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 class and its subsystem can be found in the following two documents:
- 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.
Originally, the avowed playtest was done through a PDF uploaded to Google Drive. We eventually realized that this, while pretty, was terrible for logistics. For the rest of the Avowed: Promises of Power playtest, we’ll be using these two Google Docs.
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!
Start here if you’re coming from an older avowed version.
This latest update is bringing a lot of changes to the avowed. In the past few months, we’ve done a fair bit of restructuring, going back over our documents from the beginning and taking a look at what’s changed, design philosophy-wise, since the start of the playtest.
For a discussion on what overall is changing and why, go to the first spoiler tag. The full changelog is in the second spoiler. The third has some notes about the Tinker archetype and Avowed 2: Heart & Soul, which are not presently included in this rework.
In the previous versions of the avowed, the name of the game was efficiency. The class—and its associated options—just did so much more than what similar classes could pull off, given some amount of resources (levels, feats, money, etc). With that in mind, we’ve made major changes to a couple core areas: save DC scaling, pulse shapes, and general quality-of-life abilities unique to the avowed.
Save DCs
Presently, the avowed’s save DCs scale up quite fast. 10 + 1/2 level + Cha mod means that their debuffs are matching spontaneous full casters in speeds, and far outstripping the DCs of the 6-level spellcasters that were our supposed balance goal. Given that not only are their debuffs quite good (in some cases, comparable enough to what you could get on a full caster), but they also get them at-will, this was a problem, if the avowed was to be compared to 6-level or even 9-level casters. While most at-will abilities are largely similar in usage to, say, a spell that can be used 4-5 times per day (thanks to encounter guidelines), at-will powerful debuffs are a bit different. Being able to be at “full blast” in each round of each encounter adds up to more power than we wanted the avowed to have, especially when considering their efficiency of actions.
So! The avowed’s save DC scaling is changing, as follows:
- Clauses (including modulation clauses) now have a base save DC of 10 + 1/4 level + Cha mod.
- The Reflex save DCs for shapes themselves will remain at 10 + 1/2 level + Cha mod. These saves are equivalent to a “to-hit” roll for an area effect instead of the save for the rider debuff, and as such will remain more reliable than other saves.
- Likewise, pact abilities that prompt saving throws will also have a save DC of 10 + 1/2 level + Cha mod.
- The avowed can no longer take Ability Focus for its abilities. Instead, we’ve created a series of feats that can be taken by avowed who wish to focus on debuffing.
The full feats can be found in the feats section, but here’s a tl;dr on them. Basically, these are meant to mirror the options available to spellcasters for boosting save DCs.
Mirroring Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus, we’ve got these, choosing a series of clauses instead of a school of magic.
- Clause Focus: Add +1 to the save DCs of one clause you know of each grade you have access to.
- Greater Clause Focus: Add another +1 to the bonus from Clause Focus.
At higher levels, the avowed will also have access to the following feats, which amp up their less powerful abilities, along with boosting their ability to beat SR.
- Clause Expert: +1 to the save DCs of least clauses, +2 on CL checks to overcome spell resistance. Requires access to greater clauses.
- Greater Clause Expert: Further +1 to the save DCs of least clauses, +1 to the save DCs of lesser clauses, further +2 on CL checks to overcome spell resistance. Requires access to final clauses.
Finally, these two feats mirror Weapon Focus and Greater Weapon Focus, applying a boost to the “to-hit” roll of area shapes.
- Shape Focus: Choose two shapes you know. +1 to attack rolls and to the save DCs of those shapes. Counts as Weapon Focus for prerequisites.
- Greater Shape Focus: Add another +1 to the bonuses from Shape Focus. Counts as Greater Weapon Focus for prerequisites.
The reason we chose these particular numbers is for similarity in scaling to 6-level casters. The base DC for an avowed scales from 10 to 14 over the first 16 levels of play. For a 6-level spellcaster, it scales from 11 to 16, hitting 16 at level 16 when 6th-level spells come online. However, a 6-level spellcaster’s spells are not at-will.
