Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map

No time for a proper post this week, as I’m hard at work preparing for National Heroscape Day 2016.  More links once I do my official battle report, which will most likely be in two weeks—next week, most likely, you won’t get a damn thing.  But, c’est la vie (and see la title).

What I mainly had to work on this weekend was nailing down maps.  Now, I’ve talked about Heroscape before, and I’ve talked about building maps before, and you may have gathered (if you were paying attention) that building maps is not my favorite part of Heroscape.  Most of the maps I talk about building on this blog are huge affairs which take forever to build, but generally last a long time because they’re big enough not get too bored with after a while.  On the other hand, NHSD is a tournament, where things are a bit more constrained.  You can’t just throw together any old map all willy-nilly.  Maps have to be “balanced,” meaning that you don’t have an advantage or disadvantage depending which side of the table you’re sitting on.  Quite often this is achieved by making the maps perfectly symmetrical.  They also can’t have too much height (because tourney games are quick games, so you can’t waste a lot of time scaling mountains and whatnot), or too much water (because then it’s a pain in the butt for the two armies to get to each other), or too many weird features that might be easily exploited by some units but not others.  In other words, tourney maps need to be boring.

Well, at least that’s my perspective.  Obviously not everyone feels that way.  There is, in fact, a thriving trade in creating maps specifically for tourneys.  Well, there used to be anyway ... there haven’t been any new entries in over 3 years at this point.  But still there’s quite a few out there, and somewhere along the way it sort of became my job to go through the maps and pick out what I think might be interesting ones to build for the tourney.  And that changes every year, of course, because what’s really interesting one year we may be sick of three years later after playing on it every year.  And perhaps maps that didn’t seem that exciting 3 years ago might be a bit more exciting in hindsight now that we’re looking for an infusion of something different ...

Anyhow, there’s more to it than just finding maps which seem like they’ll be cool to play on.  There’s also a paleontological aspect, which comes in the form of digging out what maps we’ve used for the past several years and seeing which need to be retired in favor of something fresh, and an engineering aspect, in figuring out how many of which terrain sets it takes to build a given map, and then a social aspect because only certain people want to bring their terrain and build maps, and then which people have enough to build these two maps vs those two? and if you can’t build that one, can you build this one instead? but then that means that whoever was going to build this one now has to build that one, and do they have the right sort of pieces for that?  And so on.  It can get quite complex, depending on how many maps you need to choose and assign, and how many people you have to assign them to.

So, being the programming nerd that I am, I naturally made a spreadsheet for it.  I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that it involves a lot of rows of maps and columns of terrain sets, and different tabs for each potential mapmaker, and turning numbers red when I’ve managed to assign someone more maps than they actually have enough terrain to build, and ... well, yes.  It’s a bit complex.  But of course that’s the sort of programming that I always find the most fun.

Anywho, all of this resulted in this post in our tourney thread about maps (don’t forget: I’m known as “Xotli” over there).  But then, while I was writing this post, I actually found some new maps to choose from, so now I may redo my whole list.  Or then again I may not.  But it’s keeping me busy anyway.

Until post-tournament.

Porchwell Firetime I

"I Came Here from Nowhere"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

When I first heard Wiskey Folk Ramblers (and who in the world knows how I stumbled onto them ... the result of some long, drunken linkwalk, no doubt), one of the first things that struck me was how similar “Gambling Preacher and His Daughter” was to “Hayride to Hell” by Hoodoo Gurus.  It got me thinking: should I maybe have a mix for story-songs?  You know, songs that just seem to be compacted little short stories wrapped up and set to music?  Several other possibilties immediately sprang to mind, such as “Jackie” by Sinéad O’Connor and “In the River” by the Call.  Eventually I would come to expand that to include songs which, while they might not strictly be linear stories in the way that those songs are, they at least are songs that you could imagine hearing while sitting on a porch, or around a campfire, being told/sung to you by a bony older relative with a guitar, or a banjo, or a mandolin.  A little bit folksy, a little bit airy, and no matter what transportative.  Thus was born Porchwell Firetime.

