Warrior Elite

Especially in 3.5 and Pathfinder, rangers are sort of misshapen. Now they share a class with paladins and knights-- each a guardian of a certain range, whether its a town or a spot of wilderness. "Favored enemy"is rolled into the more flavorful smite ability.

ERRANT (knight, ranger, steward, samurai)

1	Bodyguard 1/day, Privileged position	0 slot per day
2	Smite, attack +1	0 slots per day
3	Spells, inspiration	1 slots per day
4	Bodyguard 2/day, attack +1	2 slots per day
5	Second Magnitude	4 slots per day
6	Legendary, attack +1	7 slots per day
7	Third Magnitude	10 slots per day
8	Bodyguard 3/day, attack +1	15 slots per day
9	Fourth Magnitude	20 slots per day
10	Rally, attack +1	27 slots per day

Starting Skills: Expertise (surveying) or (heraldry) and any two.

Bodyguard: You may parry an incoming attack aimed at an adjacent ally, reducing the damage by 1d12.

Privileged position:

You get a new skill, “pull rank,” which you can use in circumstances where another character respects your social role as an errant, knight, noble, or other steward 

Pull Rank (cha)

• compel: If you succeed by less than five, pick one. If you succeed by 5+, pick three: convince them it’s appropriate for you to be here, convince them you’re more important than them, convince them to report their orders.

Smite: Pick a favored enemy from the list below, or roll randomly. When attacking such people, get +2 damage.

Table 14: Those Set out for Smiting

1. The truly wicked 

2. The truly pure  

3. Criminals 

4. Animals 

5. The undead 

6. Lawkeepers 

7. Nobles 

8. Peasants 

9. Soldiers 

10. Sorcerers and binders 

11. Priests and Loresages 

12. Wizards and other scholars

Spells:

As you develop your skills, you learn a handful of spells. At third level and every level after, select two spells to learn. All spells you know are recorded in writing, which you consult each day. When you consult your spellbook, you decide which spells you will be able to cast that day and how many times you can cast each one. For each casting of a starting-level spell, you must commit one spell slot. Later magnitudes cost a number of slots equal to their magnitude.

Magnitudes: Errants cannot learn spells of a higher magnitude than their level allows.

Inspiration: The errant can make a charisma test to allow an ally to ignore most debilitating physical conditions for at least a minute. This cannot be used on the same condition twice.

Legendary: Your skills are known far and wide. Rumor rolls about you need test 5 lower than usual. You will be periodically approached by wanderers asking for you to teach them. Most governments will pay you a commission to oversee a region. If you are ever asked (or forced) into an army, you will be given an officer’s title.

Rally: Once per day, an errant can attempt to inspire all allies at once. Additionally, all nearby allies may test constitution to regain 10 hp.

ERRANT SPELL LIST

There are no special restrictions on which spells from the errant spell list errants are allowed to cast.