A bard who gains access to 6th-level spells will likely have 2 or 3 per day when they first get them. He will be able to use them in about half the expected fights of an adventuring day, before having to rely on his lower-level spells. An avowed only has a single final clause at that point, but can use it in every round of the expected four fights. If their base save DCs were even, then the avowed would be very far ahead in the debuffing department. Thus, the avowed’s base save DCs (and success chances) are slightly lower, to make up for their ability to continually spam their strongest options.
The two feats that come online at higher levels, Clause Expert and Clause Mastery, allow the avowed to match the 6-level spellcaster’s highest-level slots in save DCs, but this is limited to weaker clauses than their strongest options, much like a bard will have to fall back on lower-level spells if they wish to continue to cast in combat.
Shape Revisions
Another area where the avowed’s class features gave them more than was really ideal is the aether pulse. Much like how a hunter brings both spells and an animal companion/full attack routine to the table, or how a bard brings inspire courage and other party buffs on top of their spells, the avowed’s aether pulse is meant to work alongside their shapes, giving the avowed a sustainable, strong primary combat option. But, sadly, we ended up giving them too much power. Rather than giving the avowed a baseline to work with, several types of pulse shapes elevated the avowed to the competence level of a specialist natively, without the heavy investment that said specialist would normally require.
Weapon Shapes
Something we’ve wanted to include in the weapon shapes is a heavy amount of “quality of life” abilities. Enhancement bonuses (at first imitating a greater magic weapon spell, but later buffed), access to haste without a spellcaster, and the like were included with the mindset of letting the avowed and their party spend fewer resources on what, at the time, we figured were buffs that were common enough to just assume.
As it turns out, this was a very incorrect assumption. A weapon shape’s haste, beforehand, came online at level 4 (if you invested fully in the shape), and lasted all day. A spellcaster’s haste comes online at level 5-6, and is class-specific. In parties without a wizard or sorcerer, the party isn’t getting haste, but the avowed is (putting them pretty far ahead, thanks to the extra attack). In parties without any full casters at all—not particularly uncommon, especially in 3pp-using tables—the party is probably not getting the spell at all, but the avowed still is. The same goes for greater magic weapon. High-op tables may have characters who buy 3rd-level pearls of power to fuel their wizard’s spell slots and get them a free enhancement bonus (letting them load their weapon up with special abilities instead), but that’s less common than we expected at the start.
So! Moving forward, we’re adjusting weapon shapes. As you might suspect, the free enhancement bonuses and hasted attacks are going away. To replace them, we’ve added in a set of abilities meant to help enable an avowed in their chosen combat style, melee or ranged.
For the melee weapon shapes (aether blade, aether channel, and aether rampage), the 2nd and 3rd ranks of their progressions has been replaced with the following:
- Rank II: The shape will give you 10-foot reach (while still letting you attack adjacent enemies).
- Rank III: Enemies that move out of your threatened squares provoke attacks of opportunity, even if they’re using the Withdraw action or tumbling or whatnot.
Melee characters don’t function well if they can’t get into melee or stay in melee. The reach and AoO synergy here is to allow the character to, in a way, present enemies with multiple bad decisions. After the avowed has moved into melee, the enemy can stay and attack back (leaving themselves vulnerable to a full attack in return), or they can move out, and get stabbed from behind while they do so. Instead of just giving outright numbers boosts, these abilities should help an avowed with the playstyle of a melee character, while still requiring them to invest in being a melee specialist like everyone else (through feats, magic weapons, ability scores, and the like).
For ranged weapon shapes (aether bolt and aether rounds; we’ve removed barrage for the time being and folded its mechanical concept into the new shape), we did something a bit different. Ranged characters largely do not have trouble getting a chance to full attack. That’s their whole point; they attack from range. However, enemies that get into melee with them can screw them over, and they don’t really have the same sort of minor versatility that melee characters can get by investing in combat maneuvers. So, for aether bolt and aether rounds, we’ve added the following:
- Rank II: When you full attack with the shape, you get an extra 5-foot step.
- Rank III: You can make ranged combat maneuvers with the shape.
- Rank IV: The shape’s range increases.
The goal of these changes are to give ranged characters some more to do and more build paths to follow, and a bit more reliability (though not quite as much as melee got, because ranged is already incredible reliable). Like with melee, they’re going to now need to invest as much money into ranged combat as another class in order to specialize in it, but this should provide a strong foundation for a ranged avowed to build on.
