Hi there! Long time no see! I’ve been thinking about 36th Way a bit recently and realized I never finished my class redesign rundown by talking about Alchemist. So let’s do that, then I’ll do a rundown of other stuff. But first…

Why isn’t there a Chaos Mage?

To be perfectly honest, because I don’t like it at all. Having seen it in play, it never seems to have interesting choices and the concept isn’t that interesting. I like wild magic in theory but practically speaking it really slows things down when you’re expected to be engaging with it constantly. Reading through the talents, it’s a pretty bad sign when more than half of them are “take this other class’s spells”. Just not a lot to work with.

Here’s the original Chaos Mage.

Why isn’t there an Occultist?

To a much lesser extent, see above. I actually did try to think of ideas for this - the idea of a draw-go interrupt-focused class is kind of interesting - but at the end of the day I couldn’t think of anything terribly thematic or interesting to do with it. I had briefly been considering something that brought in that Warlock-ish flavor in its place but decided I’d rather just not continue developing classes for this in favor of doing other projects.

Here’s the original Occultist.

The Original Alchemist

There wasn’t one! I liked the idea enough to make my own though.

I looked at a few major sources for ideas in making one:

• The Pathfinder ones
• The Witcher, because that’s a pretty major touchpoint in Alchemist Ideas in the recent past
• Thinking about specialized grenades, potions, drugs, etc in various games in general. UnderRail was a big one here.

From these, I identified a few big things I wanted for the class to be able to do:

• Interaction with making consumables for others
• Long-term potion effects
• Short-term potion effects
• Effects that apply to weapons, etc
• More direct explosives
• More indirect explosives

The 36th Way Alchemist

So from the start I had developed this with the intention of two major “focuses” for the class:

• Self-augment to better use direct attacks.
• Throwing bombs.
• Make consumables for others.

(Like I said, Witcher on the mind.)

To split each of those up, though, I came up with some sub-categories to incorporate the ideas from inspirations above:

• Mutagens are “long-term” self-augmentation, while Infusions and Oils are “short-term”. So if you’re focusing on self-augmentation, you can lean on one or the other.
• Grenades are “direct” and mostly just deal damage, while Bombs are “indirect” and do other things. So you’ve got two kinds of focus there.
• Potions/Runes are one way to give consumables to allies - either made with resources or the Thrifty talent - but Infusions can be given to allies too with the proper Talent.

And Reactive Blood ends up being the “switch” that lets them have caster Volition for caster things vs melee Volition for melee things.

As a point of differentiation from standard “caster” classes, I wanted Alchemists to feel like someone who knows a lot of things but can only do some of it at once because of physical limitations. To emphasize this physicality, their primary resource is Reagents. They have the most known/prepared Abilities of any class (5 + half level means they end up with 10 Formulae at level 10!) but nearly everything except Mutagens is something that costs Reagents and you can typically only use one Mutagen per short rest.

After like a year, that’s all the classes! Now for odds and ends.

Equipment and Magic Items

13th Age insisted on using weapons and weapon types still, even though everything was determined by class. This caused a lot of weird bits, especially around using two weapons, with very little in its favor except for one weird passage that seems like it was written solely to screw over fightery types (of course). I ditched this in favor of the stances: aggressive is the “two-hander”, defensive is the “one-hander and shield”, etc. Over time, I also sharpened up the various ranged categories so they were a bit more exclusive and there were no “trap” options that did absolutely nothing (and got rid of reloading! What an awful mechanic.) This also allows for much easier reskinning, one group playtesting made 36W into a sci-fi game - Aggressive became a shotgun, Defensive became cover-based pistol work, etc. I also added a Focused stance for cases where it didn’t make sense to be holding any kind of weapon (a bard with a two-handed instrument is what gave me the idea) because what would always happen is you’d pick the Defensive option or be wrong. This gave an alternative in those cases.

Magic Items are pretty restrictive as far as your setting, which wasn’t the goal. Immediately, I switched these to Augmentations, which could be items but could be things like blessings, training, etc. (The aforementioned sci-fi game made these cybernetics, which was cool.) Originally, Augmentations were pretty similar to standard 13th Age ones: passive bonuses and active powers. I always thought the number of active item powers you ended up with was too high, so I made a distinction between “Standard” (gives a +x bonus to whatever) and “Signature” (also gives a power). You get one Signature per tier - I was thinking about this with fantasy novel logic, usually any given hero has at most 3 specific things that provide specific benefits. (And non-casters have more class-based things to do so it evens out.)

Halfway through development, I decided I kind of hated how magic items worked in D&Dish things in general. Flat bonuses are boring! So I reconfigured them to be more “Active” - now they all give you “spend resource to do X” style abilities, with the added bonus that if your class already does that you get a free one per encounter. This feels a lot better to me. Anything that gets rid of weird math edge cases is good.

Combat Rules

Not much to say beyond the obvious “made things use Advantage instead of flat bonuses, got rid of weird/edge case stuff, changed conditions so none of them are deeply debilitating”. For as long as the whole game’s text is, the combat rules section is relatively short now - most of it’s class or enemy content, which is good!

The biggest change I did was probably making initiative non-rolled, which was one of the final updates to the game. This is entirely because I found that having everyone roll and setting up an initiative chart took a surprising amount of time (~5-10 minutes sometimes!) for something that in many cases doesn’t really matter that much past round 1. With the current setup, you can keep the same initiative chart for PCs, slot enemies into their appropriate places, and get going quickly.

Enemies

For enemies, I basically just expanded out the Bestiary to include more non-Troop/Wreckers or convert things into things that weren’t those, got rid of Caster because it wasn’t a very interesting distinction, tweaked the math (especially around mooks), and fixed encounter values once flat augmentation bonuses were out (i.e. you no longer have that weird phenomenon in 13th Age where Champion/Epic encounters should actually be a level or two higher because the math reasons for that - see Magic Items above and the move away from flat bonuses - no longer exist).

I also provided some behaviors and targeting for each enemy, which takes a LOT of strain off of even an experienced GM - you can basically just do what each says (attack X target, ignore Opportunity Attacks or don’t) and you’ll get a fairly characteristic encounter. Wouldn’t take too much to run a semi-GMless encounter with it.

What’s Next?

I’ll probably do a postmortem in general sometime soon. Thanks to an upcoming project (👀), I’ve been thinking about 36W fairly recently, so I have a lot of thoughts about what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently.

Until next time!