All of my mages (the -magus classes specifically) are just a little off from what people expect. “Earth” is probably the most skipped element in video games on top of that - you see fire/ice/lightning a lot, and earth sometimes comes in as like “acid” or some similar cop-out like that. This makes sense if you’re only making up elemental attacks and not trying to hit something more core to the concept/trying to make something that feels like it belongs to the world. But I don’t want any of the magic in this world to be solely for combat - they all had to feel like they were like, part of the world in some way. So Earthmagus’s Tales are about understanding, addressing and nurturing the land, and their iconic portrait is a farmer or tender of some sort.
To get the elephant out of the room, yes, I came at this starting with the 4E warlord by way of its less acclaimed distant cousin, the 13th Age commander. More specifically, I took a crack at this idea starting in 36th Way. 13th Age/36th Way’s Commander have two resource-generating class features indicating focus: Weigh the Odds, which lets you reliably generate the resource you need, but is purely non-offensive; or Fight from the Front, which is a melee attack that generates the resource on a hit. (More on Commander here.) So we had two concepts of:
I wanted to go elemental for explicit “magic user” types - just the four basic elements, earth/air/fire/water. It felt very on-brand. And the first one of those four that I made was Blazemagus.
Hi there! I’m gonna reveal class art every week and talk about their design as I do. I’m gonna go start to end alphabetically, so meet the Bard and the Berserker!
On roles and sub-roles
I’m going to be talking about roles a lot in these posts. This is because I designed every class using Total//Effect’s role and sub-role concepts as a basis. Each class has three sub-roles: two from one role and one from another. The sub-role indicated in text with bold is the “primary” focus, and each class has a primary sub-role that no other class has. I also have an image highlighting them for each class!
I’ve uploaded the third new Class, made possible by a very generous backer. Meet the Astrologer!
The Astrologer is a stargazing, prophetic hero.
It can easily provide full support via re-rolls, Advantage, and Disadvantage.
It has a lot of effects that mark or apply to locations, letting it shape the battlefield.
It’s in that backer classes PDF. Enjoy!
(If you want to up your pledge to get one of these, itch doesn’t really do that unfortunately. But if you just buy Just The Game again, add enough to it to get to the higher tier, and let me know on discord/social media/by email, I’ll count it.)
This post is about the various mechanical choices made in Valiant Horizon at a very high level. I group these into three categories: Diceless mechanics (stuff that works), Roll for Magnitude mechanics (stuff that works but you roll to see how much), and Roll for Success mechanics (stuff that works if a roll goes your way).
Diceless
The simplest kind of mechanic. This is what Assets, Exhausting Assets, and Burdens are:
This post is about the various mechanical choices made in Valiant Horizon at a very high level. I group these into three categories: Diceless mechanics (stuff that works), Roll for Magnitude mechanics (stuff that works but you roll to see how much), and Roll for Success mechanics (stuff that works if a roll goes your way).
Diceless
The simplest kind of mechanic. This is what Assets, Exhausting Assets, and Burdens are:
