Saint Sebastian spooks the plague away

Saint Sebastian spooks the plague away
Saint Sebastian spooks demons away
Saint Sebastian spooks the dead away
City by city and house by house
Onto our torments its arrows souse

In the past years, going to a client site, I often walked in front of the Saint Sebastian temple in Milan. Part Catholic church, part civic temple; it was built as a votive offering toward Saint Sebastian Martyr, after a plague in the 16th century. Designed as a circular civic building in a very small plot of land, is styled after pagan temples like the Pantheon in Rome. This of course pissed off the Archbishop; the temple is still owned by the City of Milan rather than by the Church, and if you are there you should visit it because it’s dope. Saint Sebastian managed to survive martyrdom by archery: the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Varagine describes him as peppered by arrows “like a hedgehog”, and because of the relative nudity of the to-be-saint, this was quite a common subject in art.

The Order of Saint Sebastian has been part of my games for a couple of years, since before the pandemic, and now that I’m playing a follower of Saint Sebastian (Doctor Luke has just set foot in Ravenloft and totally hates it!) I’m in the headspace for writing some more material about it. This is what the real temple looks like, the interior all dark grey and gold.

Saint Sebastian (the fantasy one) was a traveling medic, faith healer, and exorcist. He became famous not only because he kept on stubbornly bringing relief to the cities most hit by plagues, demons, and undead hordes, but also because being remarkably popular after bringing relief to cities would cause much chagrin of local potentates, big and small alike. Often, after the emergency, the city population would spontaneously erect small civic temples to commemorate his help, normally as small chonky towers with no windows in the lower floors; Saint Sebastian likes small round temples and thought they could be useful also as traditional fortification to defend the population in times of crisis. Over the door, always, a bas-relief of a sheaf of six arrows, to symbolize the Arrows of Saint Sebastian, the magic practices he developed. Sebastian himself was keen on the metaphor of healing and deliverance being as effective in struggles as offense: he was not otherwise especially keen on archery.

Its life was so inspiring that he attracted a crowd: rather than going around with him, they scattered, bringing relief to more and more places. After his death, and over several years, his followers formed small academies in his temples, to teach both medicine and the Arrows of Saint Sebastian. As time went by, some academies have been built as seals over evil crypts and other greater evils that the Order has not managed to dispatch: while some ails can’t be healed, their harm can at least be contained.

You can use the Arrows in your game in the following ways:

• as level-less spells, a-la Wonder & Wickedness/Marvels & Malisons
• as replacements for Turn Undead
• as Mageblade blademagic

The Six Arrows of Saint Sebastian

Arrow against Torment: the Caster asperses blessed water on small location, like a hut or a room, to deliver it from demons and the baleful dead. All demons and undead in the area, if their current HP are less than 1d6 HP per Caster level, are compelled to leave the area. The effect lasts until sunset.

Arrow against Misfortune: the Caster, once per day, can reroll any roll affecting them. For example a failed save, a hitroll or damage roll either toward or against them, a skill check, etc. In Mageblade this is a Perk.

Arrow against Pain: over the course of ten minutes, as the Caster tends the wounds of a small group of people (1 person per Caster level), they all are cured 1d6 HP, plus they all enjoy the effect of a successful Medicine check (if you do not have skills, heals 4 additional HP).

Arrow against Illness: over the course of ten minutes, as the Caster administers mundane treatment and a very limited amount of poultices and other remedies to a small group of people (1 person per Caster level), they are cured from a disease afflicting them.

Arrow Against Demons: striking terror on abject failures of creation, the vengeful strikes of the Caster terrorize devils, demons, and other fiends alike. Until the next sunset, when the Caster strikes a demon, devil, or fiend in melee, all such creatures nearby will be terrorized. This terror both gives them disadvantage in all hostile actions and gives the victims of their spells advantage to their saves until the next round of the Caster.

Arrow Against the Dead: the Caster strikes utterly demolish the living dead. The Caster melee damage against undead is doubled until the next sunset.

Mageblade, Mageshade, Shadeblade: not half-classes, nor hybrids

Fighter, Caster, Rogue and Mageblade. The four Mageblade classes are patterned on the usual four-classes model: the fighter is tough, the rogue cheats in mundane ways (backstabbing and picking locks and climbing, for example), the caster cheats in extramundane ways (the guard dogs fell asleep) and the mageblade is an extramundane cheating tough (I’m going to fight you and also do magic stuff, like the D&D cleric does).

However, while traditionally similar classes are implemented by having more competencies with a reduced capacity, sometimes decorated with extra bits (bardic music, I look at you right now), both the D&D cleric and the Mage/blade/shade triplet are actually about something else entirely. In addition to being able to fight, the cleric, due to the forced split of right hand and left hand path magic in D&D, can cure and turn undead in ways wizards can’t. And the Mageblade, while not able to cast spells, can rely on devotions, plus be clad in iron and use banes and blademagic in combat.

