Occult Adventures Class Preview: The Medium

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Illustration by Ivan Troitsky

While all of the occult classes have some connection to strange otherworldly forces, the medium is the only one crazy enough to allow all sorts of spirits to enter his body and mind in order to share their strength, allowing the spirits to gain more and more influence over him in exchange for great power. The playtest medium's spirits were based on the cards of the Harrow deck. Since that meant 54 spirits, each with unique abilities, that proved far too lengthy to fit in Occult Adventures without cutting, so I've saved that work, and we're hoping to release it in some venue.

The medium in the final book, however, has a new theme and direction, bolstered by countless ideas from playtesters that didn't fit with the Harrowed medium but work great in the new paradigm. In the new approach, the medium's spirits are born from the Astral Plane, where the Astral stuff clings to tiny fragments of the souls of people that pass through it and blends them with the tales and thoughts of others about those people. Spirits of power thus arrive from one of six different sorts of legends, which share their names with mythic paths (archmage, champion, guardian, hierophant, marshal, and trickster). Within those categories, a medium might find countless spirits with slightly different abilities. For example, one trickster spirit might be able to help with sneaking and another with grifting. A rondelero duelist champion might be a master of the falcate, and a samurai champion might know how to use a katana. Because these six legends correspond strongly to party roles, this change allows the new medium an unparalleled ability to fill in whatever role you need that day. Going to a masquerade ball? Bring a trickster master of disguise. Party missing a cleric today? Bring a hierophant and literally add the divine spells you need to your spell list that day. Same with archmage for arcane spells. And while the medium is still sometimes a 4-level spellcaster, both the archmage and hierophant progress him up to a 6-level spellcaster!

The Harrowed medium built a special spell list solely from his spirits, but the new medium has his own spell lists, with some intriguing early-access options fitting of a 4-level spellcaster. Furthermore, he is the only 4-level spellcaster currently in the game that receives cantrips at all (and he gets them at 1st-level). This adds a lot of versatility to his options if he chooses a more martial sort of spirit, and it fits with the fact that he can temporarily gain 1st-level spells too, if he picks the archmage or the hierophant.

The medium could always use seances to bring spirits into himself and grant benefits to allies, and the new medium can still do that, but he also gained some special new types of seance that let him do things like trance at a location to learn of its tragic past or even channel a haunt into his body so his party can try to reason with it. The medium can now accept strange taboos from his spirit to gain extra benefits, causing him to act in unusual ways that befit the spirit's temperament. Lastly, the medium's astral ties allow him to perform other incredible feats, like at-will astral projection at 14th level!

But wait, you say, what about the archetypes? If the medium changed that much, how do the archetypes work? To make sure that the archetypes were an absolutely perfect fit for the medium, after the changes, I wrote them from scratch myself. And boy, some of them do some crazy and fun things! The kami medium (whose awesome art graces this blog) channels the spirits of kami instead of legends, losing all the Astral abilities for the ability to use strange ofuda and shikigami, and even gain a ward like a kami does. The reanimated medium is a medium in reverse: after dying, he borrows from his own potential future legends to come back and possess his own body, keeping himself alive. This unique state grants him a variety of benefits and unusual trade-offs. The relic channeler possesses particular relics of a select group of spirits, meaning she contacts the same ones each time. She gains object-based powers and receives extraordinary benefits in exchange for the lack of flexibility. The spirit dancer shakes the whole system of spirits on its head; instead of choosing a spirit each day and gaining its powers for the whole day, he selects a suite of spirits and spends rounds from a daily pool, allowing him to slip in and out of his suite of spirits with ease, in a strange and exhilarating dance. The storyteller is more obsessed with the stories and legends than she even is with the spirits themselves; they are a means to the end of discovering more about the tales of the past. She gains lesser benefits from her spirits in exchange for enhanced knowledge, story-based abilities, and some of the most powerful applications of bardic performance (like inspire courage). Also, she can send you into a story of her own making forever at 20th level, which is pretty nasty!

So however you enjoy letting strange spirits take your body for a test drive, Occult Adventures and the medium class have something right for you!

