This week we resume looking at the class exemplars, featuring the fantastic character portraits by Nikki Smith-Cielo. Continuing alphabetically, next up is the Paladin Exemplar. This one is also a hybrid ancestry, although the base template is not human.
Kendra MacDougal
As a half-elf among halflings, Kendra was always the biggest one of her siblings and cousins. With great size came great responsibility, and she took to watching out for her littler brethren like a duck takes to water. It was only natural that she would feel the calling to her clan's patron deity, The Shepherd, and she worked hard to become not just a cleric, but a full-fledged paladin. Dedicated in mind and body to the protection of those that cannot protect themselves, she left her clan to follow in the service of her patron, wherever it might lead.
She traveled, taking on the occasional rat king or other menace to settlements on behalf of those that are less well trained in combat. With the heavy armor and weaponry passed down from her retired grandmother, these tasks were never much of a challenge, even by herself. Kendra began to want more, to make a bigger difference in the world than simply serving as a glorified exterminator. Trusting in the protection of The Shepherd, and her own training, she ventured all by herself into the heart of an auction where tall folks were buying and selling halfling slaves. Filled with righteous zeal, she withstood every attack the slavers could bring to bear while she rescued the slaves and escorted them home to the sanctuary of her clan of free halflings.
She still takes the occasional job clearing out particularly entrenched monsters for those that need help, but direct intervention into the oppression of others is now what drives Kendra. She actively seeks out situations where her shield can protect the downtrodden, and is especially keen to root out the scourge of slavery wherever she can. While her training may say that The Shepherd is the only ally she needs, Kendra is naturally friendly and always eager to join forces with others that share in her ideals, or at least her goals.
Ancestry
Kendra is a Half-Elf. While she possesses several biological distinctions from the typical example, she is also part Halfling. As such, she chooses Halfling as her base ancestry. This gives her an ability boost to Agility and Wisdom, and a free ability boost that she uses to offset the ancestry's natural flaw to Strength. She also gains 6 bonus Hit Points. For her first Ancestry Perk, she chooses the Half-Elf perk, and chooses the Elven Speed and Gifted Speaker options from that perk's menu to increase her base speed by 1 hex and gain a permanent bonus to social checks and DCs. This perk also unlocks all other Half-Elf ancestry perks if she wants them, as well as all Elf ancestry perks. This gives Kendra three different possible pools to choose from.
For her remaining three ancestry perks, Kendra chooses Great Communicator, Inspire Imitation and Plucky. Great Communicator improves her ability to understand and be understood when conversing in languages where either speaker is not fluent, and to conveying the gist of a message if neither party shares a language at all. Inspire Imitation gives a significant bonus to allies when they attempt a check that Kendra has recently already succeeded upon. Plucky is more than just a bonus to saves against fear and emotion effects, it makes her result one whole step better, turning failure into success and success into critical success!
Background
For her background, Kendra improves her Strength and Charisma and becomes an expert in Society. She chooses an Heirloom for her Backstory Boon, and uses it to gain fine quality full plate armor at no cost, in addition to whatever she purchases during her Equipment step. Kendra choose any of the optional Backstory Traits.
Class
Kendra is a Paladin of The Shepherd. The Paladin class lets her choose between Strength and Charisma as the class's Key Ability. She chooses Strength, further improving that ability modifier by another +1. The class also gives her another 11 Hit Points (10, plus her final Endurance modifier of +1), as well as several Initial Proficiencies. She's an expert in Religion, Fortitude, Will, Heavy Armor, and the Shields weapon group, since that group includes her deity's favored weapon. In addition to taking that weapon group straight to expert, the class also gives her two more esoteric proficiency boosts for other weapon groups, which she uses to improve her proficiency with Swords to trained, and then again to expert. She also chooses four more skills in which to become trained (4, plus her final Intelligence modifier of +0), and chooses Athletics, Diplomacy, Intimidation and Medicine. She is also trained in Perception, Reflex and all other armor categories besides heavy armor.
