takes him to, allowing him to call on the brutally punishing sun of the deep sands…even at night, and even indoors. This gives him the Sunbake power, which he can use to great effect against vampires: in addition to weakening them so that they can’t harm him as easily, it also exploits their vulnerability to the sun! It gives Valdo a nice ranged attack (far better than his hunting crossbow would be…) but because it’s a Spiritual ranged power, he can also use it as a melee attack via his Wild Strike class feature. Sunbake has the Desert keyword, one of the keywords associated with spirits of the land.

    Valdo will also take the Landsense feat, since he gained the Spirit Domain power by multiclassing to Wakener. This will help him out by letting him be aware of any pesky vampires that have the bright idea to try to ambush him while he’s trying to ambush them.

    Finally, as one of his last steps before embarking on his great vampire hunt, Valdo will read every book he can find about vampires, hoping that it will prove useful. He gains the Esoteric Knowledge [Vampirism] perk.

    Up Next

    This wraps up Valdo the Bat-Eater! I’m going to take a break from character creation posts for a couple of weeks, but when I get back to them, I’ll be starting the third sample character, an elf artificer named Guinne of House Midwinter.

  • GM Mechanics: Encounter Design I

    I’ve shown off enough enemies, and discussed how they scale in difficulty, that I think today is a great time to share some of the guidance that the GM Handbook has for building encounters.

    The Encounter Metric

    Every enemy has an Encounter Value (EV) that represents how difficult they are to defeat, based on their tier and type. The PCs also have an EV, based on their levels, and you can judge roughly how difficult an encounter will be by comparing the total EV of the enemies (and hazards and traps and so on) in an encounter to the total EV of the PCs. Depending on how these two totals compare, an encounter will fall into four rough levels of difficulty:

    • An encounter where the enemies have around two-thirds the EV of the PCs is an easy encounter. An easy encounter still presents a little bit of a challenge, but it is not something that the PCs will have to really plan out their tactics in.
    • An encounter where the enemies have around the same EV as the PCs is a normal encounter. You can expect a normal encounter to do enough damage to the PCs that they use up an average of one resurgence each, either during the encounter or when patching themselves up afterward. Because PCs regain a resurgence with every encounter they triumph over, they should, on average, lose no net resurgences from a normal encounter. Of course, depending on how they play, the damage might be distributed unevenly, so that one character comes out ahead and one is badly wounded…but them’s the breaks. A normal encounter is unlikely to cause character death, even if the PCs use poor tactics or have some poor rolls.
    • An encounter where the enemies have around one-and-one-half times the EV of the PCs is a hard encounter. A hard encounter will likely see all the PCs taking enough damage to cause a net loss of resurgences even after their triumph; there can be a risk of character death, but it is minor unless the PCs both roll badly and use bad tactics.
    • An encounter where the enemies have around twice or more the EV of the PCs is a climactic encounter, best reserved for the end of a long adventure when the PCs come face to face with the villain. A challenging encounter will almost certainly require the party to take a long rest afterwards, because they will use up a lot of resurgences, consumables, and other resources even if they use good tactics. And, there is a very real risk of character death regardless of how they play.

    As an example, a party of five level-6 PCs each have an EV of 160, making the party’s total EV 800. So encounters for this party would be:

    • Easy at around 550 EV.
    • Normal at around 800 EV.
    • Hard at around 1200 EV.
    • Climactic at around 1600 EV.

    In addition to telling you how difficult an encounter will be, EV also helps to design encounters from scratch. You can start by deciding how challenging you want the encounter to be and calculating an appropriate EV total for your PCs and that level of difficulty: this is called the encounter metric. Then, just pick appropriate enemies whose EV sums up to roughly your encounter metric.

    Picking Enemies

    You can absolutely fill out an encounter budget by picking enemies, if not at random, then with just a cursory glance at their EV. But, you can improve the quality of your encounters by taking a few other things into consideration:

    Story Considerations

    Aetrimonde is first and foremost a roleplaying game, and that means that the story you’re telling should be a factor in the encounters you build for it. If the villain of an adventure is an evil industrialist plotting to take over the world with his army of mechanical soldiers, then at least some of the fights during the adventure should probably include mechanical soldiers as enemies, and there are some other kinds of enemies that you should probably avoid, like nature-loving elves and traditionalist dwarves.

    This is not to say that every encounter during an adventure has to revolve around the adventure’s main plot. There are lots of ways to work in an encounter featuring unrelated enemies:

    • A villain could have groups of soldiers that he has hired, tricked, threatened, or mind-controlled into fighting for him, and who are therefore different from the rest of his forces.
    • There could be a secondary antagonist group that is allied with your main villain, but includes different kinds of enemies.
    • A secondary antagonist could also be opposed to both the main villain and the party, and become involved in the adventure because they’re trying to take advantage of the PCs’ actions to achieve their own goals.
    • Mindless and unintelligent creatures, like zombies, constructs, and animals, could be included as enemies in an adventure that doesn’t revolve around them because they are territorial, out of control, or just in the way of the PCs.
    • Traditional dungeon-delving adventures can include a wide variety of enemies whose only relation to each other is that they were brought into the dungeon by its builder. They might be there to guard it, they might be prisoners who’ve broken loose, or they might be the builder’s experiments, for example.

    If there’s a particular enemy that you want to use (because it has interesting mechanics, for example), and you just can’t find a way to work it into the story, then it’s time to exert your DM’s prerogative and re-flavor it so that it seems like a different kind of creature that would fit in better. This might involve:

    • Changing a creature’s name, type and description to something more appropriate for the adventure. (Example: Renaming a Zombie Walker to Brainwashed Muscle, and making it a Mortal Humanoid.)
    • Giving a creature different weapons and armor to suit a different culture, and adjusting its stats accordingly. (Example: Giving an Elf Archer a rifle and renaming it a Dark Elf Gunman.)
    • Adjusting the names, descriptions, and damage types of a creature’s powers to resemble a different kind of enemy. (Example: Changing a Fire Elemental’s powers to deal both fire and entropic damage, and renaming it a Hellfire Spirit.)
    • Outright replacing some of a creature’s powers with ones more appropriate to a different kind of creature. (Example: Replacing an Elf Blademaster’s Deadly Grace power with the Dwarven Stubbornness power and renaming it a Dwarf Blademaster.)

    Tier Considerations

    Aetrimonde is designed to make it possible for low-level enemies to still challenge powerful characters in sufficient numbers, and for low-level characters to handle powerful enemies in small numbers, but there are limits to this.

    Especially weak enemies (more than 2 tiers below the party) will have a much harder time hitting with attacks, and will almost always be hit by the PCs’ attacks. Fighting such weak enemies can make the PCs feel powerful, but fights with numerous weak enemies tend to take a long time just due to the number of creatures there are with turns to track and dice to roll, and it can get tedious quickly.

    Especially powerful enemies (more than 2 tiers above the party) similarly have a much easier time hitting with attacks, and will be hit less often by the PCs’ attacks. Fighting such powerful enemies can also become boring, not because they don’t pose a challenge, but because PCs that roll badly, or just don’t have a good set of powers for fighting a particular enemy, may spend several turns trying and failing to contribute to the fight.

    In general, avoid designing encounters exclusively using enemies more than 2 tiers away from the PCs. Instead, mix them in with enemies that are closer to the PCs’ tier. It usually works best to combine especially weak enemies with other enemies that are at or slightly above the PCs’ tier, and especially strong enemies with other enemies that are at or slightly below the PCs’ tier. (Combining especially strong and especially weak enemies just gets you the worst of both worlds.)

    Role Considerations

    The second thing to take into account when picking enemies for an encounter is their roles, and what that means for how an encounter with them may play out.

    Firstly, an encounter should generally not consist entirely of the same kind of enemy, or even of enemies with the same role:

    • Assassins, Brutes, and Shooters all deal high damage. Encounters with many enemies of these roles tend to be high-intensity, with PCs taking a lot of damage in a short time, which increases the odds of character death.
    • Controllers can be frustrating to deal with, because they prevent players from using their characters in the way that they want to.
    • Leaders are force-multipliers who make other enemies more dangerous. Often, multiple Leaders stack dangerously, creating one (or several) incredibly powerful enemies that can overwhelm the PCs. This is especially the case when combining Leaders with other enemies more than 2 tiers above the party.
    • Protectors are also force-multipliers, but they make other enemies more resilient. Multiple Protectors can turn an encounter into a slog, where neither the PCs nor the enemies can make much headway. Like with Leaders, it’s especially bad when combining Protectors with enemies more than 2 tiers above the PCs.
    • Soldiers have great defenses, making them difficult to bring down. An encounter with lots of Soldiers will be a slog like one with lots of Protectors.