My initial thought was to put “Gambling Preacher” and “Hayride to Hell” together on volume I.  Sometimes two songs which have common roots complement one another, and can flow nicely into each other.  But sometimes they’re just too much alike, and that was the case here.  The choruses especially line up rather eerily: “he would ride, oh he would ride” vs “and Charlie would drive, for miles and miles.” Add in the similar loping beats and similar stories of jilted love, and I decided they shouldn’t even be on the same volume, much less back-to-back.¹  If the good folks in Whiskey Folk Ramblers were to try to convince me that they’d never heard “Hayride to Hell” before, I do believe I would look at them more than merely askance.  Still, “Gambling Preacher” has its own unique charm which is more than reflected Gurus’ glory, and well deserves its place both as mix starter and here on volume I.

One of the next songs to end up here was our opener, “Facts about Cats” by Timbuk 3, almost exclusively known as one-hit wonders for their unforgettable 80’s tune “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” Which is a shame, as they’re very much more than just that.  As hopefully you will hear after listening to our opening track.  That’s followed by the Red Sea Pedestrians’ take on Curtis Eller’s “Sugar in My Coffin.” I’ve heard the original, and I really think RSP’s remke adds something valuable to the song,² which isn’t exactly a story, but still feels like one in a weird way.  Another early contender was Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, whose nearly every song is a story, so I had lots of choices.  For this first volume, I thought “Random” would be a good first taste, and I’m sure we’ll see them return on nearly every volume of this mix from here on out.

Other songs which sprang quickly to mind were “that Rev. Horton Heat song that so much reminds me of Tom Waits” (which turns out to be called “The Devil’s Chasing Me”), the Call tune I mentioned earlier, which I’ve always found particularly poignant (and their best tune not on Reconciled³), and Robbie Robertson’s classic “Somewhere Down the Crazy River.” While I’m not a huge fan of Robertson in general, there’s something smokey and mysterious about that tune that I’ve always found irresistible.  And of course Feist’s quite amazing version of Nina Simone’s “When I Was a Young Girl,”⁴ which a good friend of mine played for me once because he had stumbled across it and immediately pegged it as something I would appreciate.  He was right.  Feist’s anti-folk also lends itself pretty handily to a story-song mix, but “When I Was a Young Girl” in particular has a pulsing, conga-and-clapping-driven beat that I find highly reminiscent of “Down by the Water” by PJ Harvey.⁵

Other bands which seemed like no-brainers for this mix include House of Freaks, whose spare, guitar-and-drum sound provide a number of promising candidates, and Meat Puppets, whose alt-country-tinged grunge sounds perfect when played around a campfire at night.  For the former, after waffling around for quite a while, I eventually went with “Black Cat Bone,” but they have several good choices among the 3 albums’ worth of material of theirs I own, so we should also expect to see them again soon.  For the latter, “Shine” was the obvious candidate, and I went with it.  The “story” is perhaps a bit nonsensical and hard to follow exactly what’s going on, but I feel like it stands up.  On a slightly more downbeat note, the Decemberists, who along with bands like the Lumineers and Arcade Fire have pioneered the large-ensemble neoclassical folk-pop sound that has become popular in the past 10 to 15 years, and the Smoke Fairies, a British duo of female vocalists whose work ranges from folk to dream pop.  The Decemberists give us “Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect,” and the Smoke Fairies provide “Misty Versions,”⁶ both of which are slow, deliberate stories of the subconsious (by which I mean they use a lot of symbolism to hint at more than the surface words are saying).  Plus “Misty Versions” gives us our volume title.

I also thought of my good friends emmet swimming,⁷ because Todd is quite good at telling stories via songs.  I chose “Angst II” off their first (self-produced) album, which may be tough to track down, but, trust me: it’s worth it.  And I couldn’t help but remember a more recent discovery, Chingón, which is Robert Rodriguez’s band which he put together originally to provide music for Once Upon a Time in Mexico.  Although their album Mexican Spaghetti Western was released over 10 years ago, it was only about a year or two ago that I first went looking for more music from the performance I had just rewatched in the special features of that movie and stumbled across it.  Several of the songs on that album are stories, with a Western flair, as the name indicates; most are in Spanish, but “Bajo sexto” is, despite the name, an English tune.