A Paladin's choice of deity functions in many ways as a class specialization. It has already determined which of two skills she can jump straight to expert with and which weapon group does the same. It also strongly influences her ability to cast spells as Champion Powers. The Shepherd always only grants positive energy, adding heal to the list of spells she can cast using Spell Points. The Shepherd also automatically grants its signature spells the same way, whether those spells are typically divine or otherwise. This adds the forbidding ward Cantrip and the shillelagh spell to her list of Champion Powers in addition to heal, though since forbidding ward is a Cantrip it does not cost her any Spell Points to cast it. As Kendra increases in level and her Champion Powers are able to cast higher level spells, The Shepherd will also automatically add all of its other signature spells over time.
For her class perk, Kendra chooses Champion's Domain. This lets her gain one of The Shepherd's domains like a cleric. She can cast that domain's exclusive spells as Champion Powers, and also increases her Spell Point pool with which she can cast them. Kendra chooses the Protection domain, which grants her the divine ward power immediately. This power lets her use a free action to take damage for an ally, helping them stay alive in a pinch and also serving as a non-obvious action economy enhancer, since it costs her fewer actions to cast heal on herself than it typically does to use it on others. Since her Champion Powers use Charisma as their key ability, she has a total of 3 Spell Points to spend on her Champion Powers each day, 2 base from her final Charisma modifier of +2, and one more added as a result of her Champion's Domain perk.
Details
During this step, Kendra gets to choose her final round of ability boosts. She chooses Strength, Endurance, Wisdom and Charisma. This sets her final ability modifier array at Str: +3, Agi: +1, End: +1, Int: +0, Wis: +2, Cha: +2. She chooses Combat Reflexes as her general perk, which gives her two more reactions each round in Combat. This is especially helpful for a Paladin, as it gives her many more opportunities to use the Retributive Strike class feature to punish foes for attacking the allies she's protecting. For her skill boost, she chooses the Athletics skill perk Power Through. This lets her replace all Acrobatics checks with the move trait with Athletics checks instead. Since she's untrained in Acrobatics, and also wearing cumbersome full plate armor, this makes her much better at such checks, and possibly the same for her allies if she goes first, succeeds and thereby triggers her Inspire Imitation perk's effects.
Equipment
Like all characters in Realm of Runes, Kendra has 150 silver pieces with which to buy starting equipment, in addition to the fine quality full plate she gained as an heirloom. She uses this starting cash to buy a tower shield, the Shepherd's favored weapon, and a boss accessory to make it deal more damage. She also gets a bastard sword, a standard adventuring kit (backpack, bedroll, belt pouch, blanket, 10 candles, 3 changes of clothes, a crowbar, flint & steel, a wood mug, 6 rations, 20m silk rope, 5 sacks, a pup tent, 2 water skins and a writing set), an iron holy symbol of The Shepherd, and a set of healer's tools. She keeps the remaining 17 silver left over as cash to spend during her adventures.
Final Touches
With all choices made, Kendra can fill out her important statistics. She has 17 Hit Points between ancestry and class. She's an expert in heavy armor, and since all armor categories double the tier modifier when calculating armor class, this gives her a base AC of 20 (+3 from proficiency, +6 from fine full plate, and +1 from Agility). In addition to this base AC, Kendra also carries a Tower Shield. This always provides another +2 bonus to AC, bringing her real total up to 22, but further increases it by another 2 if she uses an action to raise the shield into a defensive position. In this case it brings her armor class to a staggering 24 at level 1. Even those enemies that are a couple levels higher than her are going to need a natural 17 or better just to get past her defenses, and those that try to just ignore her open themselves up to a devastating Retributive Strike in return. The rest of her abilities and modifiers are filled out similarly, depending on her proficiencies and ability modifiers as appropriate.
Next week we will once again take a closer look at an area of the rules that saw significant growth during the playtest process: Knowledge skills and target identification.
留言