    Secondly, some enemy roles will perform differently against certain kinds of PC. It can be fun to throw a challenge at the PCs every once in a while that they have trouble dealing with, but there is a fine line between a challenge and an unpleasant slog of a battle where nothing they can do works well. Keep an eye on the PCs in your party, and if a lot of them fall into the same niche, use certain enemy roles with caution:

    • Melee-focused PCs can have trouble dealing with Shooters (because Shooters can attack from a long ways away) and Skirmishers (because Skirmishers have ways to avoid being tied down in melee).
    • Ranged-focused PCs can have trouble dealing with Brutes and Soldiers, both of which like to get up close where it’s difficult to use ranged powers.
      • Especially pay attention to Soldiers’ defenses: if a majority of your PCs use attacks vs. one particular defense, avoid using Soldiers who have excellent values in that defense. Otherwise, encounters may become a slog.
    • Also pay attention to Controllers’ attacks, and avoid using Controllers whose attacks target a defense most of your PCs have low values in. If the party is consistently subject to nasty conditions, the fight becomes not just a slog, but unfun.

    Finally, the two “special” roles of Afflictor and Summoner should always be used sparingly:

    • It is decidedly unfun for PCs to be constantly dealing with injury, poison, and curses. Use Afflictors in only one, perhaps two, encounters per adventure.
    • Summoners increase the number of enemies in the encounter, sometimes drastically. To prevent this becoming a drain on your own concentration, use only one or two Summoners in any encounter.

    EV Adjustments

    Finally, there are circumstances where it’s appropriate to adjust some enemies’ EV up or down (by 20-40%, usually) to account for other facets of an encounter:

    • Adjust Assassin EV up if the encounter provides especially good ways for the Assassin to set up (e.g. darkness, heavy concealment, etc.) and down if the Assassin has no good way to set up (e.g. bright light everywhere, no cover, etc.).
    • Adjust Brute EV up if it starts the encounter very close to the PCs, or the encounter is in tight quarters where the PCs can not escape easily; adjust down if it starts very far from the PCs.
    • Adjust Shooter EV up if it starts the encounter with the PCs at the very edge of its attack range, or it has terrain making it hard to effectively attack it (e.g. a wall with arrow slits); adjust down if it starts very close to the PCs.
    • Adjust Skirmisher EV up if the encounter provides terrain that especially favors the Skirmisher (e.g. lots of cliffs for a Skirmisher with a climb speed) and down if the encounter is in tight quarters where the Skirmisher cannot move easily.

    Up Next

    With all of these considerations in mind, keep an eye out for my next post on encounter design, where I’ll be building an encounter using some of these lovely undead I’ve been showing off!

  • Bestiary: Wights

    Today in my October series on Aetrimonde’s creepiest undead, I’m talking wights!

    Aetrimonde’s wights share an origin: they are created undead, given necromantic magic by the necromancers who animated them. The extra care, effort, and embalming fluid that go into creating a wight means that they are more of a threat than a mere zombie. There are several common varieties, animated for different purposes, and we’ll be looking at three of them today.

    Barrow Wight

    Barrow wights are undead guards buried in the barrow mounds of ancient kings from Aetrimonde’s more primitive days. Barrow wights first entered the popular consciousness via the Lord of the Rings, where they were the bodies of ancient kings animated by evil spirits, and possessed of a fell, icy grip.1

    Aetrimonde’s wights are not the product of evil spirits, but they certainly have the fell grip. With Dragging Grasp, they can grab an enemy and drag them into the open, and with Shoulder Charge, they can grab an enemy and knock them prone. The real danger of their grip comes from Draining Grasp: once in their grip, PCs will be weakened (dealing half damage) and take entropic damage every turn they remain grabbed. If a PC gets grabbed, they and their allies will want to somehow break the grab quickly.

    Barrow Wights don’t have nearly the HP of zombies, but they also don’t have the weaknesses. They have decent defenses and some armor resistance (which is what makes them Soldiers), and, thanks to Dead Flesh, they can’t easily be brought down by fireballs and lightning bolts. To fight a Barrow Wight, some PC will almost certainly have to get up close and personal with them.

    Murder Wight

    Rather than guardians, murder wights are animated to serve as a necromancer’s elite killers. Able to blend in among the living by flensing fresh corpses, murder wights get close to their targets before knifing them and giving them a wound that will not heal.

    The Assassin role, as a reminder, is for enemies that can deal high damage, with the proper setup. A Murder Wight is a twist on this formula: it does need setup to be most effective, but it’s easy setup: they need their foe to be flatfooted so that they can use Entropic Stab. Once they hit with Entropic Stab, though…their best move is to run away, because the repeated entropic damage offers no way to end it other than killing the Murder Wight or getting far away from it. A Murder Wight that can break line of sight and hide, or run through a door and lock it behind it, forces PCs to hunt it down before the entropic damage brings down their ally.

    Apostle Wight

    An apostle wight is that rarest of things, an undead creature that can create more of its kind. They are animated by skilled, powerful necromancers with a horde large enough that they need lieutenants to manage it.

    Apostle Wights are Protectors, designed to make other enemies harder to kill. They accomplish this in a couple of ways:

    • Aura of Undeath removes other undead creatures’ vulnerabilities (like wraiths’ and vampires’ vulnerability to radiant damage), and grants them immunity to entropic damage. Worse, it allows them to heal (or at least, gain temporary hit points) from taking the entropic damage they are immune to.
    • And the Apostle Wight has multiple ways to deal entropic damage that will heal their undead allies. Death Toll and Withering Shroud2 both deal entropic damage in an area of effect, allowing the Apostle Wight to both attack the PCs and heal allies in one turn. Better yet, Withering Shroud is a concentration power, allowing the Apostle Wight to start it up and then combine it with Death Toll on later turns.

    Apostle Wights are Summoners as well, able to animate dead humanoids as Zombie Walker mooks. In a battle with only the PCs present, this is not the worst thing to deal with…but in a fight with civilians around, who can’t survive nearly as much punishment as PCs, it puts a great deal of pressure on the PCs to avoid collateral damage.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrow-wight ↩︎
    2. Both of these powers, incidentally, are Arcane powers available to PCs. Entropomancy is not the same thing as necromancy, but necromancers who did not first practice entropomancy are few and far between. ↩︎

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater V: Filling in the Numbers

    All right, it’s time for another math-heavy post today, as I’m going to be filling in all the numbers for Valdo the Bat-Eater.

    Health and Healing

    The skinchanger class gives Valdo 20 base hit points. His <CON> will give him another 12, and he will get 4 from expertise, for a total of 36 hit points. His injury value will be 18.

    Valdo gets 3 base resurgences from his class, and another 3 from <CON>, for 6 total. With a 1d8 healing die, he will get 1d8 hit points from a small heal and 1d8 + 4 from a large heal.

    This makes Valdo a little bit tougher than the average character, despite his rogue-level base hit points and toughness.

    Defenses

    As always, Valdo’s defenses are 10 + half his expertise bonus (+1) + some other relevant values:

    • AC: 14 = 11 + 2 (leather greatcoat) + 1 (<GRA>)
    • Brawn: 15 = 11 + 1 (skinchanger) + 3 (<CON>)
    • Poise: 13 = 11 + 1 (skinchanger) + 1 (<GRA>)
    • Wit: 13 = 11 + 2 (<INT>)
    • Composure: 15 = 11 + 4 (<WIS>)

    Unfortunately, Valdo is going to have terrible AC. However, he makes up slightly for this with his Spirit Transformation, which gives him armor resistance equal to his +3 <CON>. So Valdo will be getting hit a lot, but can blunt a lot of the impacts. Thankfully, his other defenses are more reasonable.

    Attacks and Damage

    Valdo has four different ways he can attack, and they’re all going have different attack bonuses and damage.

    His Carnivorous Bite attack will be based on Strength, like any unarmed attack; with +0 <STR>, this means he will have a +1 attack bonus (due to Carnivorous Bite’s precision bonus) and deal a plain 1d12 damage.

    Likewise, his Spirit Transformation unarmed attack will have a +1 attack bonus and deal a plain 1d10 damage. Since it’s strictly worse than Carnivorous Bite (for the moment; there are feats that would improve it…), there’s not really much point in putting it on a character sheet.

    Valdo’s totemic hunting crossbow, aside from being an implement for his Spiritual powers, is a weapon with +2 precision and 1d10 damage, but due to Valdo’s -1 <DEX>, he will only have a +1 attack bonus and deal 1d10 – 1 damage.

