This is a riff on Vayra’s Illuminated Paladin and Oiled Paladin, and, much like them, is intended to fit somewhere into deus ex parabola’s Unfinished World.
The Yellow Heretics are a gnostic group. They deny that G_d approved of the creation of the world. As the material reality is flawed, those who truly believe must enlighten themselves internally. Use of drugs in strange, pagan rituals is common in Yellow regions. Their clerics take vows of anchorage, or wander.
And surely that the world is flawed is obvious! The cage doesn’t even have the decency to be gilded. It’s covered in horrors - horrors born from our fellow man - the wild, the useless, the dead and the untameable.
Still, one is only in charge of one’s own self. Let the Clerics sort out our fellow man. The warrior’s duty is to her own two arms.
THE WIZENED PALADIN
Starting Items: A Yellow Mask, Wicked Barbed Spear, 3 Pieces of Bastard’s Kit.
+1 HRTS per Template.
A - Mortification, Damn Right
B - Corded Wire, Demoralise
C - Gnarled, +1 Attack per Round
D - Ready to Go
Mortification
You’re out here in the field to die horribly. Preferably in a way that will stick.
Here’s the primary change your class gets you: You don’t get XP for gold or treasure. Instead you get 10XP for each hit point you lose in a session. Easily self-inflicted damage obviously doesn’t count - otherwise, why go to all the damn trouble?
Your body is horribly tough, wiry and leathery already. One doesn’t arrive at the path of Wizened Paladin with a paunch and jowls. You have +6 Maximum HP.
Damn Right
The self doesn’t exist. All the pains of the world are illusory.
When you are affected by a condition - such as poison, fear, charm, injury or mental effect, you can remove its effects and store it in an empty inventory slot, taking on the form of an Invisible Burden. These can’t be removed like normal items can, and they block the slot while you have them.
Luckily, you can spread the misery around. Convince none to stay, and help them on their way.
When you deal maximum damage or land a critical hit, the target you struck is afflicted by one of your Invisible Burdens, your choice as to which.
Corded Wire
No weapon fashioned against you shall prosper. And that’s a bad thing.
Mundane weapons and animals can never kill you. Dismember you beyond the ability to move or fight, yes, but never end your life.
Note: Injuries are conditions for the purpose of Damn Right.
Demoralise
Battle is about triumph, blood pounding in your ears, hosts and chanting
It’s hard to fight someone who simply doesn’t care.
You apply a malus of 1 to enemy Morale rolls for every Invisible Burden you are currently carrying.
Gnarled
Your body has shrunken, hardened. You are abandoning your weaknesses.
You no longer suffer fatigue.
Critical hits are downgraded to normal hits against you - what weak points are they striking?
Injuries will not stop you from fighting until they kill you.
Ready to Go
Their tricks won’t work on you anymore.
You no longer feel comfort, require food, water or air.
You no longer feel triumph, or fear, or rage.
You no longer feel pain.
The uneducated will mistake you for one of the undead at a casual glance. Your body has turned yellow like old fat, your skin is hard, your eyes are dark and bloodshot.
You can tear your own chakras out at your leisure.
Bastard’s Kit:
6d6 Iron Coins - Coins from some lost civilization, who cares where. Marked with a strange animal. Rusted.
Portable Apiary - The honey is an illusory pleasure. The stings are real. 1 slot.
Ill Man’s Mushrooms - 3 Doses. Inflict powerful hallucinations of vomiting, dead friends and burning rashes on the skin.
Knife Set - Good for hunting down the perpetrators. And for throwing. Have handles in whalebone, aspen, dogbone, oak, ivory, and Builder-bone. 2 slots for six light weapons.
Vile Tobacco - Smells like Hell. Possibly literally. Only evil old hags, goetic wizards and you would smoke anything like this.
Ceramic Chess Set - One side depicts burned and blackened soldiers. The other, in bright orange, depicts fiery monsters. The board is leadwood.
A Bad Day - A bamboo tube full of broken glass and poison, designed to be huffed, not blown. One really awful dose.
Temperamental Naginata - A heavy weapon with a long pole. It has no sheath, and, in fact, if you try to sheathe it, it’ll come right off. So you have to lug it around with the blade out.
White Powder Cube - A densely packed cube of water-soluble white powder. Sniffing it, imbibing it - really, interacting too much with it - causes bleeding from the eyes. A total of five doses. ⅓ slot.
Plain Sword - A ringsword. It doesn’t have a name, or a history. It probably belonged to some nobody, who died in battle a long time ago. Maybe that was you, in a past life. The blade is mostly blunt.
Sickly Sack - A damp bag of old leather that reeks in an indescribably bad way. While carrying it, you can’t sneak around. Animals won’t willingly approach it. The poisons produced if you burn it are deleterious to the lungs and, in the short-term, cause hallucinations and paranoid delusions. If you open the bag and look inside, it’s empty.
Book of Terrible Anatomy - A reference text describing people with the wrong organs, or far too many organs, or none at all. Encourages you to cut open your neighbour and check.
Whaler’s Harpoon - A big, nasty massive spear, with barbs on. Designed to kill whales, so it does just dandy on soft, thin-skinned humans. Rusted to hell.
Toad (Licked) - This small toad is slightly put out, and remarkably poisonous. Licking it will give the average person vile diarrhoea for about a day. Eating the full toad would kill a large man. Comes with a wicker carrying basket, taking up a slot.
Horn Bow - Tiny little bow, deals 1d6 damage in total silence. Comes with 20 barbed arrows, all fitting in a single slot.
Branding Iron Set - Panpipes, tic-tac-toe lines, imperial seals, Aeshean symbols, anchors, centipedes - excellent for making enemies. Takes up a slot.
Tiny Bonsai - It hasn’t flowered in your lifetime. Perhaps you’re a bad influence.
Tarot Cards (Functional) - Some jackass has replaced every Major Arcana with copies of the Tower. If you line them up, they make a little comic-strip about a man falling very slowly to a bloody end on the steps below.
Ancient Shield - All brass. Marked with an old man’s scowling, disappointed face. It appeals.
A Curio!
Fairy Gloves - While wearing them, your hands can’t touch filthy, rusty, broken or damaged things (i.e., your hands pass intangibly through them).
Authentic Demon’s Skull - Hurts to look at. Whispers in places very far from the Sun. Close to indestructible - it’s taunting you.
Monstrous Sinew Cord - 150’ of slick, dark-red cord made of the fibres of something awful. Repels any blade shy of adamant with a mocking twang.
Sard’s Measurements - Pamphlet on a new mathematical discovery purporting to prove that there is an infinite distance between all objects. Read it uninterrupted for a minute and you really start to feel the distance.
Lump of Adamant - A heavily cursed and expensive paperweight - with a shape that you could reasonably use like a crude flint axe. Light, if it comes to calculating damage.
Crude Drawing of Magolg - He’s asleep under the tree. WAKE UP! PLEASE! WAKE UP!
But he can’t hear you.
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