This week we resume looking at the class exemplars, featuring the fantastic character portraits by Nikki Smith-Cielo. Continuing alphabetically, next up is the Bard Exemplar. As the only pure human amongst the exemplars, it was important to draw inspiration from beyond the typical fantasy milieu. The result is a character that takes the concept of a bard in an interesting direction, yet still feels right at home in genre.
Dalkan
Dalkan once lived in a small world. He hunted the bush with his people and practiced the yidaki for ceremony and recreation. Between the two pastimes, he always preferred the yidaki. He would use the instrument to accompany the elders as they told stories of the dream time, and he memorized every one. It was a good life, and the simplicity did not bother him. What more could he want? It seemed the answer was nothing, until his hunting group encountered an injured stranger.
The harshness of a life in the bush is intertwined with isolation. Dalkan had never met a person from outside his people. Not only did he look different, but he possessed new stories. Stories the elders did not know. Dalkan devoured these stories like a hungry serpent, but craved more. When the stranger healed, Dalkan volunteered to help escort him out of the bush. In doing so he discovered a whole civilization he did not even know existed, filled with amazing diversity of culture, tradition and, most importantly, stories. Dalkan could not go back. Not yet. His curiosity was insurmountable, and his capacity to learn and remember stories was seemingly bottomless.
He travels the world with his yidaki now, always keeping an ear to the ground for a new tale. He intends to return to his people eventually. After all, what good are his stories if he cannot share them with those he cares about? For now, however, that time is distant, dream-like. Perhaps he walks in the dream time himself, waiting only to wake with fresh wonders to share with his people.
Ancestry
Dalkan is a human, which provides him with 8 bonus Hit Points, but no other universal benefits. Rather than having specific attributes that are boosted, he gets two free choices for his ability modifiers. He uses these to improve his Intelligence, to ensure he has a lot of skill training, and Agility to improve his prowess with ranged weapons. During this step he chooses the following ancestry perks: Acclimated (Heat), Cooperative Nature, General Training and Natural Aptitude. Acclimated grants Dalkan complete immunity to the effects of severe heat and provides a bonus to checks to resist the effects of extreme heat, but makes it harder to resist the effects of severe and extreme cold. Cooperative Nature increases the size of circumstance and spell bonuses that Dalkan provides to other characters by 1. Since a large number of Bardic abilities are designed to provide bonuses to allies, this will be an exceptionally useful perk. General Training and Natural Aptitude provide a bonus General Perk and a bonus Class Perk instead of more ancestry-specific abilities. Like many humans, Dalkan is more defined by his class and general specializations than genetics.
Background
For his Background, Dalkan improves his Charisma, further improves his Agility and becomes an expert in of Knowledge. He chooses Uncommon Access for his backstory boon, and uses it to gain a free boomerang, which is normally unavailable for starting equipment due to its uncommon nature.
Class
Dalkan is a Bard. He chooses Charisma as his Key Ability, which gives that ability another +1. The class automatically gives him another 9 Hit Points (8 plus his final Endurance modifier of +1), as well as several Initial Proficiencies. He's an expert at Reflex and Will saves, Perception and the Performance skill, as well as trained in Fortitude saves, unarmored defense, light armor and Occult spells. The Bard class also grants him two esoteric boosts for weapon groups. He applies both of these boosts to the Darts weapon group, making him trained and then expert with weapons of that group. Finally, he chooses 6 more skills in which to be trained (4 plus his final Intelligence modifier of +2), and chooses Acrobatics, Athletics, Diplomacy, Occultism, Stealth and Survival. Since his final Intelligence bonus will be +2, he also gains an extra skill increase, which he uses to further improve Occultism from trained to expert.
Rather than gaining a broad class specialization, all Bards gain two bonus class perks that they must use to choose compositions and accents. Dalkan uses these bonus perks to choose Inspire Courage, to learn the composition cantrip of the same name, and Fortissimo, which is a useful metamagic accent that he can use to modify his composition powers. The inspire courage spell provides a spell bonus to attack rolls, weapon damage and saves against fear for allies in the spells area. Since it's a spell bonus, his Cooperative Nature makes the bonus even better. The Fortissimo accent, when applied to any composition power, causes allies in the area to re-roll 1's on damage dice. This applies to all damage dice from any source, including spells, and applies even if the re-roll is a 1 again. The accent is costs and action to add to a composition like inspire courage, but thereafter continues to apply as long as the accented composition does without it costing any more actions on Dalkan's turns.