    And finally, there are his actual Spiritual powers, three of which are attacks. All three are based on Wisdom, but each has different attack and damage rolls:

    • Feline Cunning has an inherent +2 bonus to attack rolls, making its total attack bonus +6, and deals 1d8 + <WIS> + <CON>, totaling 1d8 + 7. It’s also an attack vs. Poise, rather than AC.
    • Bounding Leap also has the inherent +2 bonus, and so its total attack bonus is also +6 (but vs. AC). Its damage is 2d8 + <WIS>, or 2d8 + 4 total.
    • Ursine Pin lacks the inherent +2 bonus, so its total attack bonus is +4, but vs. Brawn. Its damage is 1d8 + <WIS>, or 1d8 + 4 total.

    Skills

    Valdo’s leather greatcoat does apply a -1 encumbrance penalty, which applies to physical skills (those based on Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, and Grace). So taking this into account, his skill bonuses will be:

    Acrobatics +0History +2Persuasion -1
    Arcana +4Insight +4Religion +2
    Athletics -1Intimidate +1Society +2
    Deception -1Medicine +2Stealth +2
    Endurance +4Nature +4Subterfuge -2
    Engineering +4Perception +2Warfare +2

    Movement

    Valdo is going to be more mobile than Ragnvald: in addition to having higher base speed, at 6 squares, he has +1 <GRA>, allowing him to move 1 square if he chooses to move safely. Bounding Leap also gives him a way to make hit-and-run attacks without getting tied up in melee.

    Carrying Capacity

    With +0 <STR>, Valdo has a perfectly typical carrying capacity of 50 bulk. His starting equipment weighs in at just about half that, so he’s got plenty of room for more loot.

    Initiative

    With +0 <CUN>, Valdo has +0 initiative, meaning that he’ll likely be acting after Ragnvald in most encounters…if he didn’t start the encounter himself by leaping on the enemy from hiding.

    Up Next

    I’m almost done with Valdo here, but like I did with Ragnvald, I’m going to wrap up by showing some ways that Valdo could advance and develop up to level 5. This will include some examples of Spiritual powers that branch out away from Valdo’s core fantasy as a skinchanger and show what Ancestor, Elemental, and Land powers look like.

    And in the meantime, you can take a look at Valdo’s character sheet (with some improvements over the earlier version I used for Ragnvald, which I’ve since updated).

    ValdoBatEater_CharSheetDownload

  • Why It Works: Level Scaling II

    Today, I’m going to follow on from my previous post on level scaling and take a look at how PCs would fare against enemies of higher and lower tiers. This post may be best viewed on a larger screen, because there are some large tables in it.

    Accuracy

    As a baseline, let’s take a look at the accuracy of a PC facing an enemy of their tier, and vice versa.

    In the previous post, I discussed how PCs will advance if they max out every aspect of their character, which is to say, they’ll gain +4 to attacks and defenses over 20 levels. While in practice this won’t necessarily be a smooth progression of +1 every 5 levels/1 tier, we’ll assume that for purposes of this discussion.

    The math for enemy design that I have settled on provides enemies with that same +1 per tier as they advance, but they start with a slight handicap, equivalent to about 5 levels of advancement. This means a PC will hit a level-appropriate enemy on a 9 instead of a 10 (72% of the time), and the enemy will hit the PC on an 11 (55%).

    If a PC faces an enemy 1 tier higher, then both they and the enemy will hit on a 10 (64%). So the PC will be 64/72 = 89% as effective offensively as when they faced an enemy at their tier, and the enemy will be 64/55 = 116% as effective. Together, this translates into the PC being 89/116 = 75% as effective when fighting an enemy 1 tier higher, just from accuracy effects.

    If they are fighting an enemy 1 tier lower, then the PC is 79/72 = 110% as effective, and the enemy 45/55 = 82% as effective. Overall, the accuracy effects will make the PC 134% as effective from accuracy effects. (Though more of this will come from the enemy being less accurate than the PC being more so.)

    If you’re noticing that 134% is roughly the reciprocal of 75%, very good! This is designed into the system, and means that the overall difference in accuracy going one tier down should feel about as big as the difference going one tier up.

    Damage

    Calculating the difference in difficulty that comes from damage is going to be more complicated than it was for accuracy. This is because with every tier, typical damage increases by 2, armor resistance by 1., and hit points by 4.

    Let’s start with one concrete example: a Tier 0 PC vs. a Tier 0 enemy. The PC will deal typical damage of 8.5, and the enemy will typically have 0 AR and 28 HP. So the PC will deal 30% of the enemy’s HP per hit.

    The enemy will deal 6.5 typical damage, against 1 AR and 32 HP. This will be 17% of the PC’s HP.

    Applying the same math to different tier pairings, we can fill out the following tables for a PC facing an on-tier enemy…

    TierPC DamageEnemy AREnemy HP% DamageEnemy DamagePC ARPC HP% Damage% Damage Ratio
    08.502830%6.513217%1.77
    110.513230%8.523618%1.64
    212.523629%10.534019%1.56
    314.534029%12.544419%1.49
    416.544428%14.554820%1.44

    …an enemy one tier higher…

    TierPC DamageEnemy AREnemy HP% DamageEnemy DamagePC ARPC HP% Damage% Damage Ratio
    08.513223%8.513223%1.00
    110.523624%10.523624%1.00
    212.534024%12.534024%1.00
    314.544424%14.544424%1.00
    416.554824%16.554824%1.00

    …and an enemy one tier lower:

    TierPC DamageEnemy AREnemy HP% DamageEnemy DamagePC ARPC HP% Damage% Damage Ratio
    0
    110.502838%6.523613%3.00
    212.513236%8.534014%2.61
    314.523635%10.544415%2.35
    416.534034%12.554816%2.16

    Overall Effectiveness

    Coupling these values with accuracy, we can compute A PC’s relative effectiveness against an enemy a tier above or below them. We’ll define this overall effectiveness as the accuracy effectiveness computed above (0.75 vs. a tier above, 1.34 vs. a tier below), times the % Damage Ratio for an enemy a tier above or below, divided by the % Damage Ratio for an on-tier enemy.

    Tier% Damage Ratio vs. Equal TierAccuracy Factor vs. Tier Above% Damage Ratio vs. +1 TierEffectiveness vs. Tier AboveAccuracy Factor vs. Tier Below% Damage Ratio vs. Tier BelowEffectiveness vs. Tier Below
    01.770.751.00 0.42
    11.640.751.000.461.343.002.44
    21.560.751.000.481.342.612.25
    31.490.751.000.501.342.352.12
    41.440.751.000.521.342.162.02

    So what does this tell us? Well, just numerically, a PC will be around half as effective, or a little less at low levels, against enemies a tier higher than they are, and around twice as effective, or a little more at low levels, against enemies a tier lower than they are.

    EV Scaling

    Now, we want to take this result (that each 1-tier difference makes an enemy about twice as difficult) and translate it into a rating that captures how difficult the enemy is. And you’d think that the way to do that is to have the rating double with each tier added to an enemy. But, there’s a problem with that…

    When building an encounter, there are two easy ways to adjust its difficulty: you can adjust the difficulty of the individual enemies, holding their number constant…or you can adjust the number of enemies, holding the difficulty of the enemies constant. The problem is that these two factors work on different scales.

    If you take every enemy in an encounter and bump them all up by one tier (adjusting their stats, or replacing them with similar enemies of a higher tier), that doubles the difficulty of the encounter, as we’ve just seen.

    But if you instead double the number of enemies in the encounter, this actually quadruples the difficulty of the encounter, because it will take twice as much work (and twice as many rounds) for the PCs to defeat them, and in that time, the enemies will collectively be dealing twice as much damage per round since there are twice as many of them.

    What About AoE Damage?

    The assumption that twice as many enemies will take twice as long to defeat is based on the PCs using single-target attacks. In practice, many PCs will have access to area attacks or other ways to attack more than one enemy per turn: these tend to do less damage than equivalent single-target attacks, but more damage total if they can catch enough enemies with them.

    Having more enemies in an encounter means that they will likely be more densely packed, making area damage more effective. This will slightly reduce how long it takes to defeat a hypothetical twice-as-large encounter.

    On the other hand, having twice the damage output means that the PCs will likely need to fight more cautiously, passing up opportunities to deal damage in favor of healing themselves or staying in defensible positions. This will slightly increase how long it takes to defeat a hypothetical twice-as-large encounter.

    And, with twice as many enemies, they will find it more easy to flank the PCs. This will slightly increase the damage they deal before being defeated.

    In playtesting, these three factors have appeared to roughly cancel each other out.

    What About Focus Fire?

    In reality, the enemies in an encounter won’t all be defeated at the same time. If the PCs focus their attacks on one enemy at a time, this will reduce the overall damage they take.

    Consider an encounter with, let’s say, four goblin warriors that each take the PCs r rounds to defeat, and deal d damage per round until defeated. They collectively deal 4d damage for the first r rounds, 3d damage for the next r rounds, etc., for a total of 10dr damage.