For more of that dark, wistful tone, I turned to two bands from Darkling Embrace: Bat for Lashes and Devics.  Both can do story-songs, but most of the time they tend to drift into the darkly pretty territory mined by Darkling Embrace, or even the noir trippiness of Smokelit Flashback.  Here we have two tunes which are slightly more straight-forward for them—which means they’re on the more surreal side of this mix—“Horse and I” from Bat for Lashes, and “My Beautiful Sinking Ship” from Devics.  The former is the opener of BfL’s best album, Fur and Gold; the latter the title track from Devics’ best.  With one sporting the lonely sound of wind in the trees and what I feel sure must be a theremin in the background, and the other using cello, accordian, and the tinkly piano of a dive bar entertainer, both are dripping with atmosphere.

Porchwell Firetime I
[ I Came Here from Nowhere ]

“Facts about Cats” by Timbuk 3, off Greetings from Timbuk 3
“Sugar in My Coffin” by the Red Sea Pedestrians, off A Lesson in Cartography
“White Tooth Man” by Iron & Wine, off The Shepherd's Dog
“Random” by Ed's Redeeming Qualities, off It's All Good News
“Mr. Zebra” by Tori Amos, off Boys for Pele
“Shine” by Meat Puppets, off Too High to Die
“Black Cat Bone” by House of Freaks, off Monkey on a Chain Gang
“The Devil's Chasing Me” by Reverend Horton Heat, off The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat
“Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect” by the Decemberists, off Castaways and Cutouts
“Somewhere Down the Crazy River” by Robbie Robertson, off Robbie Robertson
“When I Was a Young Girl” by Feist, off Let It Die
“Misty Versions” by Smoke Fairies, off Smoke Fairies
“My Beautiful Sinking Ship” by Devics, off My Beautiful Sinking Ship
“In the River” by the Call, off Into the Woods
“Angst II” by emmet swimming, off Dark When the Snow Falls
“Bajo sexto” by Chingón, off Mexican Spaghetti Western
“Gambling Preacher and His Daughter” by Whiskey Folk Ramblers, off ... And There Are Devils
“Horse and I” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“Golden Frames” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Some Velvet Morning” by Firewater, off Songs We Should Have Written [Covers]
“Halley's Waitress” by Fountains of Wayne, off Welcome Interstate Managers

Total:  21 tracks,  78:08

In the cateogry of more unlikely tracks, we have a couple of early tunes which skew even more surreal than Bat for Lashes and Devics.  To call them “non-linear storytelling” is perhaps understating it a bit.  You may recall my mentioning Iron & Wine back on Slithy Toves.  Well, here he is again with “White Tooth Man,” which may not be his best song,⁸ but it’s pretty damned close.  To complement that, and serve as a bit of a bridge between “Random” and “Shine,” I chose “Mr. Zebra” by Tori Amos.  It’s an odd little tune that I’ve always dug.  To show you the contrast, though, here’s a bit from the opening of “Random”:

Her boyfriend is thoughtful,
She’s a passable cook,
But sometimes she eats alone.
And, one time, she was hit by lightning
While sitting on the roof of her home.

and here’s the opening of “Mr. Zebra”:

Hello Mr. Zebra
Can I have your sweater,
‘Cause it’s cold cold cold in my hole hole hole?
Ratatouille, strychnine,
Sometimes she’s a friend of mine,
With a gigantic whirlpool that will blow your mind ...

So “story” is a bit of a stretch for some of these tracks, but, as I’ve said, it’s more a feeling than a strict definition.

Which just leaves us with our closing triptych.  Coming off the almost spooky “Horse and I,” we kick off the home stretch with “Golden Frames” by KT Tunstall, which appears to be a story-song about being abducted by aliens, so it flows nicely.  Then we drift into the very song that discovered Firewater for me: “Some Velvet Morning,” originally sung by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra.  In fact, when I think of songs that tell stories, right after I think of Gordon Lightfoot,⁹ I think of “Some Velvet Morning,” along with Sinatra and Hazelwood’s other hit, “Summer Wine.” Sometimes called “cowboy psychedelia,” I always found these two tunes fascinating as a child, although nowadays they’re a bit country for my tastes.  But I went looking for updated versions that I might find more palatable,¹⁰ and that’s how I stumbled onto Firewater’s cover album, Songs We Should Have Written.  Firewater’s Tod Ashley and guest Britta Phillips¹¹ do a very smooth version which keeps the echoey guitars and the psychedelic aspects, but replaces the overblown strings with a Hammond organ and adds a few new touches, like voice distortion on the female vocal to give it even more of a trippy feeling.  Then, to close out the volume, we cap it all off with “Halley’s Waitress,” Fountains of Wayne’s understated little ode to a disappearing server.  It’s a mellow way to wind us down to reflect on the 21 little stories we’ve heard.