Most importantly, the Fighter, the Mageblade, the Rogue and the Caster play in different ways by design:

• fighters can wiggle combat math in reliable ways (armour and stances) indefinitely.
• casters have great effects in a lot of different ways with spells (each school grants access to many spells), but both each spell can be used once, and the mana to cast them is limited
• rogues learn and then master a lot of extra skills thus increasing their scope, and can use their roguish luck to push any roll, even multiple times.
• mageblades learn a very limited amount of devotions and blademagic: each is a single “effect”, but as long as there’s mana, each can be used many times.

This makes Mageblades very different from Casters, and not in a quantitative way: casters know a lot of spells, but each is a snowflake, while mageblades know little magic, but can use it repeatedly.

The difference with the fighter is also not simply a “lesser” fighter: fighters fight better and harder for a longer time, and mageblades (even pumping mana in combat) can’t match them, but fighters can’t do blademagic either. Fighters especially do not have Banes, which are blademagic specific to Mageblade orders that lets them do double damage against a specific type of enemy, so for example Exorcists have Bane: Undead. Mageblades also have their athame, which is their magic sword/wand, from character generation.

They play differently. And have different roles. They also feel different in a way that is not clearly the somewhat milquetoast “wider but lesser”. They definitely are not hybrid classes the way they are normally intended.

Furthermore, there’s two more such classes in this little game: Mageshade (name courtesy of Eric Nieudan) and the Shadeblade. They technically do not exist fully yet, but this is the direction the development will take:

• Mageshades could have a small number of magick rites to do mundane stuff, powered by mana and reusable. While rogues can do many things unreliably but can use their luck, mageshades can spend mana to “make it work”. As perk (all classes have one), some shadow/night/oblivion-related ability (like shadowstep or sleep or forgetfulness). Not sure what the Focus should do for mageshades yet.
• Shadeblades similarly can start by mixing the scopes of the fighter and the rogue and come off in some completely different shape. So some skills, plus for example how to mingle the spending of rogue’s luck and the steadiness of fighters into something similar to both but different?
  • A first example, definitely underdeveloped and untested, is to have shadeblades do silly over the top wuxia moves, so that if they miss they can spend one mana to hit instead, or then they are hit spend mana to parry or dodge and jump away.
  • An alternative is maybe to have the shadeblade have a fresh pool of rogue’s luck every combat, but only limited to combat rolls?
  • Or maybe a mix of the two, electing to spend luck in the combat get a combat reroll, or to spend it for the whole day in order to succeed at dodging or hitting without rolling.

 

MAGEBLADE! the adventuring natural philosopher and Extra Resilience optional rules

Mageblade healing is somewhat inferior compared to other recent fantasy RPGs, so here are a couple of optional rules that help help with party resilience, but not their overall strength.

Better Life through Surgery: The first one is simply to increase the Surgery healing from 1d4 to Focus. I’m not sure if the focus should be the surgeon’s, the patient, the highest of the two or the lowest of the two. My gut feeling tells me that it should be the surgeon’s: there are good arguments for any of those amounts, but all Focus amounts in the game scale related to the active character, and I do not want to trow off people with that one weird rule that works completely differently.

This makes Surgery a better skill, and hopefully there will be more skill options soon for an educated adventuring person.

from vixen vintage: http://www.vixen-vintage.com/2013/06/inspired-by-lady-adventurers.html

Because I really want to play this ->

… but with goggles, guns, grenades and a grappling hook.

I want to play a character that is a gentleman and a scholar, and while the book has Surgery, Engineering, Exotic/Dead Foreign Languages, Research, Diplomacy, Gather Information and Bullshit, and Climbing and Swimming are definitely an educated person’s kind of outdoorsy activity.

Of course there are more, like Pharmacy, Geography and Law in MB!: Silk Road and Sailing or Piloting in MB!: Tales of the Wind, and stranger things in MB!: Vyrnaccean Science.

The second rule is somewhat similar to the short rest concept from recent games like Into the Odd and possibly D&D (but I’m not sure, I played 4E and 5E a grand total of three times).

Resilience: a character can spend two turns after an encounter to get a proper rest. They can then recover 1d6 hits if they have been wounded or 1 mana if they spent any. Each character can rest this way Focus time per day.

This is great for everybody, without making characters stronger. It stared as only healing 1d6, but adding the mana option gives other classes some more occasions to shine. It mostly get around the problem of the five minutes adventuring day in the following ways:

• front line people get some healing, so last for more encounters
• mageblades get extra blademagic and devotions, so can use them in more encounters
• rogues get even more mana to spend as luck, for extra shenanigans
• casters get extra mana, which is great for extra malevolence and magic shields, but still does not let them spam the same spell over and over again: the hard limit of 1 cast per spell per day is still enforced.