    An encounter with eight goblin warriors will instead have them dealing 8d damage for the first r rounds, 7d damage, for the next r rounds, etc., for a total of 36dr damage. That’s almost four times as much.

    So the idea that doubling the number of enemies quadruples the difficulty of the encounter holds even with the PCs focusing fire.

    The problem here is that doubling the number of enemies in the encounter will only double the total EV of the enemies, while quadrupling the encounter’s difficulty. We want to make it so that raising all of the enemies by two tiers, which will also quadruple the encounter’s difficulty, also doubles the encounter’s total EV. This means we want the EV scale to scale something like this:

    Level / TierEV (Option 1)EV (Option 2)
    0 / 0100100
    1110108
    2120116
    3130124
    4140132
    5 / 1150140
    6160152
    7170164
    8180176
    9190188
    10 / 2200200
    11220216
    12240232
    13260248
    14280264
    15 / 3300280
    16320304
    17340328
    18360352
    19380376
    20 / 4400400

    The first option uses rounder numbers and is likely easier for a GM to remember and use for that reason, but the second option will give slightly smoother scaling. The differences are relatively small, and in any case this is largely meant as a rough guide to encounter difficulty, so I’m going to go with the first option.

    Fewer Enemies of Higher Tier

    In the details about focus fire above, I did some math to show that doubling the number of enemies still roughly quadruples the encounter’s difficulty, even with the PCs using focused fire. Let’s apply the same approach to consider what happens when substituting higher-tier enemies for lower-tier ones does:

    Consider an encounter with four goblin knights that are individually twice as difficult as the goblin warriors. For simplicity, assume that “twice as difficult” means that they take 1.4r rounds to defeat and deal 1.4d damage per round, so that the damage an individual goblin knight could deal before being defeated is 1.96dr, or roughly twice as much. This encounter will have the goblins deal 5.6d damage for the first 1.4r rounds, 4.2d damage for the next 1.4r rounds, etc., for a total of 19.6dr damage before the last one is defeated. Which is, yes, about twice as much in total as the four goblin warriors.

    But (and this is the complicated bit), two goblin knights, which it’s tempting to assume would be equivalent to the four goblin warriors, would deal only 5.88dr damage before being defeated. This is because halving the number of enemies cuts the encounter difficulty to roughly 1/4, and making the individual enemies twice as difficult only brings it back up to roughly 1/2. You would actually need between two and three of the goblin knights to have an encounter of roughly the same difficulty as the goblin (three would deal 11.76dr damage), and this is what the EV scales above accomplish.

    If we say, for the sake of argument, that goblin warriors are Tier 0, then their combined EV is 400; the goblin knights, being twice as difficult, must be Tier 1, and the combined EV of three of them is 450 (or 420, using the more precise scale), which is pretty close to an appropriate EV for an encounter that would deal 11.76dr damage when compared to four goblin warriors dealing 10dr.

    In Practice

    All of the above is theoretical and purely numeric. I did use this math to help me calibrate PC and enemy level scaling, but it’s not enough to rely on numbers alone: the pure math misses a few factors that are difficult to model simply.

    One factor is that at higher levels, both PCs and their enemies will also have a wider selection of actions and special traits. For enemies at least, some of these will be, for lack of a better word, “nastier” than at low levels. Some high-level enemies can do things like teleport out of a battle and bring back reinforcements, which is not a factor at low levels. PCs have their own nasty tricks at higher levels, due to how certain powers and feats can be combined in a way that is greater than the sum of the parts.

    So, I’ve run some playtests, pitting groups of PCs against variations of the same encounter that used enemies at their tier, a tier above, and a tier below, with their numbers adjusted accordingly. The consensus? There are definitely differences in how these encounters played out and felt…but they’re small, and the encounters felt similarly difficult, which I think vindicates my scaling here.

  • Aetrimonde Gazetteer: The Dwarven Federation II

    Today, in the second half of my coverage of the Dwarven Federation, I’m going to be covering the nation’s current state, meaning government, politics, and society. And, I’ll cap it off by providing some suggestions for plot hooks that could be used to tie the Federation into a campaign!

    Government

    The Dwarven Federation is, as the name declares, a federation, but it is a federation of clans rather than states or cities. Dwarven clans are a combination of an extended family unit and a family-run business: in the Federation, they are also a political unit capable of not just holding territory, but also raising armies to defend it and passing and enforcing laws within it.

    A clan’s jurisdiction extends only to the borders of its own territory, which depending on the clan may consist of as little as a compound of buildings where its people live and work, or as much as a range of mountains and valleys. Most clans fall into the former category, with their claimed territory entirely surrounded by the territory of another, more powerful clan to which they owe a form of fealty. Where a dwarf of one clan must venture into the territory of another whose laws differ, their rights and obligations are governed by treaties between the respective clans, which can grow exceedingly complex.

    Outright war between clans is rare, but they do compete, and they often use legal and economic strategies to undermine rivals’ access to resources or drive them into bankruptcy. The Regent is the arbiter of last recourse for conflicts between clans, with the power to order that a clan’s territory and assets be seized by a claimant, or (in extraordinary cases) that a clan be dissolved entirely and its people exiled.

    While in theory every clan’s Thane sits upon the High Council, and receives voting power proportional to the population of their clan, in practice the council is dominated by the handful of ancient, wealthy and powerful clans that control the bulk of the Federation’s territory. Because the minor clans occupy territory entirely surrounded by these major clans, they can be leaned on to vote in a bloc with the Thane whose clan surrounds them. The major clans are not a constant, however: their number has fluctuated between five and eleven over the centuries, as political and economic maneuvering bankrupted some clans and elevated new ones.

    Legally, the High Council cannot pass laws for the Federation as a whole, any more than the regent can. However, the Thanes are bound by tradition and honor to respect and uphold any consensus reached by the High Council. In practice, this means that if a sufficient majority of the council agrees on a policy, the dissenters must either fall in line and implement the policy, or secede from the Federation. Some clans, holding territory on the borders of the Federation, have chosen to secede over the centuries, but this is a rare event: leaving the Federation means being cut off from the greatest repositories of Dwarven heritage, and is therefore a last resort for any clan with the slightest respect for that heritage.

    Among the policy decisions that the High Council confers on are matters of foreign policy, military strategy, taxation, trade, and of course the election of new Regents. The Regency is a position for life, which is one reason why only elderly dwarves are ever seriously considered for it. (The other, of course, is that only a dwarf who has spent an entire lifetime developing an understanding of dwarven culture and heritage could possibly command the respect necessary to wield the position’s ceremonial power effectively.)

    Political Situation

    At present, the Regent for the Unclaimed Throne is Ingrid Ingvaldsdottir, who has held the position for four years. She is a progressive and a reformer, by the standards of the Federation, which is to say, she does not immediately call for the exile of any dwarf to offer up an idea without precedent in the annals of dwarven history.

    Ingvaldsdottir was elected Regent in response to the growing economic crisis that has seen dispossessed apprentices leaving the Federation in droves, and has caused the more modern clans in the west of the Federation to start muttering about seceding en masse. Unfortunately, she was elected by the barest of margins, as a compromise candidate carried by a coalition of the modernist and mercantilist factions on the council against the traditionalists; the traditionalists were barely restrained from seceding themselves by their dedication to preserving the Federation and their heritage. While she received enough support to claim the Regency, this does not translate into enough support to make the council reach consensus on the cultural reforms she believes are necessary to arrest the Federation’s slow descent into irrelevance.

    The traditionalist opposition on the high council is led by Olaf Olafssen XXIII, who is indeed a direct descendant of the first Regent. Clan Ulfenning remains a powerful clan, and one of the few to continue efforts to reclaim further pieces of the heritage of Gjalerbron or identify an heir to the throne after Audur’s Proclamation. Olaf XXIII would sooner see the Federation broken than permit any reforms that, as he sees it, devalue Dwarven tradition and heritage. He and his allies are biding their time, but are rumored to be preparing for a political counterstroke as soon as Ingvaldsdottir overreaches.

    Foreign Relations

    The Federation is on good terms with Waystone, which forms one of their largest remaining export markets, and Caras Elvaren, due to their shared history of loss during the Collapse. Formerly, they were friendly to Tir Coetir, but the wood elves’ reckless release of their engineered plagues during the last wars soured this relationship.

    Relations with the Novan Imperium are complex: the Imperium is home to a sizeable dwarf population, but these are largely exiled or expatriate dwarves who do not agree with the Federation’s backward-looking culture.