Next time, we’ll take a look at our creepiest mix so far.

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1 In other words, we won’t see “Hayride to Hell” until volume II.

2 Perhaps it’s just the sweet clarinet break.

3 Which is their best album by far.  I often find that artists have one great album and the rest of their œuvre is mediocre.  But just because the rest of the albums are “meh” doesn’t mean there aren’t some great individual tracks there.

4 To be fair, that song existed before Nina Simone’s version.  But I think it’s fair to say it’s most commonly associated with her.

5 Which no doubt we’ll also see on a future volume.

6 Which I believe also uses congas for its main beat, as it happens.

7 Who we’ve seen twice thus far: once on Salsatic Vibrato, and once on Darkling Embrace.

8 That would almost certainly be “Boy with a Coin,” which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

9 I should try to find a modernized version of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” somewhere.  The original is a bit too cheesy for my tastes these days, but I still have some fond memories of it.

10 We’ll see what I found for “Summer Wine” on volume II.

11 Who not only doubles for Nancy Sinatra on this album, but also covers for Cher.

D&D 5e: Meet Arkan Kupriveryx (Execution)

Here’s another post to close out the story of Arkan Kupriveryx, my current D&D 5e character.  You should at least have read last week’s post to know what I’m on about.  In that post, I explained why I have a “PC” despite being the GM, and what the basic mechanics of his character would be (race and classes).  This week I want to show you how I turned that into an interesting backstory (or at least I think it’s interesting).

This sort of backstory-building is what I want from my players, and the amount of work it takes is why I don’t kill characters.¹  It’s okay if you don’t have a really cool concept to start off with.  (Of course, it’s lovely if you do, as well.  Just not a big deal if you don’t.)  But, with a modicum of effort, you can come up with a pretty decent backstory.  I already gave an abbreviated version of something like this when talking about my younger son’s character; here’s a slightly longer example.

So what we know from last week is that I needed to come up with a concept for a paladin character, but a paladin of vengeance.  He would also have a bit of arcane knowledge via one level of sorcerer.  So the most sensible thing would be if he were a sorcerer first, then something happened which caused him to swear revenge on someone or something.  Since the adventure we’d be playing was Hoard of the Dragon Queen,² and since part of the advantage of having an NPC PC is to have a way to tie directly into the storyline, this one was a no-brainer: my character would swear vengeance against the evil dragons, and/or the dragon cult, which are the main antagonists of the adventure.  Not sure why he needs vengeance at this point, but we’ll circle back to it.

So we’re set on one level of sorcerer, then two of paladin.  Sorcerer is one of the few classes where you get to pick your subclass at first level, so we’ll have to make a choice there as well.  Happily, this is a no-brainer: the draconic bloodline is easily the best choice, even counting some of the other options to be found on the Internet.  And someone with some good dragon’s blood in their family tree would be particularly incensed by evil dragons, so that all works out.  Now let’s look at race.  Sticking to what we have in the core rules, I started thinking seriously about a dragonborn.  It’s not the best option for my particular build (a dragonborn gets +2 strength and +1 charisma, whereas this character would be better off if those were reversed), but I’m not here to min-max.  The advantages are sufficient, and the storytelling possibilities just got really interesting: not only a dragon sorcerer, but a dragonborn dragon sorcerer ... way to double-down on the tie-in to good dragons and hatred of evil dragons.  Next I start reading a bit on the Forgotten Realms wiki (since that’s the setting our adventure takes place in) about what dragonborn are like in Faerûn.  I don’t have to conform to this info, of course, but, if I’m going to build a character who’s completely out-of-place in the setting, I want to do that consciously, not out of ignorance.  So I read, and I discover that dragonborn hate dragons (check), that they’re generally very honorable (works for a paladin), and that they have a strong connection to their family and clan (so perhaps it was his clan that was wiped out by evil dragons).  So far so good.