Also, the extra mana means more attempts at saves. And nobody wants to fail those!

 

Mageblade: Wealth & Allowance

Adventurers need to replace or acquire adventuring items such as spikes, rope and arrows pretty much after every expeditions. When the loot is small, deciding where to allocate that wealth is interesting, but after a couple of adventures, if the adventurer survives, they’ll hopefully be flush with cash. And at that point, where’s the interesting decision in spending 1 or 2 coins on a rope or a crowbar?

To avoid accounting too much for all these small things, Mageblade introduces the Allowance. If the party acquired a non-negligible amount of wealth, the Allowance lets each PC refill or buy some items for free before their next foray. The initial version of the rule is that the total allowance for each character is 5% of the character’s wealth, with a maximum of 1d6 objects.

For example: Timmy, a character with 100 coins, between adventures has an allowance of 5 coins which can spend on 1d6 objects. Rolling a 4 they buy 6 torches (1c),  a pole (1c) and a bundle of 20 arrows (2c): they’d have another item to buy, but they ran out of money.

Another example: Zurgo the Zauberer, owning 10000 coins in gems and gold, has an allowance of 500c. Rolling a 3 they buy a heavy armour for a henchman (400c) and 3 vials of blessed water (2 x 25c): they’d have another 50c but they ran out of items.

The second version of the rule, the one we are going to playtest is:

If you got treasures in your last foray, you get 1d4 objects for free, their cost depending on your wealth.

PC’s Wealth	Tier	Object	Max Item Cost
nothing	0	no freebies for you!	0
50c	1	1d4 tier 1 objects	1c
150c	2	1d4 tier 2 objects	3c
500c	3	1d4 tier 3 objects	10c
2500c	4	1d4 tier 4 objects	50c
20000c	5	1d4 tier 5 objects	400c

What about bundled consumables, like torches, arrows, pythons? If you have not completely run out of these, a single item will restock them.

Is this going to break the game? not really, it would take 20 adventures with no loot whatsoever for the character to dilapidate their wealth.

Why rolling? to give them a decision: they can still buy things and spend money, but the whole which free swag are you going to get this adventure is just too attractive not to think about.

Why not handwaving it? because it requires GM headspace, while a small subsystem where PCs get freebies after an adventure is a small and cute way to give stuff to players while minimizing downtime.

 

 

 

Mageblade: a new class

The Mageblade is a magic slayer with a wicked blade, a mystic bridging the arts of steel and magic. Most are trained by one of the Ordo Mysterii for years and released on secret missions, or on an journey of interior growth, or they left or escaped from the order, or for some other imperscrutable reason, often many of these reasons at the same time. They are relentless and, when using their athame, a magically bond blade, can clad themselves in steel, use spells and strike true.

Illustration (allegedly) by shinoshoe26

The Mageblade is a new class in my MAGEBLADE game. They are somewhat inspired by clerics, and are part Lone Wolf with Kai powers, part sword saints, part mystics fighters.

What’s important about them, to me, is that they replace a cleric class that was straddled between casting, healing and fighting but plagued with a very weak faith element, despite the name. The Mageblade needs no devotion to the divine, but the lack of devotion to their Ordo Mysterii might prove lethal, as retribution for defectors and betrayers strikes hard.

This is the version for your Old School game, the MAGEBLADE version has slightly different mechanics. 

Mageblade – Old School

HP, Saves, Hitrolls, XP: as Cleric

Ironclad: Mageblades can use any weapon, armour and shield.

Athame: Each Mageblade has an athame, a mageblade. The athame is a magic blade (dealing 1d6 damage in melee), wrought from cold iron by the Mageblade, and then enchanted and bound in a week-long process. The athame is magic, but it is powerless when not wielded by its creator. Mageblades can deliver touch spells making an attack with the athame. Furthermore, athames have an important power:

• Empower: Mageblades can empower their athame. This takes just an instant (so it can be part of a melee attack or a spell) and charges the blade with magic and makes it glow like a torch for 10 minutes. While the charge lasts the athame gains a +1 hit bonus, +2 at level 5, +3 at level 9. The Mageblade can discharge this energy to power a Blademagic: doing so drains the charge. Mageblades can empower once a day; if they want to empower they blade more times they can do so by spending any unused spell.