Spell Name	Domains	Magnitude	Effect
Ancestral Army	Spirit, leadership, shadow	Fourth	You are surrounded by the ghostly hosts of the honored dead. Each round, you may make two extra attacks and have a free use of the parry and bodyguard ability. Also, they wreck up the place. Lasts five minutes. This spell requires concentration.
Antipodes	tactics	First	Each circumstantial bonus you get for combat increases by one. Lasts five minutes.
Attuned Weapon	Strike, fire, cold, metal, weapon	First	Your weapon glows with potent energy. The next time you hit an opponent, it deals an additional d6 of damage.
Charm Animal	Charm, animal	First	One animal target treats you like their friend. You can cast this spell at third magnitude to affect a group of people.
Cut Down	Strike	Fourth	You gain the cut down fighter class feature for the next ten minutes. This spell requires concentration.
Dancing Blade	Enchantment, weapon, wind	Second	Your weapon floats around you and attacks with a bonus equal to your highest magnitude attained, dealing the weapon’s base damage. Lasts five minutes.
Dispel Transformation	dispel	Third	All transformation spells before you end. If they were cast by a higher-level caster, you must make a spellcraft test, modified by their level, to succeed. This spell requires concentration.
Fell the Beast!	leadership	Second	Your allies gain your smite ability for the next hour.
Flyting Weapon	Strike, tactics, weapon, speech	Third	Your weapon sings with crass disses. Each hit inflicts a point of fatigue, and your opponent must test wisdom to flee or use any clever tricks.
Fool Me Once	tactics	Second	Ignore a combat maneuver or trick that an opponent already successfully pulled off on you.
Hate	Emotion, strike	First	For the next hour, you get +2 to hit and damage targets of your smite, but with each hit you inflict you take 2 damage.
Hospitality	Curse, emotion, ritual, item, enchantment	Second	You place a talisman as a centerpiece of your dining table. As long as it physically stays there, no treachery may be performed there.
Mano a Mano	Curse, tactics	Second	Target foe gets a -1 penalty to hit for each ally fighting against you, to a maximum penalty of your level.
Mystery (natural)	Ritual, nature	First	The target gets a random loresage natural mystery. This lasts for 12 hours.
Oath of Peace	Charm, curse, ritual	Third	A defeated foe must agree to follow the law and be non-aggressive.
Parley	Charm	First	The target tests wisdom or becomes willing to hear you out for at least a minute. Fails if they are threatened. This spell requires concentration.
Parsimonious strike	Strike	Second	Strike an enemy who has not acted yet in this combat. If you hit, deal double damage but skip your next turn. This spell requires concentration.
Pathfinding	Nature	First	Reroll a survivalism, expertise (nature), or expertise (surveying) test and take the better result.
Puissant Parry	Tactics	Second	The next time you are attacked, you may reduce the damage taken by 1d12. Lasts five minutes.
Radioactive Weapon	Radiation, strike, light, disease, weapon	Fourth	Your weapon glows with potent energy, brighter than a torch. For the next ten minutes, it deals an additional d6 of damage and forces the target to test constitution or become terminally ill. This spell requires concentration.
Seance	Necromancy, spirit, ritual	Third	You channel the departed spirits of those who have died in the area, or who otherwise have a connection to your location. Through you, they may converse and can answer questions, thought they may require bargaining for the juiciest information.
Sincerity	emotion	First	Become proficient in a skill to convince someone when you are being honest.
Speak with Trees	Nature, speech	First	You may use use expertise (surveying) to bargain and gossip with trees, as per the implicature and rumor skills. This spell requires concentration.
Speak with Weapons	Metal, speech, weapon	First	You may use use craft or expertise (heraldry) to bargain and gossip with weapons, as per the implicature and rumor skills. This spell requires concentration.
Tenacity	Emotion, tactics	First	+2 to a skill
Torque	Emotion, tactics, transformation	Third	Act last in the initiative, but get +2 AC, attack, and strength and constitution tests.
True North	Divination, metal	First (cantrip)	You know the direction of magnetic north.
Unblockable Strike	Strike, ooze	Third	Make an attack that automatically hits.
William Tell	Strike	Third	Make a free ranged attack, and it lands precisely where you intend it. You automatically hit any enemy, etc. This spell requires concentration.
Wyrding Weapon	Strike, divination, weapon	Fourth	Each time you hit a foe, ask a question about them and receive some kind of answer from the DM. This must be an attack at full strength, or else trivia will result. This spell requires concentration.

Reappropriation

THIEF (rogue, spy, burglar, assassin)

1	Deft 1d6, Greed
2	Skilful
3	Deft 2d6
4	Skilfull, Anticipate 1/day
5	Deft 3d6
6	Skilfull
7	Deft 4d6
8	Skilfull, Anticipate 2/day
9	Deft 5d6
10	Skilfull

Starting Skills: any one expertise, bolt, stealth, and one other

Deft: After making an attack roll against an unknowing or flatfooted opponent, or when making a skill test, you may add a d6 to your total. The number of d6s you may spend per day increases with every other level.

Greed: Every time you personally acquire more money than you’ve ever seen before, you may subtract one point from one of your primaries attributes to add one point to another primary attribute.

Skilfull: Every even level, a thief may either gain a new skill or select a specialty in a skill they already possess. A specialization confers a new ability related to that skill.