There’s one more change to weapon shapes that I haven’t mentioned yet. Specifically, for channel and rounds, we’re doing away with the somewhat fiddly “replace your damage until level 4, then add damage” effect. With this update, these two shapes will instead simply be dealing 1d6 points of damage per odd-numbered caster level to attacks with one weapon, as an independent instance of damage. When revisiting the math after removing the previous numbers boosts, we found that the early damage should probably be fine; comparable to what, say, a barbarian or rogue gets, albeit more limited in its own ways. Two-weapon fighting for shapes is also no longer stock on the weapon shapes—the Aether Duelist feat has been adjusted to enable TWF for all shapes (and still function as TWF, just in an avowed-specific way).
As a final note for this section, the basic shapes are going away; they’re pretty redundant with the reworked weapon shapes, so we’ve folded them into aether blade and aether bolt.
Area Shapes
The changes we’re making to area shapes are much simpler than those for weapon shapes. In previous versions, the avowed’s area-of-effect aether pulses scaled up to 3d6 points of damage per 2 caster levels (or, 30d6 at CL 20). That’s equivalent to, say, a wizard casting an Empowered fireball... at-will, and before the avowed adds in their own Empower Spell-Like Ability/Balefire Infusion/other damage boost. We’re removing the third tier of scaling; area shapes will be capped at 1d6/level, and the avowed can take feats to boost it past that like everyone else.
We’ve also made some adjustments to the aether blast[i] shape, now named [i]aether burst so we could use “blast” as a general descriptor for these shapes. The fourth rank outright giving you a second AoE made it significantly stronger than the other area shapes, and so we’ve replaced that rank with the ability to deal increased damage to a single creature at the center of the AoE. Aether wrath, whose fourth rank was actually completely redundant (oops), has also received this ability swap.
Flight
Like with weapon shapes, the avowed’s access to always-up flight comes online a bit earlier, and a bit more strongly, than most other classes can access it. As such, we’re changing take flight from a lesser clause to a greater, and the ascension class feature now comes online at level 15. Other avenues of flight, most notably the dragon’s teeth clause for flying zombies, are also being adjusted to occur at slightly higher levels.
Chameleon Clauses
The tune-down in power for the chameleon clause line is a bit of a different situation than the other changes. We’ve found that the clauses simply give far more more utility than other clauses of the same grade, so we’re bumping each of them up a grade. Chameleon clause I is moving to greater, and chameleon clause II to final. The third version of it is removed for the time being.
New Stuff!
With all of that said, I’d also like to go over some of the major new things in this patch. To start with, we’re introducing some new magic items: the promise shard, which can grant an avowed the use of a least clause, and the pulseshaper’s rod, which grants access to a shape stored within it. With the rest of the update, we’ve been putting a lot of emphasis on wanting the avowed to spend money on power like other classes do. These new items are to help give the avowed things to actually buy other than an orange ioun stone and magical stat increases.
In addition, we’ve adjusted the Celestial pact a bit, making its defensive rune much cleaner in use. Rather than granting a reactive heal over time, we’ve moved the healing up some levels and made it an instant return of hit points. In its place, we’re introducing a new condition: taunted.
The taunted condition works a bit differently from other conditions. Despite the name, this isn’t quite a hard taunt like you might see in videogames; instead, the mechanic helps a Celestial-pact avowed tank via soft aggro. A taunted creature has a miss chance on its attacks against creatures other than the taunter, effectively giving them a choice between two bad options. They could attack the taunter (who, as a tanky character, can probably take it better than the squishy mages and whatnot), or they could attack someone else, and risk the taunt causing them to miss.
Hopefully this should give the Celestial avowed a more interesting tanking playstyle moving forward, and we’d love to hear your feedback on the mechanic in general.
- The shapes and aether pulse class features have been merged, as all pulses are now shaped.
- Ascension has been moved to level 15, as the intention of the class feature is to allow Avowed to not feel pressured to spend other resources on Flight unless they wish to gain it before it’s necessary. At 15, it’s super necessary.