Mark Seifter
Designer

Meet the Iconics: Erasmus

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Today, as part of our ongoing Meet the Iconics series, we introduce the next of the six new iconic characters featured in Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Occult Adventures. This week we meet Erasmus, the iconic medium!

Illustration by Wayne Reynolds

Erasmus was born the youngest scion of a minor noble house in Caliphas, Ustalav's capital. Along with his five older siblings, he enjoyed the benefits of a fine education and practice in horsemanship, swordplay, and tutelage in the arcane arts. Yet he understood he had little hope of ever claiming ancestral holdings or heirship. He spent his early life in the cosmopolitan pursuits of the idle rich, and he seemed destined for some opportune marriage to secure his family's comfort, with the resulting life likely to be one of bored leisure.

As Erasmus left his teenage years behind, though, the heirs of his family began to mysteriously die. Authorities discovered Nissa, his eldest sister—a cunning duelist—slain in some underground fighting pit by an opponent she severely outmatched. His uncle, a skilled magic-user, was torn apart by a summoned creature in his own occult library, while the corpse of his son was found broken below his high tower. His second sister, Veldira, choked to death on porridge in the Pharasmin cathedral where she served. Erasmus's closest confidant, his sly older brother Baylock, was found hanged in a dark alley in what authorities ruled a suicide. Amid the turmoil of the deaths, Erasmus's father began to waste away in his council chamber, while the family's eldest surviving heir, Erasmus's brother Vinn, took control of the family affairs.

It wasn't long before the voices started.

At first they were the faintest whispers, which Erasmus dismissed as sleep-deprived hallucinations or echoes bouncing through the corridors of his family's estate. But with each new death, the whispers grew stronger and their message clearer: "Murder." Erasmus ignored the ghostly mutterings as best he could, quietly writing them off as the lunacy of grief. But, with his suspicions aroused, he began to investigate the whispers' claims. Erasmus told no one of the subtly altered summoning circle he found in his uncle's chambers, or of the oily residue that failed to wash from his father's used silverware. The more he discovered, the more intense the chorus of voices grew in his crowded mind. Servants concealed Erasmus's late-night wanderings as best they could, or dismissed his mutterings and wild ravings as overwhelming grief.

It all came to a head when one of Erasmus's episodes interrupted his own father's funeral. Snapping his head back and forth, Erasmus railed against a chorus of unseen phantoms. Amid the outburst, he howled that his family was victim of his eldest brother's deceit.

None who heard truly listened, though, all convinced that grief had pushed Erasmus past the brink of insanity. Vinn, Erasmus's only remaining family member, committed him to Havenguard Lunatic Asylum.

For nearly a year, Erasmus languished at the asylum, baffling his well-intentioned wardens as they sought to heal the man's troubled mind. But on the anniversary of his father's death, another voice called through the darkness. From a neighboring cell, a new prisoner calling himself "the King" counseled the troubled man. With gruff kindness, the stranger with the accent of a northern barbarian taught Erasmus not to fight the chorus, but rather to accept and welcome it, opening his mind and body to its words. Erasmus gradually identified each mysterious voice in turn, and finally understood they were the shades of his family—the spirits of his deceased brothers, father, and uncle—who endlessly dwelled upon the circumstances of their deaths. Over time, he learned to sit in quiet communion with the voices, and to allow them to exercise their influence upon his mortal shell.

With the aid of his uncle's mastery of magic, Erasmus easily retrieved the keys to his cell to secure his escape. Under the control of his battle-eager eldest sister, the asylum's guards had no hope of restraining him. But when he gratefully burst open the King's cell, he found it empty. Too harried to ponder the implications of his friend's disappearance, Erasmus fled, relying on the influence of his roguish brother Baylock to slip through the shadows to freedom.

Yet, the world had not changed for the better during Erasmus's absence. Vinn had used his brother's madness to legally disown him from any claim to his family's titles or lands. His murderous brother had also married into a prestigious noble family, solidifying his holdings and winning him considerable influence in Caliphas's royal court. Seeing little chance at justice, and now questioning the source of the mysterious voice that had counseled him back to sanity, Erasmus knew he'd need living allies to retake his birthright. He boarded a ship crossing Lake Encarthan, the restless spirits of his ancestors following close behind.

Brandon Hodge
Contributing Author