    Society

    Clans are of course the center of the Federation’s society: members of a clan work closely with each other, and as a rule they also live, feast, celebrate, and worship together as well. A typical clan is semi-communal: individuals and smaller family units within the clan own their own homes within a shared compound, and accumulate wealth in the form of a claim to the clan’s assets and funds. Clans also generally provide members with access to communal meals, medical care, legal services, and more. There is of course variation between clans: some are totally communal, with members residing in barracks or dormitories and owning only personal effects. Others are less so, with members largely managing their own affairs independent of the clan.

    Dwarves are initially born into their parents’ clan (or one of their clans, as marriages across clan lines are not uncommon). They are not bound to a clan, though: while there is pressure for young dwarves to apprentice in their birth clan’s trades, a dwarf who finds no appeal in this can always seek to be adopted into a clan more suited to their interests. So, too, can they join another clan by marriage. The right to join any clan that would have them is one of the most traditional rights in dwarven tradition, and no clan would dare infringe upon it.

    This is not to say that there are not costs to changing clans. Dwarves are expected to pay for the training they receive as part of an apprenticeship, and if they or their family do not have the money to pay for this outright, they incur a debt to the clan in which they apprentice. There are other ways to incur a debt to one’s clan, and changing clans with such a debt on the books requires that someone–the dwarf themselves, their family, or the clan adopting them–pay it off before they can leave. The most traditional clans can be utterly ruthless about this, and often the only way for a dwarf with debts but no prospects to leave is for them to flee the Federation entirely. More commonly, though, a dwarf changing clans merely has their debt purchased by their new clan, if it isn’t paid off entirely by their friends and relations as a parting gift.

    In theory, a clan’s Thane rules by decree, but in practice, because clans are so tight-knit and because members can leave without too much difficulty, they are run on a democratic basis. Dwarves traditionally respect age and experience, though, and so the clan’s Thane is very often just the oldest dwarf in the clan, and advised by a council of other elder dwarves. In smaller clans, this council is often informal, and consists of elders discussing matters over a meal as the rest of the clan listens in from further down the table. In larger clans, a council may be formalized, with elders assuming ministerial posts and meeting in a dignified salurhropa.1

    To found a new clan, a dwarf must first receive permission from their Thane—who does not have to seek permission from anyone else, strictly speaking, but it is traditional for Thanes of minor clans to get the approval of the major Thane to whom they give fealty. This permission is generally granted in recognition of some great accomplishment, but it is also sometimes used to resolve schisms within a clan by allowing a disgruntled faction to strike out on their own. Once permission is given, founding the new clan is a matter of attracting clan members, claiming or buying a territory, and of course, having the founding recorded and recognized by neighboring clans.

    Architecture

    Towns and cities in the Dwarven Federation are generally carved into the sides of rocky hills, cliffs, and mountains. This is done in imitation of the ancient city of Konigstrond, which was built into an entire mountain, from base to peak. Where they have no suitable outcroppings to carve into, the dwarves of the Federation will instead build out of cut stone, but since the Federation occupies a mountainous region, this is quite rare. Additionally, while they do not usually build so deep that their homes cannot open onto the outdoors, the Federation is dotted with strongholds repurposed from old mine shafts.

    Economy

    The Dwarven Federation produces stone- and metalwork of unsurpassed quality, much of it commissioned by foreign customers through various merchants and brokers. This export market has shrunk in recent years due to advancements in foreign manufacturing, but is still represents a major source of income for the Federation.

    The dwarves need this foreign income, because they are barely self-sufficient for food. The high mountains are not suited for farming, and dwarven agriculture consists almost exclusively of farming rye and other hardy grains, and raising flocks of sheep and goats in higher pastures. This does not make for a varied diet, and the Federation imports large quantities of foodstuffs. There is a market for dwarven beer and spirits (and some “exotic” cheeses) abroad, but this is a niche and low-volume trade.

    Religion

    Federation dwarves mostly worship the same Pantheon as Aetrimonde’s other societies, performing the same rites and believing in the same afterlife. But due to their unique cultural baggage, dwarves are far more concerned with being remembered by the living once they have passed on: this is expressed through what is essentially a second religion practiced in parallel to ordinary worship. Every clan supports a Stonekeeper, who is equal parts priest, historian, and genealogist. The Stonekeepers keep records of every clan member’s notable acts—for good or for ill—and, upon a dwarf’s death, their clan’s Stonekeeper constructs for them a fitting stone monument, carved with a summary of their greatest achievements so that they can be remembered for posterity.

    The highest posthumous honor for a dwarf of the Federation is to achieve the status of Venerated Ancestor and be immortalized in stone as one of the colossal statues that dot the Federation’s settlements. These are created by specialist Stonekeepers when a worthy dwarf dies, and they become focuses of veneration for the immortalized dwarf’s descendants. In times of strife, these statues can be animated by Stonekeeper shamans, who are able to imbue the stone with the spirit of dwarfs long dead and remind them of their deeds in life. This allows departed dwarves to provide guidance to the living–or if the need is great, to take up fittingly colossal arms and armor, and march to the defense of their homes.

    Stonekeepers are common in many dwarf communities, but the dwarves of the Federation take them more seriously than most. Dwarves traveling far from their clan’s territory are expected to carry a passport attested to by their Stonekeeper, summarizing their deeds and character and serving as an introduction to clans that are unfamiliar with them. Should a dwarf do something of note that comes to the attention of another clan’s Stonekeeper, it is within their purview to make an addendum to their passport for the attention of their home clan’s Stonekeeper.

    Plot Hooks

    A trip to the Dwarven Federation could see the PCs getting into all sorts of adventures, especially if anyone among them is themselves a dwarf.

    Encounter Hooks

    • A dwarf among the PCs who is not from the Federation, and does not share its culture, could run into trouble due to not having a suitable passport. This is the mark of an exiled or shamed dwarf, and simply being near any sort of criminal activity could cause suspicious guards to try to detain them.
    • Most dwarves do not expect outsiders to adhere to the same restrictions they place on themselves. Some fundamentalists do, however, and for them, outsiders bearing such things as firearms, clockwork, or anything steam-powered are an affront that they might try to drive off violently.

    Adventure Hooks

    • One of the PCs has decided to commission a new weapon from the finest smith they can find, who naturally happens to be a dwarf. Of course, such a renowned artisan doesn’t offer their services to every adventurer who wanders into their shop…but as it happens, they have a job that needs doing, and if the PC can take care of it for them (perhaps dragging their allies along), this master craftsman will grant the PC the privilege of buying something bespoke from them.
    • The PCs have come across what appears to be an ancient piece of dwarven craftsmanship in the last ruin they delved into. The Federation is a natural place to seek out information about its origins (and value…), but upon visiting and consulting an expert on such things, they find themselves caught in the middle of a struggle: many different clans believe they have a claim to this relic, and while some would be perfectly willing to pay a finders’ fee, some of the others prefer to send assassins. Now, the PCs must figure out exactly what it is they found, and work out what the appropriate thing to do with it is…without incurring the eternal wrath of any of the claimants.
    • The political deadlock in the Federation has come to a head, as Clan Ulfenning has backed the claim of a purported heir to the Unclaimed Throne. Dwarf clans across Aetrimonde are now forced to choose between Ulfenning and the Regent, and a civil war in the Federation appears likely. In the middle of all this, the PCs are quietly commissioned (as known, impartial observers) to investigate the supposed heir’s background and determine if they are genuine, honestly mistaken…or a pretender put forth to derail the Regent’s planned reforms.

    Campaign Hooks

    • After centuries of waiting, the Federation is at long last planning a new expedition to the ruins of Konigstrond, and the PCs have been recruited for it. The expedition will require fighting through the Vale of Glories to the ruined city, establishing a secure perimeter, and then painstakingly clearing the collapsed tunnels leading to the ancient dwarves’ most secure vaults deep within the mountain. All the while, the expedition will no doubt face attacks from the orcs who now call the Vale home…not to mention looters and thieves eager to help themselves to dwarven relics, and almost certainly some inter-clan disputes over any valuable finds. All told, it promises to be an exciting opportunity for adventurers…

    Up Next

    I’m going to follow this up by discussing two nations that are foils to the Dwarven Federation: Caras Elvaren and Tir Coetir, the two nations of the elves. Stay tuned!

    1. Meeting hall, literally translated “hall of shouting.” The typical Federation dwarf being both opinionated and stubborn means that clan governance is raucous…but often entertaining. Salurhropa are traditionally engineered for acoustics, allowing a large audience to hear exactly what imprecations are being hurled by debaters. ↩︎

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater IV: Powers, Feat, Equipment

    Today, I’m getting down to the details on Valdo the Bat-Eater, the ghoul skinchanger. I’ll be picking his powers, feats (he gets an extra!), and starting equipment.

