O brave new world Which points to worlds beyond And discovers the way. OURANOS (Uranus) Talon Abraxas
The Vocator
<:
Big homebrew time. Have 30 pages x)
so yeah! The Vocator! Its a variant class, since I'm enjoying making them, and this ones probably my new favourite of the bunch! The vocator exists as a modernization of the stuff seen in the 3.5e Binder, mixing its vestige mechanics with a bit of spellcasting too.
The class is pretty funky, its designed to sort of be a hyper-versatile, spellcaster-martial? That last sentence had no meaning, alright so. It fills a similiar role as the warlock, being a spellcaster who plays more like a martial, and its versatility comes in how you can practically rebuild your character each day. Got a social scenario? Bind vestiges related to social checks. Got combat? Switch to a bunch of combat stuff. Need healing? Get a healing vocator. With the vestiges on hand, the ability to swap subclasses baked in and such, the design is very much that you can customize and change your role in a party each day.
Overall, yeah, I am really happy with how this turned out, hopefully you guys like it as much as I do
ROYAL BLACK ‘Mother Of Aliens’ Dress if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways
Two universal constants of high fantasy living:
- If something falls into ruin a necromancer will move in 100% of the time
- There is a critical mass of gold that will summon a dragon. If you keep accurate records and stay below it you’ll be fine
I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t renovate your summer keep and live in it at least one month out of the year, we’ll have to charge you with Negligent Dungeonization of Property. The old cellar laboratory might have belonged to your uncle, but if you aren’t going to use it, something will.
The players are a squad of government investigators, trying to prevent monsters from claiming new habitat. It’s mainly negotiation but sometimes people have an interest in attracting dangerous entities for their own purposes.
So my tarot begins! This is quite a big project so please support it (by sharing and all) if you want to see more
(Not doing them in order btw. The deck decides which one is drawn next)
There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber
English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.
Mx. Leah Velleman on twitter
Icelandic folklore requires you avoid saying the names of evil whales, otherwise you’ll draw their attention.
Yall have evil whales?
Iceland does! They are the illhveli, literally “evil whales”, and they live to kill you. They love nothing more than killing and eating humans and sinking their ships. Their greatest enemy is the steypireydur (that’s blue whale to you), which is the greatest of the good whales and the protector of sailors.
All evil whales are, well, evil. So evil that if you speak their name at sea, they will hear it and home in on you. So instead you use all sorts of euphemisms for their names. Also if you try to cook their meat it literally disappears from the pot. That’s right, they’re so evil, you can’t even eat them.
They include such types as the hrosshvalur (horsewhale), with big eyes and a red mane and tail. This is probably the best known and most feared of the lot.
The raudkembingur (redcomb) is especially cruel and bloodthirsty even by illhveli standards. If you manage to escape it, it will die of frustration.
Good luck escaping the mushveli (mousewhale) though, it has legs! And will clamber onto the beach in pursuit!
Or what about death from above? The stökkull (jumper) leaps high into the air and pile-drives boats to pieces.
Meanwhile the skeljungur (shellwhale) sits in the path of boats and lets them get wrecked on its shelly hide…
… while the sverdhvalur (swordwhale) slices through boats with its dorsal fin.
The katthveli (catwhale) is relatively harmless though. It meows.
The same can’t be said of the lyngbakur (heatherback), a classic island fish that lets sailors get on its back and then dives, taking them to a watery grave.
The nauthveli (oxwhale) on the other hand specially targets cattle, attracting them into the sea with its bellow before tearing them apart.
How can you avoid all these murderous whales, like the taumafiskur (bridlefish) here? Any of a number of ways, including getting a steypireydur to help. There are substances, ranging from angelica to sheep dung and chopped fox testicles, that they find abhorrent. And you can distract them with loud noises and barrels.
For more, I assure you this link will answer all your questions.
This is also why fairies were referred to as the ‘Good Neighbors’ and why there are so many nicknames for Satan.
The concept of avoidance speech is endlessly fascinating and rife with plot points for writing, but honestly I’m just thrilled about the EVIL WHALES.
Protectar
Image © Wizards of the Coast, by Adrian Smith. Accessed at the D&D Miniatures Handbook Art Gallery here
[Commissioned by @crazytrain48. Be not afraid! This creature combines a very stereotypical angelic appearance with a very low CR–the better to use in building warbands and making a figure of lower rarity in the D&D Miniatures game. Like a number of the monsters in the Miniatures Handbook, they have no unique abilities to speak of, just a small handful of SLAs. So I gave them some, emphasizing their protective nature.]
Protectar CR 2 NG Outsider (extraplanar) This being looks to be the very ideal of an angel, being a winged humanoid clad in armor and carrying sword and shield. Their face is stern, but not unkind.
Protectars are lesser celestial beings that spring forth from the fabric of the good aligned planes. They are more concerned for protecting mortals than in combating evil. A protectar often patrols their planes looking for lost mortals, helping petitioners settle into existence as a spirit, and doing miscellaneous good deeds. They are faultlessly moral, and never lie, cheat or steal. They also will happily lay down their life in sacrifice to aid another.
In combat, protectars close ranks and defend their allies. They are more concerned with support than dealing damage, and often act as battlefield healers. Their auras shine brightly to creatures that can detect good, and may pull the attention of fiends to target them over their allies. Some protectars lean into this, and act as decoys for more powerful celestials to thwart assassination attempts or confuse enemy spies.
Considering they look like the most stereotypical angel imaginable, what is the reason they’re not?
A few:
1. Parsimony. The original isn’t an angel, so I didn’t make it an angel in my conversion
2. Angels are powerful. Since the weakest angel in Pathfinder 1e Core is the astral deva, at CR 14, angels have a powerful protective aura by default. I would have to explain away not giving it one.
3. There’s already a CR 2 angel: the cassisian, and I wanted to minimize redundancy
4. Angels are related more closely to souls. It seemed weird to me to have an angelic being being inherently disposable the way a protectar is: you’d think the forces of good would be kinder to their petitioners. I could see a concept of a protectar being formed from a soul that died repentant but still stained with sin, so it has to die and be reborn multiple times in order to cleanse itself… but that’s just an idea I came up with now, as opposed to when I wrote it.