- Clauses of lower grades can now be taken in place of gaining a new clause of the highest level available. When replacing a clause as part of levelling up, clauses can be replaced with any clause that would have been a valid selection at the level you took the clause you are replacing.
- Avowed now gain any 2 shapes of their choice at 1st level, and do not gain a bonus basic shape (as basic shapes have been removed; see below.)
- Arcane Strike, Dirty Fighting, and Combat Expertise have been added to the list of Avowed bonus feats.
Pacts
- The introductory fluff section on pacts has been rewritten to clarify the steps necessary to make a pact, and the source of the avowed’s powers. The “Making Pacts” section has been removed, though it will return as part of the section on fluff we’ll do. Eventually.
- Celestial Pact’s Martydom benefit now explicitly applies to temporary hit points lost.
- The Celestial Pact’s rune of penance now applies the new Taunted condition, causing a 20% miss chance to hit creatures other than the one that applied the Taunted condition. Also, consecrate.
- The Celestial Pact’s reactive healing has been moved to a function of its immediate-action 8th level pact empowerment, Rune of Detention.
- The Fey Pact attunement now uses your Avowed level in place of your base attack bonus, and allows you to force the enemy to make a Will save instead of attacking them - so save-focused Avowed are less hecked.
- The Old One Pact’s attunement has been changed into an immediate-action clause healing you for the full amount immediately, but can no longer be voluntarily dismissed and instead lasts until the end of your next turn.
- The Otyugh Pact has been removed from Avowed: Promises of Power, as it was in serious need of revision (Pathfinder diseases are kind of nuts, it turns out). The revised version will return in Avowed: Heart and Soul, and the deprecated pact can be found here. We’ll miss you, trash friends.
- Pact clauses now have grades to allow for interactions with effects based on clause grades. They still cannot be gained through methods other than the pact class feature.
Clauses and Shapes
- The DCs of clauses (though not shapes) has been heavily reworked. Unlike most spellcasters, the avowed was not limited in their use of higher-level abilities by fewer spell slots. As their abilities were meant to be roughly equal to the power of 6-level spellcasters like the Bard and the Inquisitor, we opted to bring them into line by lowering the DCs universally to 10+1/4 levels. The Clause Expert and Clause Mastery feats have been added to increase the DCs of the Avowed’s lower level clauses. With these, we hope to see more powerful clauses being used when players are willing to deal with a higher chance of failure, while lower level clauses are the most reliable, allowing for all effects to have uses at all levels - and similarly, their ability to affect opponents should now be more in-line with 6-level spellcasters.
- Successful saving throws against shapes which have their damaged halved on a successful save now also negate the modulation’s effects other than damage type changes.
- Weapon shapes can now be used to perform a combat maneuver! Like actual weapons. And they still apply the modulation! Not the damage, though.
- Area shapes no longer increase to 3d6 damage per 2 levels.
- Shape selections can now be exchanged upon levelup.
- The Blast tag has been added to instantaneous save-halves shapes to make further interactions (such as feats) have an easy whitelist to reference.
- Aether barrage has been renamed aether bolts and rewritten, as it was not fulfilling the fantasy of an onslaught of near-instantaneous attacks. Aether bolts fills the niche of the Avowed’s iterative ranged touch attack shape. All ranks of the shape have been reworked. It no longer grants haste or an enhancement bonus on attack and damage rolls, but adds a strength bonus to damage dependant on how many hands you use to make it comparable to thrown weapons and composite bows. The second rank now allows small movement before a full attack, the third allows you to make ranged combat maneuvers (with a scaling bonus to compensate for the lack of enhancement bonuses), and the fourth significantly increases its range.
- Aether blade’s third selection has changed to no longer be a damage or accuracy increase, now causing enemies to provoke attacks of opportunity from you even when using movement that would normally cause them not to and grants you a bonus on CMB checks made with the weapon.
- Aether blast has been renamed aether burst, because we tried for, like, four months and couldn’t think of a name for the tag other than ‘blast’.
- Aether blast and aether wrath’s fourth selection have been changed; they now both deal additional damage to one creature adjacent to the origin intersection of the effect.