Dalkan also gains two more class perks, the standard one from first level and the extra one from his Natural Aptitude ancestry perk. Unlike his bonus perks, which could only be chosen from among those with the composition or accent trait, these perks can be any first-level Bard perks. He could use these to pick up more compositions and accents if he chose, but instead he selects Bardic Knowledge and Loremaster's Recall. Bardic Knowledge completely removes the penalty for Recall General Knowledge, meaning that Dalkan is always likely to know something relevant, even if it's not in a category of knowledge in which he specializes. Loremaster's Recall increases his Spell Point pool and teaches him a power of the same name that he can cast as reaction to roll twice and take the better result on any check to Recall Knowledge or Recall General Knowledge. It costs a spell point to cast, but when combined with Bardic Knowledge it means that Dalkan almost always knows something helpful about any given topic.
Bards also gain Occult spellcasting. He has a Spell Repertoire which he uses to learn 4 Occult Cantrips and two Occult 1st-level spells. He can freely cast any Cantrip in his repertoire, and has two first-level spell slots that he can use to cast other spells. As a spontaneous caster, he does not have to choose what spell he uses a slot for until he casts it. For Cantrips, Dalkan chooses detect magic, guidance, know direction and read aura. For his first-level spells, he chooses sleep and soothe. He also gains a pool of 4 Spell Points (3 from his Charisma bonus, +1 more from the Loremaster's Recall perk) which he can use to cast composition powers. Since inspire courage is a Cantrip, it does not cost any points to cast. The loremaster's recall power costs 1 Spell Point, but Dalkan can also freely spend 2 Spell Points to cast any spell in his repertoire without using a spell slot instead. With 4 Spell Points in his pool, this can effectively double the number of 1st-level spells he can cast if he doesn't need to use loremaster's recall.
Details
During this step, Dalkan gets to choose his final round of 4 ability modifier boosts, improving his Agility, Endurance, Intelligence and Charisma by one more, each. This sets his final ability modifier array at Str: +0, Agi: +3, End: +1, Int: +2, Wis: +0, Cha: +3. He also gets a free skill boost, which he uses to gain the Virtuosic Performer Performance skill perk, granting him a large bonus to any checks using wind instruments, his type of choice. He also chooses Allied Spellcaster and Exotic Training (Darts) as general perks. Allied Spellcaster is a reaction he can use to improve another caster's Spell Roll or Spell DC, and this bonus is also further increased by his Cooperative Nature. Exotic Training removes the exotic trait from all weapons of a single weapon group, in this case Darts. This lets him use his full expert proficiency with his boomerang, which would otherwise be an exotic weapon. Since characters are treated as untrained with exotic weapons, even if their proficiency would otherwise be better, removing this trait changes a -2 penalty into a +1 bonus for this unusual weapon.
Equipment
Like all characters in Realm of Runes, Dalkan has 150 silver pieces to spend on starting equipment, in addition to the free boomerang he gained from his Backstory Boon. He buys a batch of 3 javelins for some variety in damage types, and if his boomerang doesn't return for some reason, a yidaki (a one-handed instrument) with which to perform his composition powers, a standard adventuring kit (backpack, bedroll, belt pouch, blanket, 10 candles, 3 changes of clothes, crowbar, flint & steel, wood mug, 6 rations, 20m silk rope, 5 sacks, a pup tent, 5 torches, 2 water skins and a writing set), and an alchemical starter pack (2 elixirs of life, 1 alchemist's fire, 1 acid flask, 1 antidote, 1 antibiotics and a bandolier to hold it all). He keeps 25 silver pieces left over as spending money to use during his adventures.
Final Touches
With all choices made, Dalkan can fill out his important statistics. He has a total of 17 Hit Points between ancestry and class. He prefers to not wear armor, but since he's trained in unarmored defense his AC is 14 (+1 from proficiency, +3 from Agility). His Spell Roll for Occult spells is +4 (+1 from proficiency, +3 from Charisma) and his save DC is 14 (his proficiency +10). While his Spell Roll and DC aren't enormous, most of the spells he uses don't use either of these statistics. The only exception is sleep, which allows a saving throw to resist its effects, but as a spontaneous caster Dalkan can freely choose to spend his spell slots elsewhere if he thinks a target is likely to resist it. The rest of his statistics are filled out similarly, depending on his proficiencies and ability modifiers as appropriate.
Next week we'll alternate back to a closer look at another topic that underwent significant improvements during the playtest process: Crafting, both in general and with how it relates to starting equipment.
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