    Powers

    I’m going to approach Valdo’s powers a bit differently than I did Ragnvald’s. The Martial powers Ragnvald was choosing from can really be divided into just three groups: melee attacks, ranged attacks, and utility. There were very few melee attacks that wouldn’t have worked with Ragnvald’s chosen armament of a warhammer and shield.

    Valdo, by comparison, is a Spiritual character, and Spiritual powers are divided into many more groups. There is first a division into four overarching types of spirits: ancient, animal, elemental, and land. As a skinchanger, Valdo will find Animal powers to be the most consistently useful. But within the Animal powers, there is a further division into five different types of animal, each with their own keyword: Bear, Panther, Serpent, Stag, and Wolf. I’m going to start off by deciding exactly what kind of animal spirits Valdo has bonded, and let that inform his choice of powers (and therefore playstyle).

    Neither serpents nor stags seem like appropriate spirit animals for a ghoul: ghouls have no particular association with poisons, and stags…aren’t predators. Wolves could be a great spirit animal for a ghoul skinchanger who hunts in a pack with other ghouls…but Valdo is a lone hunter without a pack. This leaves bears and panthers as Valdo’s spirit animal, and I like the mechanics of both: Bear powers are about overwhelming force with a minor focus on surviving wounds (which meshes nicely with the ghoul ancestry); Panther powers are about mobility and attacks from ambush (which I like for Valdo the monster hunter).

    With that choice settled, what will Valdo want his powers to accomplish? As a skinwalker, his class features are centered around doing damage, but he doesn’t have as much staying power as Ragnvald. So a good set of priorities for his powers may be:

    • Two purely damaging attacks.
    • A mobile damaging attack, letting Valdo disengage afterward.
    • A way to recover from taking damage.

    Let’s see how we can meet these priorities.

    Feline Cunning will give Valdo a high-damage power he can use almost at-will. It does need the target to be flatfooted, but between flanking and stealth, Valdo can easily find a flatfooted target, and adding <CON> to damage is a significant increase to the damage it will deal. This is an Implement power, the first I’ve shown off; that keyword just means that the power can be used through an appropriate implement (a wand, staff, etc.), although it is not required.

    Ursine Pin does not, itself, do a lot of damage, but it enables Valdo to do a lot more damage with other attacks. This power works by allowing Valdo to grab a target (which prevents it from moving, although there is more to it than this), knock it prone (which makes it flatfooted, enabling Feline Cunning), and causes Valdo’s other attacks (including Feline Cunning) to do more damage. It also allows Valdo to move into his target’s space; while he is allowed to do it safely, and thus will not provoke opportune strikes from other creatures, entering an enemy’s space always provokes an opportune strike from that enemy. Valdo may want to do this anyways, because certain feats provide benefits to Bear powers when in the target’s space.

    Bounding Leap is a safer attack, allowing Valdo to leap in, attack an enemy, and then leap safely away. He may want to use this if he isn’t sure he can handle being in close quarters with a powerful-looking enemy. It does not grant additional movement, however: any movement that Valdo uses up to make the leaps that are part of this power count against his normal movement. The power also might have a niche use as a power dealing more immediate damage than Ursine Pin, and not requiring a flatfooted target like Feline Cunning, but as it deals only 2d8 + <WIS> damage, the greater power use it would cost is a steep price.

    Fury of the Bear is not, actually, a way to recover after taking damage. But Valdo has a lot of ways to recover from or avoid dying to damage already, just from his ancestry features. If it turns out he needs more survivability, he can always pick up another power along those lines later. What Fury of the Bear offers is a way to strike back harder after taking some damage.

    Feats

    Valdo gets two feats at level 0, thanks to the Spirit Bond feature giving him a Multiclass Initiate feat for another Spiritual class. Let’s pick that one out first.

    Valdo could begin multiclassing as either a Druid, Shaman, or Wakener. I think the Wakener would be simplest to make work with Valdo’s powers and feats, so we’ll go with that. The Wakener Initiate feat gives Valdo a choice of two class features from the Wakener class, in limited form: of the two, I think Spirit Domain is most interesting.

    Spirit Domain creates a zone where enemies are challenged by Valdo, and his animal spirits have free rein. While in the zone, he can see and target all other squares in the zone with his attack powers, regardless of range (so he could use Feline Cunning without needing to be adjacent to the target, for example). The zone starts off filling a Pulse 1 (the space he used it in plus all squares within 1 square of it), but grows each time he uses a Spiritual power within it (only up to a Pulse 2, though, until he multiclasses further).

    Describing the effect of Spirit Domain is a great opportunity to make Valdo memorable! Given that it challenges enemies, and his powers are all tied to animal spirits, I shall say that Valdo’s Spirit Domain creates an area filled with phantom bears and panthers that harass his enemies from every angle.

    As for Valdo’s normal feat, there are a number of options that would work nicely for him.

    Perhaps the simplest choice, given that he is a damage-dealer, Mighty Spirits would allow Valdo to deal increased damage (+2 now, up to +6 at higher levels) with Spiritual powers featuring either of two keywords. Given his choices of powers, these keywords should undoubtedly be Bear and Panther.

    Improved Ghoulish Tenacity will give Valdo another way to recover his Ghoulish Tenacity power. Normally he would regain the use of this power if he avoids being brought down to 0 hit points until the start of his turn, but with this feat, even if he is brought down, he still regains the power as soon as he is healed above his injured value.

    The Bear Totem feat would give Valdo a new choice of benefit that he could gain from Spirit Transformation, increasing the damage dice of Spiritual powers. And it stacks with the benefit granting +2 damage to Spiritual powers! With this feat, he could have Feline Cunning dealing 2d8 + 1d6 + 9 damage within two turns. As a side note, there is a Totem Animal feat like this for all five animal keywords…

    Alternately, Valdo could just increase his Wild Strike damage from 1d6 to 1d8, which is a smaller boost, but doesn’t require as much setup as the Bear Totem option.

    Or, rounding out the options for increasing his damage, Valdo could take Razor Claws, causing his Panther powers to also deal some repeated bleed damage. While this wouldn’t deal as much damage up front, and some creatures are immune to bleed damage, this would probably have the largest effect in the long run.

    I like the Bear Totem option, so that’s what Valdo will take as his second feat.

    Equipment

    Unlike Ragnvald, Valdo really doesn’t need a melee weapon, since between his Carnivorous Bite and Spirit Transformation, he has multiple good unarmed attacks. But he does need an implement (a totem) for his Spiritual powers, and he does need armor. He should also probably pick up a ranged weapon of some kind, since all of his powers are melee-ranged. (This is something we can fix at higher levels.)

    For his totem, Valdo could pick out a totemic staff, scepter, or wand, or he could pay to have a weapon turned into a totem. (This is unique to totems; implements for Arcane and Divine powers have their own special options in addition to the same staff, scepter, or wand forms.) As a monster hunter, and one who has hunted vampires, I like the idea of giving him a totemic hunting crossbow, festooned with the claws and fangs of his totem animals. He won’t actually be at all accurate with it, thanks to his -1 <DEX>, but it gives him an option. The crossbow costs 10gp; turning it into a totem costs another 20gp, and a pack of 20 bolts for it will be 1 more gp.

    Valdo will want light armor, thanks to that same -1 <DEX>. He has +1 <GRA>, thankfully. His Spirit Transformation feature will give him 3 (<CON>) armor resistance if wearing light armor, and it doesn’t stack with resistance from actual armor, so there’s no need for him to pick out an armor with resistance. A leather greatcoat, offering +2 AC, will cost him another 10gp.

    Next up, Valdo will pick up the same Basic Adventurer’s Kit that Ragnvald did, running another 15gp. And…that’s really all he needs! All that gear comes to a grand total of 56gp, leaving him 44gp for incidentals. Compared to Ragnvald, he’s rolling in liquid assets…which I kind of like, since it suggests that Valdo doesn’t really spend money on himself, as he sees no point in fripperies.

    Up Next

    With all the decisions made for Valdo, the next post in this series will work out all the math for him and provide a copy of his character sheet. And then, just in time for Halloween, I’ll present some options as to how Valdo might advance up to level 5.

    I’ll also be sprinkling in some posts about enemies, and since it’s spooky season, lots of them will be undead…including some vampires like the ones Valdo has hunted. Stay tuned!

  • Bestiary: Elite Enemies

    A while back, when I covered mooks, I hinted that Aetrimonde would also support enemies designed to be equivalent to multiple PCs. Today, I’m going to show off the first type of enemies like this: Elites, which are designed to be level-appropriate challenges for two PCs.

    Design Goals: Why Elites?