- Aether cascade now arcs once plus once per 4 levels, rather than once per caster level, as its ability to affect an entire encounter regardless of positioning had rendered other multi-target shapes redundant.
- Aether command has been removed from Avowed: Promises of Power due to lazylording being hard to balance in Pathfinder. It’s going to be redone and will return in Avowed: Heart and Soul, but the old version can be found here.
- Aether channel has been rewritten, and no longer grants haste or increases enhancement bonuses. It now causes a separate instance of damage when an attack with the weapon hits. Further, its third selection now causes enemies to provoke attacks of opportunity from you even when using movement that would normally cause them not to.
- Aether grasp’s numerical bonuses on and against grapple checks have been reduced, and no longer stack with Improved Grapple.
- Aether rampage’s damage has been reduced (to compensate for the fact that it gets TWF-level attacks without penalties) and its second and third rank no longer increases enhancement bonuses or grant the rend ability. Its second rank now increases its reach, and its third rank now causes enemies to provoke attacks of opportunity from you even when using movement that would normally cause them not to.
- Aether rounds causes a separate instance of damage when an attack with the weapon hits, in the same way as aether channel. Its second and third ranks are identical to aether bolt’s, and its fourth rank increases both the length of your weapon’s range increments and the maximum number of increments within which you can make any attacks.
- Aether wrath’s range is now determined purely based on horizontal distance to the center of the cylinder (seriously, you wanted us to do trigonometry for every cylinder effect? What.)
- Basic shapes (aether blow and aether ray) have been removed, as basic shapes were redundant and needlessly complicated. The Aether Skirmisher feat has been reworked to allow for the same skirmisher playstyle with any weapon shape. Avowed no longer gain a basic shape at 1st level, instead only choosing 2 different shapes.
- Binding disagreement can now be used without an escape clause, simply applying the effects of bestow curse.
- Bewitch and create friendship now suffer a cumulative penalty to affect enemies recently targeted by the avowed with each effect, as the avowed was effectively able to use these abilities on a single creature until they failed. This caused the avowed to vastly overpower 6-level casters attempting to use 6th level effects.
- Hitting a target already under the effect of caustic pulse with another instance of the modulation increases the ongoing damage slightly.
- Chameleon clause I and II have been changed to Greater and Final clauses respectively, as they proved overwhelmingly powerful for non-combat encounters in their current grades, given the equivilent effect in third edition required giving up several levels of spellcasting progression. Chameleon clause III has been removed.
- Cover of darkness renamed solid smoke to make it clear it’s not an illusion or [darkness] effect.
- Deafening pulse, abrasive pulse, and frostbite pulse now apply stronger penalties with each hit.
- Dragon’s teeth now can only be used to emulate animate dead at caster level 11 or higher. Further, husks lose all fly speeds unless created by a caster of 11 or higher.
- Frightning pulse renamed to unnerving pulse, as it does not apply the frightened condition.
- Lifeleech pulse has been renamed steeling pulse for clarity’s sake, as it does not actually restore life and also we love terrible puns. It now stacks with multiple hits.
- Personal gravity has been renamed I go where I please and had its fluff rewritten, due to complications that emerged from unintended interactions with gravitational effects in Pathfinder.
- Sightseer has been split into two new clauses with added effects: unveil, which grants see invisibility and allows you to dispel glamers on targets you hit, and night watch, which gives you and all allies the ability to see in darkness.
- Shadow strands is now partially negated by abilities that allow the user to see through magical darkness.
- Switcheroo now allows you to teleport even if the target succeeds on their saving throw.
- Take flight has been changed to a Greater clause, as at-will flight proved to be overwhelmingly powerful against standard encounters at 6th level. We’re aware of Hunter and Druids getting flying mounts at 1st. The point stands.
- Unbind spell now suffers a stacking penalty on dispel checks for 24 hours, in order to prevent avowed from simply brute-forcing magical encounters in a way other casters were unable to due to limited spell slots.
- The feat descriptor has been added to shapes gained through feats to clarify that they cannot be chosen through the shapes class feature.
Character Options
- The Feats and Character Options chapters have been merged.
- The Avowed feat tag has been added to allow for further expansions to the Avowed bonus feat list.