Table 4: skill specializations

Logistics: when you succeed a test, you may forgo staying under budget to pick two.	Stealth: spend a deftness die to let an ally use your result on the next shared stealth roll
Craft: when you succeed in appraisal, you know if the item was stolen.	Expertise: you can use the skill to babble. Among laypeople, you can apply an existing expertise skill to create convincing misinformation. This can be used as a sort of performance.
Acrobatics: If you succeed by 5+, you perform the stunt silently.	Rumor: New move: incept. You manipulate a group into starting a project. If you succeed by less than five, pick one. If you succeed by 5+, pick three. The project is under budget, effectively directed, meets its deadline, you get inside knowledge of the project, you’re sure no one witnessed your machinations, you are not mentioned in the project’s plans,
Nonverbals: you automatically detect when someone is using the nonverbal skill	Spellcraft: You can dismantle existing magical wards and effects as per the craft ability. You get a penalty to the roll equal to the level of the spell effect.
Implicature: when you succeed on a bargaining test, you may forgo dealing honestly to pick two.	Survivalism: You and a number of allies equal to your level leave no tracks.
Perform: you may pass on secret messages in your art, just like using nonverbal communication.	Bolt: If you succeed, pick two.
Diligence: you can use intelligence instead of wisdom to endure tedium and practice a trick. You can use charisma instead of wisdom to check in with allies	Library Science: you may pick “you find the most valuable works.”
Sleight: In the time it takes to make one test, you may conceal a number of items equal to your level.	Psychology: You may pick “the mark is quickly analyzed” when performing analysis.

Anticipate: Once per day, when in combat, a thief can make a specific prediction about what action a foe will take. If the foe takes that action on their next turn, it provokes an attack or other standard action from the thief, and the thief adds a d6 to the pool they can use that combat with the deft ability.

What Even is Magic?

If you happen to be a materialist, it can be easy to unlearn what magic is supposed to do. Some people say that magic, as opposed to the natural world, is somehow not scientifically observable. This is not quite right. If you have a ritual that can be used to summon the demon Valtherastices, then by induction we can say, very scientifically, that we did some tests and found that the ritual, in fact, summons Valtherastices. Spells in fictional settings, and for the most part in the imaginings to real-life practicioners, do actually have observable effects-- why else would people perform them?
Even when the effect is low, like a spell that has only a 2% chance to summon Valtherastices, or when it is distant, like he may only appear years later, the spell can still be empirically verified once your wizards start introducing double-blind experiments and large sample sizes. "Hmm, looks like .03 of the group that performed the ritual summoned Valtherastices after two decades, and only 0.01 of the control group did. That's a p-score we can feel confident in."
So magic is not about an uncertain effect. It is not, in that way, mysterious. Having a system, such that might be studied in a wizard's college or an alchemist's lab, does not make magic unmagical or a mere branch of science. What is different is the connection. The natural world only allows an effect if the cause can somehow push the matter of the world to make that it happen. A wire carries an electric current because of the direct interaction of elections along every step of the line. Magic does not work like this. Magic ties a cause to an effect without necessarily manipulating matter in this same lawful way. Magic does not work through nature, it is above nature. Hence, supernatural.
Sure a ritual may require you to make a physical connection or satisfy material conditions, but this merely activates the magic. It is simply a correspondence, like pre-established harmony. When the connection between a particular cause and effect are unknown in physics, physicists start trying to figure out what that connection could be. In this way, they predict things like the Higgs-Boson before actually discovering it. In magic you cannot do this, because there is nothing to predict. It is simply a black box that checks if a condition is met, then spits out an answer.

A diagram of a human's rifle, which uses combustion and other chemical reactions, can explain each step, in increasingly fine detail. A diagram of an orc's rifle, which uses psychic power, can only explain on the level of "IF there is metal in the clip, THEN magic makes bullets shoot out of the barrel."

It may as well be gold

When fantasy authors want have a substance with some strange, fantastic property, they often create a fictional element whose sole defining characteristic is that one property: adamantium, kaiber, mithril. Ditto many fictional species. Consider the tribble, which is completely uninteresting save for its impossible fecundity. And fictional materials are not created for no reason. There is never any descriptions of "Jorium, which is like aluminum with a melting point that's slightly higher and a reddish sheen."

Fine, but it can be interesting to break this rule. Maybe iron weapons sever the soul, which mithril is merely a hard metal bled by a god, as in Holy Selmat. Maybe lightsabers require corundum, and they are red or blue based on whether they are fueled by a sapphire or a ruby. The point is, interesting features should not be restricted to the annex of fictional entities, doled out one-per as needed. Bees are weird! Hickory is weird! There's a reason you come up with interesting monsters when you ask yourself "what if this animal behaved like that animal?" You are defamiliarizing the animal's behavior.

One thing I want to try is a slight tweak on +X magic weapons. Rather than just having the number, I would assign each number to a certain material or technique. Like, a wood staff would be +0 if it were ash and +3 if it were ironwood.