Blademagic: The Mageblade can discharge their empowered athame to activate one blademagic. This can be done as part of a melee attack, or just before casting a spell or doing another action. The blademagic usually lasts until the next dawn, unless specified. If a Mageblade activates a second blademagic while one is still active, the first automatically terminates, but they still have to empower the second separately to activate it. So it’s possible to, in a round, charge the athame, hit in melee, and discharge the athame to power a blademagic. Mageblades start knowing 1 blademagic and learn a new one at level 6 and one at level 12, with their availability depending on their Ordo Mysterii. This is a list of some sample blademagic:

• Rend: the athame becomes a conduit for delivering raw power into wounds. After a successful hit roll the Mageblade can discharge the blademagic into the wound, dealing 1d6+1/2 level extra damage. This terminates the blademagic.
• Bane: the athame is ensorcelled with energies antithetical to the essence of a specific type of being. The Mageblade adds focus also when dealing damage in melee to a type of enemy. There are multiple banes, and they must be learnt and activated separately: Undead Bane, Demon Bane, Animal Bane, Spirit Bane. Tales mention other banes (including Cephalopod Bane and Human Bane), but do not mention where to learn them.
• Arc: the athame forms wide circles of lethal steel. The Mageblade can attack 3 different enemies in melee each round. Duration: 1 turn.
• Dance: the athame is let into the air as it starts to dance, bob and spin mid-air. The athame can be set to attack a given close enemy: it attacks with a hit bonus equal to the PC’s focus, and has AC 5 [14]. If hit, it’s not damaged but loses its next attack. If it is not set to attack anybody, it blocks attacks giving +2 to the AC of the Mageblade. Duration: 1 turn.

Devotion: Mageblades can learn a single devotion, a ritual specific to their order. Each Devotion can be used by discharging their athame. Some sample devotions are, depending on the Ordo Mysterii:

• Conflict Praxis Orders: Turn/Control Undead/Animal/Spirits/Demons: pick any one combination depending on how the Conflict Praxis order is aligned.
• Blood Dragon Order: one of the Maenad Powers
• Thaumagram Orders: one of the Dodecathaumagrams

Magic: Mageblades have some limited spellcasting ability. Depending on their Ordo Mysterii they either cast spells like a Magic User or a cleric of 2 levels less. Mageblades can cast spells in armour but only if they wield their athame. Mageblades do not automatically gain a spellbook or new Magic-user spells. If they cast Cleric spells they gain all cleric spells normally and their athame doubles as holy symbol.

Some orders, like the Thaumagram Orders, often eschew teaching blademagic to focus more on spellcasting: the Mageblade will not learn any blademagic, but can cast spells as Cleric of the same level.

 

 

Mageblade: development notes

So, I had a few days off and I started to flesh out a bit more Mageblade. Mageblade is meant to be some sort of D&D retroclone, except it’s not really cloning anything.

To put it a bit in perspective: I stripped down S&W Whitebox to the point where there’s not even the experience points tables, saving throws or classes left there. At the moment it’s there just to act as framing.

Then I started building. I decided that characters get numerically better at doing their thing using one single scale: the Focus Bonus. For Fighters, it applies to hit rolls. For Casters, more effective spells. For Mageblades, hit rolls with their athame (a bound blade) and saving throws. Here’s the advancement table, which is shared by all classes.

Advancement Table

Level	XP Needed	Hit Dice	Focus Bonus
1	0	1d	3
2	1,000	2d	3
3	2,000	3d	4
4	4,000	4d	4
5	8,000	5d	4
6	16,000	6d	5
7	30,000	7d	5
8	64,000	8d	5
9	125,000	9d	6
10	250,000	10d	6
11	400,000	11d	6
12	600,000	12d	7

So a level 3 fighter has +4 to the hit roll, and Casters always have +0. While this might seem a bit odd, consider that magic do not gives bonus to hit or to AC, so plate mail and shield is pretty much the non-plus ultra. Said that, there will be magic barriers, giving AC equivalent to armour. This follows my “eschew numeric modifiers” philosophy: I’m trying to do everything without numeric modifiers, except where I use the Focus Bonus.

You might have noticed that there are only 12 levels, but players get to roll 12 hit dice. To avoid tears, HPs are rerolled at every level, and the new amount is kept only if better than the previous. If not, the new HP total increases by 1.

Characters get also skill points, a handful spread from level 1 to level 12. Each class can spend them in specific things: Fighters can get Stances and combine them to make combos (yeah, combos, you read well), Casters and Mageblades learn disciplines and magic schools. Learning requires teachers, and more exotic skills require cooperation if reclusive or exclusive or simply crochety masters.

Mageblades also learn new blademagic, which is some kind of battlemagic channeled through their athame during melee. An example of blademagic is Bane: there are many Banes to be learnt, one per creature type. When a Bane is active, the athame becomes deadly to that creature type and deals extra damage equal to the Focus, so for example if a Mageblade of level 5 activates Undead Bane their athame will deal +4 damage to undead. Other blademagic lets the mageblade attack many enemies, animates the athame, or just deal extra damage.