Thursday, August 24, 2023

How to Fight Ghosts, and Yourself, and Everyone Else (GLOG Duelist Subclasses)

    Like every glog-type individual, I can't stop myself from making a new fighter every few months. Also like every glog-type individual, I can't stop myself from immediately doing anything a blog post tells me to - so when Locheil's fighter Legally Required anyone reading it to make more subclass variations for it, I did, dooming it to an eternity shackled to me.

    Ha.

Ψ - Assured

A method developed by, and for, Clockwork Men. It expects that your skin is proof against blades, but even tiny weak flesh-creatures may find it of some use.

You may have learned it from a retired Clockwork Man, or from a recovered punchcard.

1. Technique: Splintering

    When you could riposte, you can instead catch the attacking weapon between two fingers and snap it like a twig. Assuming you remain adjacent to humanity, you take 1d4 damage.

2. Stance: Sunderer

    Swords you hold count as sledgehammers when used against inanimate objects.

3. Stance: Pristine

    As long as you are at full HP, your attacks deal +2 damage.

4. Technique: Caught in the Gears

    When you make two successful attacks on the same target, you may immediately grapple them. According to doctrine, you should then crush their head like a grape in your huge metal hands, but I expect you don't have huge metal hands. Pathetic.


Ψ - Zoanthropy

A "style" of screaming, biting, and bleeding. 

You may have learned it from observing one of its practitioners, or by spending days in a strobe-lit room while being beaten with sticks.

1. Technique: Frenzy

    You may make as many bonus melee attacks as you want, but your target gets to make just as many against you.

2. Stance: No Idle Hands

    Weapons you have built yourself, from scratch ("I mined this iron ore and smelted it in a furnace I built myself" scratch) have their damage die increased by one step. (Bone, stone, and wooden weapons shatter into splinters when they roll their maximum damage.)

3. Technique: Taste of the Blood

    You may replace one of your melee attacks each round with a 1 damage bite. If this kills the target (and unlike other Duelist abilities, this kills the target, no question) you regain all your spent attacks.

4. Stance: Deadened Nerves

    For every point of damage you take, your attacks do +1 damage until the end of your next round. 


Ψ - Carceral

Developed and maintained by the ranks of the Knight-Exorcists in the eight cities of the dead.

You may have learned it as an initiate in their order, or through messages in your dreams.

Source

1. Stance: Open Eye

   A careful pattern of acupuncture needles seats your soul strongly in your body, and sets your eyes firmly on the material world. You can parry spiritual attacks, mental intrusions, and heretical speeches.

2. Stance: Closed Eye

    Your attacks and your body count as magic for the purposes of attacking gargoyles, ghosts, and other such things. Your vision becomes blurry and grey, but with ten minutes of focus you can look into someone, at the shape and movement of the soul through their body.

3. Technique: Expose

    You may replace one of your melee attacks with a deeply uncomfortable poke directly at the target's spirit. Most people must Save or be knocked prone - those who are possessed must Save or fall unconscious as the possessor is flung from the body. Of course, many possessive spirits survive perfectly well in the open air...

4. Technique: Ingrained Response

    Some tricks meant to disperse the holy dead work just as well on tomb-robbers and vagabonds. If you miss with a melee attack, you may immediately throw an item held in your off-hand: piles of salt and iron nails are stereotypical, but sometimes a grenade works even better.


Ψ - Solipsism

A method developed by you.

You always knew it.

1. Technique: You Are Me

    When someone you can see makes an attack, you can decide they will roll with your current attack bonus and deal damage based on what you are holding.

2. Stance: You Are Not Real

    You are not affected by injuries of any kind until they kill you. Look down at your broken legs and declare that it is a trick - I feel nothing.

3. Technique: You Are Here

    Instantaneously switch places with anyone you can see - after all, they're just another piece of you.

4. Technique: You Are Not Safe

    You can make melee attacks against anyone you can see, at any distance. To onlookers, it seems as if you are hacking at yourself.

1 comment:

  1. Really good stuff - hard to pick a favourite, but Zoanthropy might edge it out. Thrilled to see some styles!

    ReplyDelete

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