Then I hit this little gem:

The scales a dragonborn wore were scarlet, gold, rust, ocher, bronze, or brown in hue, though they in fact bore little correlation to a dragonborn’s breath weapon and the scale colors of true dragons.

Now, if you know anything about dragons in D&D, you already know that the evil dragons are the “chromatic” ones, and are red, white, green, and so forth, generally matching their breath weapon (red for fire, white for ice, etc).  And the good dragons are “metallic” (gold, silver, and so forth).  But here’s something saying I could be a red-scaled dragonborn with an ice breath weapon, or a bronze-scaled individual with fire breath ... how intriguing.  Anyone who knew anything about dragonborn wouldn’t find this unusual of course, but, then, not many people know very much about dragonborn, as they’re not very common.  So some people might expect one thing from my character and then be surprised when that didn’t turn out to be true.  In fact ... what if I deliberately screwed around with this expectation?  What if I was a black-scaled dragonborn with acid breath (which is in fact the traditional breath weapon of a black dragon)?  Except that I (and my whole clan, for that matter) believed that we were actually descended from copper dragons, who also have an acid breath weapon.  Now we’re really starting to see some nifty ideas taking shape.  I named my character Arkan, after getting a feel for the sound of the sample names in the book, and I invented a clan name of “Kupriveryx,” which vaguely sounds like the Latin for “true copper.”  Then I decided that my magical dragon scales (a feature of the dragon sorcerer) would be a translucent, mystical image covering my natural scales, and that, viewed in just the right light, they would have a coppery glow.

Next I have the problem of needing both an arcane focus (for my sorcerer spells) and a divine focus (for my paladin spells).  And I still need to swing a longsword, plus be able to make somatic gestures for arcane spells—it’s like I need 4 hands over here.  I solve this by saying I use a crystal (arcane focus) which is set into a copper chain which is wound around my left hand, and that’s what I use to cast with.  Looking for a god who would suit my theme of vengeance, I settle on Torm.  And, oh look: his symbol is a right-hand gauntlet.  So I get one special, white gauntlet (made of some hard, enamel-like subtance) for my right hand.  I have some extra starting gold because we started at 3rd level,³ so I just charge myself 2-3 times as much for a crystal and a gauntlet (since they’re custom-made), and now I have my foci covered, plus I have two more cool character details.

Next, I want to have just a few rogue-like touches, so I concoct a background by combining the spy from D&D Wiki with the faction agent from the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, saying I was initially set to be a spy for the Harpers, but then I dropped out to pursue my oath of vengeance, but I still have a few contacts.  Give myself a long black cloak, proficiency in stealth and investigation, and add in some goggles of night⁴—although mine don’t look like the picture in the DMG; they’re all black and give me an unsettling, bug-eyed appearance—and my character is complete.  He fulfills all the roles that our party needs, but he’s still interesting.  He’s effective—even optimized in a few ways—but not min-maxed.  He hasn’t hit his paladin subclass yet, which makes him noticeably lag behind his other two compatriots, but then he gets a few perks from the sorcerer side.  For instance, he gets to do ray of frost and fire bolt as often as he likes, as they’re cantrips, on top of his acid line breath weapon (from being a dragonborn) once per short rest, so he’s got quite a few of the energy types covered.  Plus he can do witch bolt as a 1st-level spell ... or at least he could, if he ever gets to use a 1st-level spell on anything other than cure wounds.  Being the front-line healer has its downsides, and Lay on Hands only gets you so far.

But I can’t complain, really.  I took a set of required features—including a class I really didn’t want to play—and turned it into an interesting character with an intriguing backstory.  I’ve intentionally left a few of the details vague (such as who were his contacts in the Harpers, what—if any—missions did he go on for them, etc) so that I could adapt them to whatever situations come up during the course of the campaign.  But he’s firmly tied into the main plotline of the adventure, and he knows information that can be useful for the party to have.  So I’m pretty pleased with him, overall.  Hopefully his example will spark some creativity for your next RPG character as well.