    The question that attentive readers may be asking themselves right now is “why do you need a special kind of enemy to be equivalent to two PCs?” I’ve shown off enemies of a few different tiers so far, and a pattern emerges: a Tier 0 enemy is worth 100 EV, and for every two additional tiers, their EV doubles. So if you want an enemy to be twice the challenge of a level-appropriate enemy…why not just pick an enemy from two tiers up?

    The first part of the answer is narrative. Sometimes a GM wants to tell a story pitting the PCs against a foe who is more powerful than a mere mortal, like an ogre, or demon, or some of the more dangerous kinds of undead. Higher-tier enemies more challenging because they are marginally more capable, with slightly higher defenses, damage, etc., but this doesn’t make them feel appropriately powerful to model these powerful supernatural beings. I want Elites to feel more than mortal, and that will take mechanical changes relative to normal enemies.

    The second part of the answer is mathematical. An enemy two tiers up can easily feel “unfair,” because they will have attack rolls and defenses two points higher (on average): this moves their chances of hitting from around 55% to 72%, and their chances of being hit from around 72% to 55%, which is a massive shift. They’ll also have an extra 8 hit points, 2 armor resistance, and a whopping +4 damage. So in short, an enemy 2 tiers above the PCs will be much harder to hit, take less damage when they are hit, and hit like a freight train when they attack. Which is not to say there isn’t a niche for this, but sometimes you want an enemy who is more powerful, but not so overwhelmingly so. Elites are designed to work like two normal enemies rolled into one: twice the actions, twice the hit points, but not significantly harder to hit or better at hitting.

    My implementation of Elites gives them the following traits:

    • Elites have twice as many hit points as an equivalent normal enemy of the same tier. This makes them take about twice as much effort to defeat as a normal enemy.
    • The first recovery roll an Elite makes at the end of its turn automatically succeeds. Since Elites choose the order to make recovery rolls in (or rather, the GM chooses for them), this makes it harder for the PCs to keep really nasty recoverable effects on them.
    • Elites should be able to do 2-3 things per round, although they should not, generally, be able to use two limited-use actions per round, and it’s good if one of those things is something they do when it’s not their turn. This gives them around twice the offensive power of a normal enemy (who can generally do 1-2 things per round), but it spreads them out so that they don’t just pile a ton of damage on one character, all at once.

    The overall effect here is that an Elite enemy can be dropped into an encounter to replace two normal enemies, and it will take about the same amount of effort to defeat but deal a little less damage (or have a little less effect, for enemies that do things other than deal damage).

    With that in mind, let’s take a look at some Elites:

    Zombie Ogre

    The Zombie Ogre is a zombie animated from a big corpse, like that of an ogre. It’s not just bigger and tougher than an ordinary Zombie Walker (see details below for comparison), it can use that size and toughness to rampage through a group of PCs.

    This is the first Large enemy we’ve seen; this means that it takes up a 2×2 space in combat, and smaller creatures gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls vs. its AC and Poise…which are already so awful for the Zombie Ogre that it doesn’t make a lot of difference.

    As an Elite counterpart to the Zombie Walker, the Zombie Ogre does indeed have exactly twice as many hit points. It also does slightly more damage with its normal attack (due to being larger), and has a Brawl action. Many creatures (particularly Elite one) have a Brawl action, which generally allows them to make two or more attacks. All Brawl attacks must be made, if possible, before the creature can do anything else, but they take place in sequence and in theory the attacker could be interrupted partway through. The Zombie Ogre may actually have trouble making both of its Brawl attacks, because each Mighty Bash would push its target away, and thus out of range.

    This is also a great point for me to introduce one style of action that I’m building into many of the creatures in the Bestiary, which is the “interruptible” action. That’s not a defined term in the rules, but the concept of it is that actions like Lumbering Rampage are powerful, but their actual effect is delayed, and there are ways for PCs to either stop the enemy from following through (such as by breaking the Zombie Ogre’s concentration, in this case, which would take something dealing 26 damage to it, or somehow stunning it) or just get out of the way. Some interruptible actions can also be turned against the user or their allies: in this case, the PCs could shove their enemies into the path of the Lumbering Charge and let the Zombie Ogre trample them.

    Zombie Walker

    Skeletal Amalgam

    A Skeletal Amalgam is something a necromancer might make when they have a whole bunch of partial skeletons: a vaguely humanoid figure with extra arms sprouting in every direction.

    As an upgrade of the Skeletal Warrior (see below for comparison), the Skeletal Amalgam is initially armed with the same shortsword…in every one of its four arms. And it can attack with all four of those arms at once, if it likes, using its Brawl-like Flurry of Arms action. However, its number of arms can fluctuate over the course of an encounter, losing them as the PCs damage it to certain thresholds, or gaining more from the Piles of Bones left behind by other skeletal enemies.

    The Skeletal Amalgam is classed as a soldier, but if you’re just looking at its defenses in the statblock, it might not be clear why. With a mere 13 AC, it certainly doesn’t look much like a Soldier. But the Multi-Armed Parry special trait makes up for this: with +1 AC per Skeletal Arm, its actual AC will start out at 17, and can get as high as 21 if a Skeletal Amalgam manages to acquire its maximum of eight arms. And, as long as it keeps at least three arms, it cannot be flanked (due to having an arm in every direction to parry with).

    The Skeletal Amalgam benefits a lot from also having a lot of other skeletal enemies in an encounter. Skeletal Rattler mooks provide a steady supply of Piles of Bones that the Skeletal Amalgam can absorb. Skeletal Warriors (below) can also provide Piles of Bones, but they also have uses for Piles of Bones, so they might compete with Skeletal Amalgams unless it’s a very large encounter. Skeletons also have terrible Composure and mediocre Wit, and unlike zombies they aren’t Mindless, so can be easily confused or controlled with illusions and mind-altering magic.

    The weaknesses of Skeletal Amalgams, and skeletons in general, are less pronounced than those of zombies, but they do exist. Primarily, while they can make a lot of attacks, all of those attacks are individually quite weak. PCs with high armor resistance will have a field day shrugging off attack after attack, quite possibly taking no damage from low rolls.

    Skeletal Warrior

    Up Next

    Now that I’ve introduced the mechanics of Elite enemies, I’ll be sprinkling them into future Bestiary posts. Keep your eyes peeled!

  • Bestiary: Mummies

    Based on the poll I put out with the first Bestiary post, you readers would like to see some Afflictor enemies, who have consequences for the PCs that last longer than the end of a fight. In keeping with my undead and eerie theme for October, I’m going to use another kind of Aetrimonde’s undead to demonstrate Afflictors: mummies!

    In order to do Afflictors justice, though, I’ll need to introduce some mechanics for how those consequences work: the titular Afflictions.

    How Afflictions Work

    The rules for Afflictions are influenced by disease and poison rules from multiple editions of D&D, which I’ve adapted and generalized to create a framework that can also model things like broken limbs and magical curses. In general, Afflictions:

    • Have long-lasting effects on a PC.
    • Require the PC to succeed on checks to recover. These are generally Constitution checks for injuries, poisons, and diseases, but curses and psychic traumas can call for more esoteric types of check.
    • Have multiple stages that they progress through: they may start off worse and gradually get better, or they may have a check Difficulty high enough that a PC actually gets worse.
    Affliction Rules in Detail

    Examples of Afflictions

    Today’s post will focus on mummies and one specific affliction that they can cause, but I’d also like to provide some other examples of afflictions. These and many others are included in the Game Master’s Handbook for a GM to use, whether as something caused by an enemy, the result of a trap, or just a consequence of wading through sewers.

    A Burn Wound is among the simpler afflictions there is, having no particular rules to it. Once they receive the Burn Wound, characters start at the second stage, reducing their healing received and Endurance checks. They then must make a Difficulty 10 Constitution check every day to recover from it; if they get 5 or less, they instead get worse, and their maximum hit points are also halved. Burn Wounds are an appropriate injury for enemies to cause with high-damage fire attacks. (Dragons are Afflictor enemies, because they can cause Burn Wounds with their breath attacks.)

    An Arm Injury is a little more complicated, both in that it affects a specific arm and can be made worse by repeated injuries, and also that it can become a chronic condition: if a character fails too many checks to recover from it, the effect becomes permanent at its most severe step. Arm Injuries represent an injury to the muscle or joints of an arm; a separate Broken Arm condition covers injuries that break the bone. Arm Injuries are an appropriate affliction to be caused by bladed weapons; Broken Arms (being more serious and taking longer to recover from) are more likely to be caused by something like a giant grabbing a character by the arm and squeezing, or a sadistic redcap smashing their arm with a hammer.

