Thursday, August 19, 2021

Man is an invention of recent date - Archaeologist (GLOG Class)

Quick and dirty, in truest gretchling style, written entirely on my phone in a lunch break;


You're not much of a fighter, you can't wear armour unless another class allows you but can wield shields. A combination of boarding school life, the university boxing championships and a smattering of bartitsu means you cannot fumble with fisticuffs, light clubs and pistols.

Skill: Ancient History and 1 other

Equipment: Leatherbound notebook and pencil, sheaf of paper, piece of rubbing wax, stick of chalk, thumbstick (light weapon, in a pinch).

For each Template you gain +1 to Saves
A: Cunning Linguist, Sally Forth.
B: What a Relief
C: Bibliophile 
D: Power Word

A: Cunning Linguist 
You are fluent in all dead and antique languages, as long as even a scrap of their written or spoken form survives to the present day, and can have Templates+1 out of 6 chance to be able to hazard a rough guess at the meaning of even ones that don't, as well as formulate simple phrases in them on the fly.

In addition, you can read and cast Incantations if you find any (see below).

A: Sally Forth
A combination of stiff upper lip, head-in-the-clouds academic obliviousness and love of the Empire inures you against fear and danger. You have advantage on saves versus traps and fear, on a successful save you take no damage or negative effects, even if you would normally suffer half.

B: What a Relief
You have a 2:6 chance to find a random Incantation in any inscription, statue, mosaic or relief you spend at least 10 minutes examining, creating a rubbing, sketch or similar containing it in the process. Roll a d4 to determine its MD.

C: Bibliophile
You love books, books love you. You are never subject to curses as a result of reading forbidden texts, and cannot be harmed or inconvenienced by exploding runes, symbols-of-unpleasantness, and other such written cognitohazards. Others nearby you may take the brunt instead though.

D: Power Word 
You can choose to cast an Incantation with more MD than it has, at a cost of 1d6 HP per MD added.

Incantations
The ancients were absolutely mad for spells, invocation, sacred architecture and all that rot. 'Course nowadays we have safe, reliable, state-approved magicians rather than mad, doomed, godlike wizards. But a lot of that old magic is still about, hidden beneath the sands - or ice, vines, funko pop figurines,  what-have-you - carved into steles, tablets and temple walls.

Incantations can be memorised by anyone who can fluently read the language they are written in. They take up as much space in your memory slots (which you have a number of equal to your Intelligence score) as they have MD, and take 10 minutes per MD to memorize.

Incantations have their own MD, which are always expended on use, you cannot choose to use fewer MD to cast them, though you might carry several copies that each have different MD values. These are referred to in the following form;

1MD: The Lesser Spell of...
2MD: The Journeyman's Spell of...
3MD: The Greater Spell of...
4MD: The Master Spell of...

In all other respects, Incantations are GLOG spells from any source. Doubles and Triples incur mishaps and Dooms as normal, drawn from the class that the spell came from. You may have multiple Dooms.

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