Some implications of this:

• +X weapons are not necessarily magic, but higher numbers probably still are.
• You can cap the highest plus based on the material.
• Certain materials are more abundant in some places and nonexistent in others, creating a natural disparity.

Examples:

• Wood weapons: +0 ash, +1 oak, +2 hickory, +3 ironwood, +4 clipwood*
• Metal weapons: +0 iron, +1 steel, +2 damascus steel/noric steel, +3 starmetal, +4 taseqtis, +5 half-gold*

*Let's say clipwood a species of tree that glitches into itself, so that one branch is actually three identical branches clipped into each other, making the weapon very dense.

*Let's say half-gold is irradiated gold after 5 years of decay. I know some people have written about how gold must be magic (why else is it expended in so many magic rituals,) and when it's radioactive it radiates that magic in a powerful aura. After 5 years it's mostly safe to wield.

The Guy

FIGHTER (soldier, martial artist, brawler, berserker)

1	The zone, attack +1
2	The quest, Defining the zone
3	Privileged position, attack +1
4	Defining the zone
5	Resistance, flurry, attack +1
6	Defining the zone
7	Cut down, attack +1
8	Defining the zone
9	Legendary, attack +1
10	Defining the zone, hurly burly

Starting skills: any one expertise, any other two.

The zone: Once per day, you may enter the zone, a state of combat focus. The state lasts until things calm down, and gives you a +2 to all attack and damage rolls, at the cost of 2 AC.

The quest: At this level, select one of the conditions from the table below, or roll randomly. Whenever you meet that condition, you get another use of the zone that day, even if you haven’t used it yet.

Table 1: combat situations

1. You go below half health
2. An ally dies
3. You meditate, stretch, or do forms for an hour
4. You force a foe to yield
5. You get a critical hit
6. You defeat a foe with your bare hands
7. You have a hearty meal
8. You get a little sloshed
9. You romance an ally
10. Your ally coaches you before your next fight

Defining the zone: Your fighting style develops. Choose one of the effects below, or roll randomly. It now applies whenever you enter the zone.

Table 2: zone developments

1. No longer lose 2 AC

2. Further +1 to attacks and damage. Fatigued afterward.

3. +3 to combat maneuvers if not wearing medium or heavy armor

4. +3 to resist combat maneuvers

5. Once, when an enemy attacks, replace your AC with an attack roll-10.

6. Combat nourishes you like eating and drinking

7. +1 to attack and damage while flanking

8. +2 damage while mounted with stirrups

9. Get a critical hit on a natural 2

10. Unarmed and improvised attacks grant +1 AC and resistance vs. maneuvers

11. If you hit one enemy, roll to attack another

12. When an enemy moves away from you, make a free attack

13. Jump very far and very high on successful acrobatics test

14. +2 AC when standing between an ally and a foe

15. Add half your level to resist magic

16. +4 to sunder items

17. Can spend a use of zone to avoid surprise.

18. You cannot be knocked unconscious.

19. When you spend your action directing allies, they get a bonus equal to half your fighter level.

20. Allies get one of your zone developments

Privileged position: You get a new skill, “pull rank,” which you can use in circumstances where another character respects your social role as a fighter, killer, protector, or otherwise martial exemplar.

Pull Rank (cha)

• Compel: If you succeed by less than five, pick one. If you succeed by 5+, pick three: convince them it’s appropriate for you to be here, convince them you’re more important than them, convince them to report their orders.

Resistance: Choose a peril on the table below or roll randomly. Add your level to rolls to resist it.

Table 3: perils

1. Fear
2. Poison (including alcohol)
3. Pushing
4. Cold
5. Heat
6. Charms
7. Disarming
8. Tripping

Flurry: If you do nothing else during the round, you may take a -3 to hit on your turn to attack twice.

Cut down: You can slay lesser fighters with a thought. As a free action, you may slay any character with fewer than half of your hit dice. They must be within range of one of your attacks and susceptible to it. You may do this multiple times in a round, but the total levels of characters slain cannot exceed your own.

Legendary: Your skills are known far and wide. Rumor rolls about you need test 5 lower than usual. You will be periodically approached by students of combat asking for you to teach them. Most governments will pay you a commission just to live nearby. If you are ever asked (or forced) into an army, you will be given an officer’s title.

Hurly Burly: If you do nothing else during the round, you may take a -5 to hit on your turn to attack three times.