[House Rules]Divine Elves Part 3: Nightblade

A recent thread on RPG.Net had an awesome premise.  What if you removed Clerics from OD&D and gave their magic to elves?

I thought the idea had merit.  The more I rolled it around in my head, the more I liked it.  Even if you left Clerics in, the spell creation and class creation rules in ACKS gave a perfect opportunity to build a ‘better elf’… or at least a different one.

So I did…see the previous post about the race build.  See the previous altered Spellblade Class.

In this post I’m going to rebuild the Nightblade class as a divine assassin.  Again, I’ve tweaked the spell list to my own tastes and vision.

[House Rules]Divine Elves Part 2: Spellblade

A recent thread on RPG.Net had an awesome premise.  What if you removed Clerics from OD&D and gave their magic to elves?

I thought the idea had merit.  The more I rolled it around in my head, the more I liked it.  Even if you left Clerics in, the spell creation and class creation rules in ACKS gave a perfect opportunity to build a ‘better elf’… or at least a different one.

So I did…see the previous post about the race build

In this post I’m going to rebuild the Spellblade class as a divine warrior champion (essentially a full on paladin).  I’ve tweaked the spell list to my own tastes and vision, but it could have easily been a straight up cleric list (or bladedancer, or shaman, or whatnot).

The Divine Elven Spellblade

[House Rules]Divine Elves Part 1

A recent thread on RPG.Net had an awesome premise.  What if you removed Clerics from OD&D and gave their magic to elves?

I thought the idea had merit.  The more I rolled it around in my head, the more I liked it.  Even if you left Clerics in, the spell creation and class creation rules in ACKS gave a perfect opportunity to build a ‘better elf’… or at least a different one.

So I did…

Elven Arcist

“Remind the humans there is a reason they once feared us.”
Draethiel-Elven Arcist

[House Rules-New Monster]Drop Bear

They’d traveled for nearly a week in this green hell.  

They followed the map to Castle Fang that Orwen had uncovered in the Caves of Derok.  

Twenty experienced adventurers entered together into this alien landscape.  

Now only ten remained.  

“I don’t understand,” Aeric said, throwing down his pack as the group settled for a short rest.  “How can any place be so deadly?”

“Didn’t you know?” Twelith the elf asked.  “This land protects itself from all who would invade it.  The plants, the beasts, the ground itself seek to keep all out.  We have done ill coming to this place, and the land does not forgive.  We have yet to even see the worst this place has to offer.”

“And just what might that be?” Orwen asked from the ground where he leaned against a tree.

“Drop bears,” the elf said, in a hushed whisper.

Orwen burst into laughter.  When it stopped, he wiped the tears from his cheeks.  “Seriously elf?  That old story?  In a land where everything, and I mean everything is trying to kill us, you have to make up something else to scare the boy with?”

That was the last thing Orwen said.  A moment later a large, dark shape dropped from the tree above and tore him apart.  It happened so fast, the others could not even react before the creature hissed at them, and then scampered back up the tree, dragging the remains of Orwen in it’s teeth.

When the shock left them, the expedition immediately turned around and left for home.    

Rain Forests and Gaming

If you read my blog, you know that recently I traveled the world and one of the places I saw was a rainforest.

I came away from the rain forest with a few gaming related thoughts.

Beastmen and Goblins…WTF? Part 2

While mulling over the whole ‘beastman problem’, I had some ideas about the goblins.  At first they were just one more variety of beastman, but that quickly went away.  For them I wanted something different.

In a lot of modern games, goblins are either treated as comic relief or granted weird tinkering techno abilities (often supplanting the dwarves as the preeminent anachronistic engineers and scientists of the setting).  I’m not fond of this.  I don’t like the comic angle because, frankly, I feel it’s quite meta.  If the little toothy bastards are trying to stab you or rob you, there is little humorous about them.  I feel that the ‘humor’ that arises from such characterizations is too postmodern for my tastes.

To put it another way, if the majority of players did not view them as so inconsequential after years of slaughtering them, these comic iterations wouldn’t be so prevalent.  Players do not view them as a threat, and so you can make them comedic without any great effort.  Goblins are a joke, they die in droves, so let’s riff on that and make them even more funny and irrelevant.

So, without changing stats, what could I do to make them more menacing?