- Ability Focus applying to all clauses proved to be overwhelmingly powerful when compared to other spellcasters, who had to choose which school to apply it to. Its interaction with the Avowed has been removed. The Clause Focus and Greater Clause feats have been added, which increase the DC of one clause per grade and can be taken multiple times.
- Aether Duelist has been rewritten to function much more clearly, and with all weapon shapes that allow iterative attacks.
- Aether Skirmish feat removed, then added again and reworked to be more coherent. Improved Aether Skirmish added.
- The Clause Expert and Clause Mastery feats have been added for the above-mentioned reasons involving save DCs.
- Alter Spell-Like Ability, a new meta-SLA feat which allows you to change the saving throw a given SLA targets, has been added to help the Avowed target multiple defenses (due to their relatively limited choice of spells in comparison to other casters with similar DCs).
- Heighten Spell-Like Ability, a new meta-SLA feat which increases DCs, has been added.
- Lingering Pulse now functions for all shapes with the Blast descriptor.
- Merciful Pulse has been renamed Merciful Pact now boosts your social skills, instead of making you actually BETTER at combat. It still lets you nonlethally blast people, though.
- Mystic Reflexes has been split into two feats; Mystic Reflexes, which allows you to make AoOs while flat footed and adds your Charisma modifier to the number of AoOs you may make per turn, and Opportunistic Blast, which grants you a new shape usable exclusively for AoOs and causes you to always be treated as threatening adjacent squares so long as you’re capable of using spell-like abilities. This both lessens the disparity between Dexterity-based and Strength- or Charisma-primary Avowed, that between Avowed and other AoO-based builds, and causes Charisma-based Avowed with a melee weapon shape to no longer gain a redundant effect.
- Quicken Spell-Like Ability now functions with all shapes, and can even be used with weaponlike shapes to make a full attack as a swift action. However, such shapes now suffer a -4 penalty on attack rolls and, saving throw DCs, and can only be used with the Avowed’s least clauses at level 11 and lesser clauses at level 16. This is to compensate for the similar 4 level penalty another caster would suffer for using a Quickened spell slot, and the lack of slots of high enough level to quicken their higher-level effects.
- The Shape Focus and Greater Shape Focus feats have been added in order to standardize feats that grant accuracy bonuses, increasing the attack roll or save DC of two shapes the Avowed knows (though not applied modulations). Avowed can still take Weapon Focus and Greater Weapon Focus for manufactured weapons.
- Relentless Frenzy and Rampaging Frenzy have been moved to Avowed: Promises of Power from Avowed: Heart and Soul, as they are effectively necessary for aether rampage to compete with other full attackers.
- The Spirited Swordsmanship feat makes a triumphant return, though it does not allow a user to add their Charisma modifier to damage rolls and only functions on weapon shapes that are made against an enemy gaining their armor bonus to AC. This allows builds targeting normal AC with weapon shapes the opportunity to have higher DCs than they normally would at the cost of some damage, for players who wish to play a debuff or support role but have a concept involving a physical weapon. Or claws.
- Two new universal drawbacks added available to all characters: the vow drawback, which binds you to a code of conduct imposed by a powerful patron (like, say, an angel who doesn’t want you murdering innocents), and the servitude drawback, which allows a patron to demand favors from you occasionally (like the fiend who demands you occasionally aid his cults).
- Balefire Infusion has been slightly rewritten for more inclusive fluff.
- Two new magic items have been added: the Promise Shard, which grants a single least clause known, and the Pulseshaper’s Rod, which grants you a number of ranks in a shape chosen by the creator.
Tinker
- The Tinker archetype has been removed from Avowed: Promises of Power, as it was proving difficult to balance. It will return later, though for characters already playing one or who wish to play with it regardless, it can be found here. However, the old version will no longer be supported.
So, we’ve moved the mentioned A1 stuff into their own documents:
For the time being, these options will live in here (so people using them can still access them), until we can get them reworked. Likewise, the Avowed 2 link is still up, and will remain up until we can get it updated. We’re working hard on getting it ready, but since it’s a lot of material, it’ll probably take a bit.
Now that that’s all said, all that’s left to do is go to the docs themselves! The two Avowed 1 playtest docs can be found in the first post.