Forrestfire's page

For the past year and a half, Forrestfire Studios has been working on an ongoing project and playtest: the avowed. This project began as a sort of side project, but over time, has grown and been subject to revisions, reworks, and shifts of design goals. It’s been a long, fun journey, so with that in mind, if you’re already familiar with the avowed, I recommend skipping to the second post.

In any case, hi! I’m Erin Heck (Forrestfire online), and my co-author is Katia Oakes (Taveena online). You might be familiar with other stuff that we’ve worked on (a lot of things for Dreamscarred Press), or this might be your first time seeing our work! Regardless, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the ride.

So what is the avowed? All told, I’d say it’s something scattered between…

• A class inspired by the warlock from D&D, with a playstyle based around having a series of at-will abilities, rather than rationing spell slots. Like a martial class, the main “attrition” mechanic on the avowed is hit points, and the class is written around existing within the main Pathfinder framework, alongside classes such as the bard, inquisitor, magus, and occultist.
  
• A love letter to the warlocks of every edition, along with an expansion of psychic magic's themes and fluff.
  
• A highly variable class built with the goal of supporting any given mechanical role—thanks to how their pact and shape options function, an avowed character can be built as any party role (but, importantly, not as every role at once). This freedom allows you to take your concept and run with it, without worrying about stepping on the toes of others, even other avowed.
  
• A new subsystem that can be expanded through archetypes, prestige classes, and variant rules.
  

• The Avowed: Promises of Power (part 1) This document includes the base class and its pact options.
  
• The Avowed: Promises of Power (part 2): This document includes the class’s main subsystem, aether pulses and clauses, as well as new feats, drawbacks, and magic items for avowed. It also includes a long list of racial favored class options.
  

You can also find, in this Google Drive folder, all of Forrestfire Studios' currently-public playtests and any free PDFs or files we've uploaded for people to use. The links to each of the files in the folder will remain the same for as long as the file exists, thanks to being able to just upload new versions.

If you have any feedback, feel free to drop it in the thread or through private messages. This project has been a long time in the writing. We hope you enjoy!

Hello all. Today we at DSP have for you a brand-new public playtest for a concept that’s been a long time in the making: the rajah, an initiator that blends akashic power with martial might. This unique class melds akashic concepts and martial skill, taking to the battlefield as a glorious leader who can aid, empower, and strike through their allies!

Within this document you will find:

• The rajah base class, a half-BAB initiator with an akashic bent and a unique take on combat. This also includes a variety of racial favored class options for the rajah, located at the end of the document.
  
• Twenty-four new veils unique to the rajah (but accessible by others, don't worry!). These veils are of a brand-new veil type called Titles, and are shaped on allies to grant them a benefit, rather than the rajah themselves.
  
• An assortment of new feats to support the rajah class, the Title veils, and akashic initiators in general.
  
• And finally, brand-new magic items tied to the rajah.
  

This isn’t all that this playtest has to offer, though. The rajah as an initiator has access to a new discipline, Radiant Dawn, which represents a combination of akashic and martial techniques. This discipline is focused on healing, party support, and debuffing, with mystical and esoteric effects that can be enhanced with akashic essence (which the discipline grants just by having it). The document also includes new style feats for Radiant Dawn users, as well as a martial tradition, The Bank of the Sun! :smallbiggrin:

Radiant Dawn is not in the same document as the rajah (for the sake of keeping Google Docs from melting our computers…), and can be found here at this link.

As always, thanks for taking a look. We hope you enjoy the playtest, and look forward to your feedback!

Hey all! With more of DSP's older playtests moving from "sitting for a while" to "finally released," Dreamscarred Press is moving on to some new material! Today I've got a playtest doc for a brand-new psionic class, the Highlord. This 6-level manifesting class uses their collective both for leading their allies and destroying their enemies, drawing foes into their mental network to force them to do their bidding... or merely crush their minds.

In the following document, you'll find the highlord base class, including many customization options and seven different subpaths. In addition, there's new feats both for the highlord and for other users of collectives, and a set of racial favored class options for the class!

To check it out, click on this link.

Thanks for taking a look! We hope you enjoy.

Hi! My name is Forrest Heck. If you’re familiar with Dreamscarred Press, you might recognize me as one of their creative directors, the design lead for Psionics Augmented: Occult, and a writer/public face/playtest runner (including Path of War: Expanded and Divergent Paths: Fool's Errand) on here and other forums.

I could just continue to copy-paste a large message from the link I'm about to give, but that seems lazy, so... To cut to the chase here: thanks to some complications in my personal life, I'm not actively working with DSP right now. However, I've still got a lot of ideas, and I'm here to unleash them on any poor fools who're willing to take a look.

So, in light of not having the time to spend working on DSP, I've recently set up a way of producing 3pp content at my own pace. Forrestfire Studios (which is right now just me) is going to be making one product each month, writing up things that range from classes to new subsystems to variant rulesets and even potentially PDFs full of feats and the like.

Right now, I've got one such product up for public viewing, a 5-level arcane spellcaster called the spellburst savant. Instead of having the spell progression of a more full caster, this class has the ability to spontaneously apply metamagic feats at a scaling discount, among some other abilities for customizing their spells on the fly. This project is mostly finished, though it's getting balance tweaks every so often as playtest feedback comes in, and will remain free for view and use indefinitely (later projects will have their final versions compiled and put up for sale, as noted on the Patreon's page).

There's a list of upcoming projects on the Patreon page, which include a Pathfinderized warlock with a psychic/occult bent, a variant mounted combat system, new tech and mecha rules, Path of War initiation stuff, and more. Each month, patrons get to vote on what I should write next; my current project is the warlock, which should be ready for playtesting sometime in mid-October.

I'm happy to take any questions, playtest feedback, or comments here, on the Patreon, or in any other channels you might have access to me (there's not a thread on Giant in the Playground because of their rules against linking Patreons and the bulk of this stuff being based out of there, but I'll be happy to respond to PMs over there as well).

Thanks for taking a look, and I hope you enjoy.

The path of war stretches ever onward.

Hi! Now that Path of War: Expanded is released, the DSP team has been looking forward to what’s next with Path of War, including new classes such as the Medic, more material, and, of course, our work on the errata for the first Path of War book.

Those of you who’ve been watching our playtests will know that there are some definite problems with parts of that book, especially regarding the Broken Blade discipline. One of the well-known problem children of Path of War, Broken Blade’s intent didn’t quite map to its execution. It was originally meant as an “unarmed” discipline, and functions well when used as such, but the end result when it was published lived up a bit more to its name than we meant to.

Broken Blade (among other things) will as such be getting some changes when the errata hits, but as a whole, we don’t want to completely rewrite it, and will be trying to keep Broken Blade’s identity close to that it gained after its release. However, we don’t want to kill off the idea of a dedicated unarmed/monk-like discipline.

Enter the Fool’s Errand discipline. This discipline shares a similar conceptual space with Broken Blade, but was written from the ground up to be distinct from that concept. Fool’s Errand is an (ex)traordinary discipline based around freely and efficiently mixing armed and unarmed combat, with a heavy emphasis on mobility and battlefield control.

In the linked document, you’ll find the a new mechanic—grasp—that allows initiators to take hold of their enemies’ movements, as well as new feats (including style feats) and a new martial tradition, the Fellowship of Fools.

Once it's playtested, the discipline will be released as part of Dreamscarred Press’ Patreon release queue.