    Compulsive Lying is a Trauma, which could be an aftereffect of mind-altering magic, or it could be caused by more mundane psychological stress, like being imprisoned and subjected to interrogation and torture. It allows the GM to compel a character to do things not in their best interests, by telling exaggerations or lies in a way that may backfire on them. A character with good Deception might be able to get away with this…but a character with poor Charisma and no training may wind up developing a reputation as a liar.

    Fae Mockery is a Curse straight out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, causing a character to become risible to anyone who didn’t already know them…at first. If a character persists in whatever behavior irked a faerie enough to curse them, and worse, badly fails a few checks to recover, they can wind up irritating people instead of amusing them. Eventually, they may even find that their old friends now can’t get over their amusing new features.

    Afflictions are not the only mechanic that would make an enemy an Afflictor (some Afflictors do things like steal, damage, or destroy PCs’ equipment, for example) but they are the most common. So how do Afflictor enemies use afflictions? Let’s look at some mummies:

    Mummy Lore

    Mummies are undead that were subjected to ritual embalming before being raised to unlife. They have all of the usual undead lore, plus a unique origin in Aetrimondean history:

    Mummified Bodyguard

    The most basic mummy that the PCs could encounter is a Mummified Bodyguard, subjected to the mummification process to guard the tombs of mummified rulers. Thanks to armor worn over their wrappings, they have decent AC and other defenses, and are therefore classed as a Soldier as well as an Afflictor. Also contributing to their Soldier role is the combination of Unrelenting Strikes and Unflinching, allowing the Mummified Bodyguard to unleash a nigh-uninterruptible flurry of accurate, though not particularly damaging attacks.

    The Afflictor role of the Mummified Bodyguard comes into play with its Absorb Vitality action. As described in the lore, mummies are able to drain the vitality–and moisture, and bodily humours–of victims, and this action is found on all mummies. It allows them to deal damage to nearby injured, living creatures, and regain hit points equal to the damage, but most importantly, it places the Curse of the Mummy on the unfortunate targets hit.

    The Curse of the Mummy is an affliction allowing a mummy to derive sustenance from their unfortunate victims, causing them to wither away into a desiccated husk unless they consume ever-increasing amounts of food and drink to make up for it. Ultimately, if players repeatedly roll terribly (or run out of supplies, as might happen in the middle of the wilderness), the curse may kill them outright.

    Details of how draining a victim rejuvenates a mummy are one point where I’m not going to provide detailed rules, instead leaving it up to GMs. Depending on what their plot demands, a mummy might instantly regain some of their youthful, lively appearance (a la the titular villain of the 1999 film), or it might be a more gradual process where it takes time for the mummy to look more lifelike. Instead of detailed rules, I instead provide a few suggestions that GMs are free to use or ignore as they find suitable for their campaigns.

    Mummified Priest

    The Mummified Priest poses more of a challenge to PCs, due to how it interacts with the Curse of the Mummy. While it has the same Absorb Vitality action that the Mummified Bodyguard has, it’s actually less effective (because the action is based off Constitution, and the Priest’s is lower).

    However, it makes up for this with its Binding of Sacrifice action, which imposes some nasty conditions (weakened, making a PC deal half damage, and dazed, limiting them to a single action per turn and making them flatfooted). It gets much, much worse against PCs already under the effect of the Curse of the Mummy, though, causing repeated entropic damage that allows the Priest to simultaneously regain hit points.

    The Mummified Priest is classed as a Controller as well as Afflictor because of the conditions caused by Binding of Sacrifice, and because of its other action, Frightening Visage (which is actually a power available to Divine PCs…). Aside from forcing PCs to move back from the Mummified Priest, and using up their reactions, this can also force them to take opportune strikes from other enemies if they have gotten well mixed-in.

    Using a Mummified Priest

    Because the Mummified Priest interacts with PCs that already suffer from the Curse of the Mummy, there are a couple of great ways for a GM to use a Mummified Priest:

    • In a single encounter, a Mummified Priest could be added to a bunch of Mummified Bodyguards, increasing the threat they pose with Absorb Vitality. In this setup, the Priest should be able to stay well back from the fighting, perhaps with the aid of favorable terrain, while the Bodyguards mix it up in melee. And once one of the PCs has contracted the Curse of the Mummy, the Priest can use Binding of Sacrifice to seriously impede that PC, forcing the party to try to break its concentration or just kill it quickly to release their ally from the curse.
    • In a more extended adventure, an early encounter with Mummified Bodyguards could lead to one or more PCs contracting the Curse of the Mummy. This would be a good time to start tracking supplies of food and water, especially if the PCs are out in the wilderness: the need to consume additional supplies puts pressure on the party, and subsequent encounters including Mummified Priests can encourage them to try and break the curse before proceeding.

    Mummified Noble

    The Mummified Noble is a comparatively simple enemy to run, because it really only has one trick in two potencies. Thanks to the extra effort put into its necromantic animation, the Noble can use Absorb Vitality at will, not just once per encounter.

    Replacing Absorb Vitality as a once-per-encounter power is Demand Vitality, which is not quite a straight upgrade. Demand Vitality targets only creatures that have already contracted the Curse of the Mummy: on the one hand, this means that it needs more setup for Demand Vitality to be effective, but on the other, it means that the PCs will have a harder time avoiding it. Whereas it’s possible for the PCs to keep themselves healed above half HP, so that they are not injured and therefore not a valid target for Absorb Vitality, there are few to no ways of breaking the Curse of the Mummy mid-fight: this means that any PC that already has the Curse of the Mummy going into a fight with a Mummified Noble is going to be a target for Demand Vitality.

    The other aspect of Demand Vitality that I will highlight is that, rather than applying an affliction, it makes an affliction worse. Suddenly having to deal with an additional penalty (especially one of the nastier ones in the lower stages) for an entire fight can be a nasty shock for the PCs.

    Using a Mummified Noble

    Because it really only has two variations of the one trick (an attack that deals entropic damage in a pulse, allowing it to regain hit points based on damage done, and applying/worsening an affliction), the Mummified Noble can be hit-or-miss if used in isolation. If the PCs mostly avoid becoming valid targets for its two main powers, it will likely wind up swiping ineffectually at them, maybe grabbing one or two and dealing some paltry damage. It is better to use the Mummified Noble as a climactic encounter after the PCs have already encountered other mummies and some of them have contracted the Curse of the Mummy.

    Up Next

    There is one other variety of mummy in the Bestiary, but I’m saving it for another post that will cover enemies designed to be equivalent to more than one PC. Keep an eye out for it soon!

  • Valdo the Bat-Eater III: Skills, Perk, Languages

    Short post today: we’ll be covering Valdo’s choice of skills, perks, and languages, and since I introduced all of these concepts the first time around when covering Etterjarl Ragnvald, it won’t take much length at all today.

    Skills

    Valdo gets the following preferred skills:

    • Arcana and Engineering (Der Eisenwald culture)
    • Intimidate and Warfare (Outlaw stratum)
    • Acrobatics, Athletics, Endurance, Intimidate, Nature, Perception (Skinchanger class)

    He’s also automatically trained in Nature from the Skinchanger class.

    Because I’m leaning into the creepy and horrifying aspects of the ghoul skinchanger concept, Intimidate is an easy pick. Endurance is also a nice pick that ties into Valdo’s ghoul ancestry. Since Valdo is a hunter of monsters, I’ll also give him Perception, so that he can spot them, and wrap up the last of his four preferred skill choices with Arcana, so that he knows a little bit about the monsters he hunts.

    For his final skill choice, I’ll give Valdo Stealth, for the ability to sneak up on his prey.

    Valdo’s trained skills will be:

    • +4 Arcana
    • +5 Endurance
    • +1 Intimidate
    • +4 Nature
    • +2 Perception
    • +3 Stealth

    Perk

    My initial thoughts on Valdo’s perk is that there are far too many good choices. He could easily have an Esoteric Knowledge perk relating to some type of monsters common in Der Eisenwald, like vampires, lycanthropes, flesh golems, etc. (I’m of the opinion that “Monsters of Der Eisenwald would be too broad a subject, overlapping heavily with the Arcana and Religion skills, so Valdo would have to pick just one.) He could have Profession [Monster Hunter], which would apply to the actual work of monster hunting (finding leads, choosing supplies, preparing traps…maybe raising mobs…). Or he could have a Fame perk representing his (in)famous takedown of an entire coven of vampire spawn.

    In the interests of variety, I’ll give Valdo the perk Fame [Victims of Vampires], making him a well-known (if somewhat feared) hero among people who have suffered the depredations of vampires.

    Languages

    Like Ragnvald, Valdo will speak Westerling as the presumed common language of this campaign. He will also speak Victish, one of the two languages suggested by the Der Eisenwald culture.

    Up Next

    In the next post on Valdo, I’ll be getting into the real mechanical meat of his character: the choice of powers, feats, and equipment.

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