Adding Spheres of Power and Path of War to my game, need advice.

[Bard of Ages]

Now, I'm going to start with the fact I've skimmed over these systems enough to understand the core mechanics so that my players won't be able to just steamroll me or blow away my expectations as a GM.

What I need advice with is, how do I add these things to a campaign world in something like an Adventure Path with any meaningful degree?

We've been playing kingmaker for a while and due to character death, party members leaving, etc. I've now got a wyvaran warder and a spheres wizard on the way. As I'm a pretty by the book kind of GM, I worry that when it comes to "retraining" or leadership feats, I'm not going to know how to incorporate these things so that these players feel included. I'm probably making a mess of explaining my problem so I'll try to come up with a TL;DR.

TL;DR I'm not a very imaginative or creative DM and I need tips on how to add Spheres of Power or Path of War into my world in a believable way.

[GM Rednal]

One of the most effective ways is to introduce them attached to a specific "group". The new characters shouldn't just, y'know, spontaneously come into existence or anything. XD Use their backstories to introduce the systems to your land. Perhaps that Sphere Wizard was trained in a magical academy where everyone uses that style, and the Wyvaran's from a clan that has plenty of Martial Initiators. o wo/

[Bard of Ages]

GM Rednal wrote:

One of the most effective ways is to introduce them attached to a specific "group". The new characters shouldn't just, y'know, spontaneously come into existence or anything. XD Use their backstories to introduce the systems to your land. Perhaps that Sphere Wizard was trained in a magical academy where everyone uses that style, and the Wyvaran's from a clan that has plenty of Martial Initiators. o wo/

Thats... surprisingly simple. See what I mean about being the opposite of creative :p

[GM Rednal]

Simple is often the best way to do these things. XD It works perfectly fine for most plots, is internally consistent, won't disrupt anything you've already made, and allows you to continue adding new things in the future with the same ease.

[Sir Antony]

It helps that these classes don't look all that different in-game from a core fighter and wizard. Sure, they play very differently. That's the appeal of them. But to the average onlooker, a warder is an armored guy with a sword (or axe, polearm, whatever) who stabs, parries, ripostes, blocks, and slashes his opponents to death. To a trained eye, yes, he uses an unfamiliar style, but there's a bazillion different styles in the world already. What's one more?

The sphere wizard is very much the same. She throws down zones of darkness and light, conjures illusions, and summons bizarre creatures to aid her. She can travel great distances in the blink of an eye and smite her foes with fire and ice. Sounds like a wizard, right? Now, those who see her heal the injured might wonder if she's some sort of hybrid cleric, or maybe a druid when she commands a tree to wallop an orc, but she did say she studied at that unpronounceable foreign academy, and there's all sorts of odd sorcery bloodlines. Maybe it's like that. It is kind of impressive how she has so much stamina for magic missiles, though.

[Bard of Ages]

I think my biggest issue is that I'm never going to make npc's with manuvers or using the spheres of power magic defense stats for example. so I'm worried if my PoW user will ever get use out of knowledge martial

[GM Rednal]

Unless they have something relying on it, probably not. That'd be a time to step up as GM and let them know that it's probably not going to be a useful choice - they can still take it if they want to do it for flavor reasons or something, but they shouldn't feel obligated to grab it.

[Sir Antony]

Yeah, not that different from saying Knowledge(nobility) probably won't come up much in this story.