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1 I only maim them a little.  Sometimes.

2 By the way, many people consider this to be a subpar adventure, partially because you have to work hard to find all the pieces (some of which are in supplemental PDFs on the Wizards of the Coast site), but probably primarily because it’s very “railroady.”  By which we mean that it doesn’t give you a lot of options: you just need to keep agreeing to do the next thing on the list or else the whole thing derails.  But I don’t mind any of that, particularly—while it’s true that I prefer open-world campaigns when I build my own, for a quick-start campaign that includes a brand new player, a strong sense of direction isn’t so bad.  And the having to hunt down all the bits is annoying, but not a deal-breaker.

3 I cooked up some figures for this based on some Internet sources.  Maybe I’ll do another article about that someday.

4 Because I told everyone they could have one minor magic item, presumably gained from their previous adventuring.  And goggles of night are a pretty minor magical item, and I always hate being the only guy in the party who can’t see in the dark.

D&D 5e: Meet Arkan Kupriveryx (Concept)

Since my last two posts put together are longer than 3 of my “normal” posts combined, I figured I better do a shorter post this time.  It’s still on gaming, but this is more illustrative than explanatory.  I want to demonstrate some of the principles I like to stick to as a GM by talking about my character in the 5e game I’m running for my boys: Arkan Kupriveryx.

So first let’s start out with why I have a PC.  I’m the GM; techincally speaking, I can’t have a PC, as I am not a P.  All characters run by the GM are NPCs, by definition.  But this is a tradition that my old gaming group started many moons ago.  The basic reasoning behind it goes like this:  Say the current GM gets tired of being in charge and wants to hand over the reigns to someone else.  If the GM doesn’t run a “PC,” then the former GM has to roll up a new character, and we have to find an in-story way to integrate with the group.  And what happens to the former PC of the new GM?  So much easier if there’s an NPC who is a real part of the party—treated like a PC in every way—no matter who the GM is.  So when GM #1 steps down, their NPC becomes a PC, and GM #2’s PC becomes an NPC.  Except we still treat them like PCs.  See?  It sounds more confusing than it actually is, in practice.

Also, having an extra PC around can be way useful if your group is small.  Without Arkan, our party would be two PCs, and that’s just not enough to survive in a typical D&D world.  Especially when one of them is brand new to the game.  Plus, having an “NPC PC” allows you (the GM) to funnel information directly into the party when you want to, without having to invent clumsy expository devices.  So that’s nice.

Anyhow, I knew I wanted to create a PC, and my typical modus operandi when starting a new campaign is to let everyone else come up with their concepts first, then I fill in the gaps.  I consider it a really interesting challenge to take a character whose abilities and features are mostly predetermined by party need and then find a way to turn that into a cool character concept.  In this case, we had a druid, and a rogue with some arcane abilities.¹  So what we really needed was a bruiser—a tank.  I balked a bit at this.

“But I hate playing fighters!” I whined to my eldest.  This is true: in all my years of playing D&D, I’ve only ever played a straight-up fighter twice, and I hated it both times.²

“Play a paladin,” he replied.  “We could use the extra healing anyway.”  Druids can heal, true, but not when in their animal forms.  And obviously the Smaller Animal was interested in running around as a dinosaur most of the time.

“But I hate paladins even more than fighters!!” I double whined.  This is also true: I dislike rangers and paladins³ because I think they shouldn’t have spellcasting abilities.  But I hate paladins even more than rangers⁴ because paladins are goody-goodies.  I don’t like Superman, I don’t like Captain America, I don’t like Galad from Wheel of Time, I don’t like Miko from Order of the Stick ... I don’t like paladins.  I even find Lancelot a bit annoying, if I’m honest.⁵

But I could see that he was right.  A paladin was exactly what the party needed: excellent melee skills and reliable healing powers.  So I took a look at the paladin subclasses, and I discovered something really interesting: there are 3 paladin subclasses, and only 1 of them is actually a paladin.  The “Oath of Devotion” subclass represents the traditional D&D paladin.  Then there’s the “Oath of the Ancients,” which is more of a green knight, which is interesting, but then there’s the “Oath of Vengeance,” which is ... well, frankly, it’s just friggin’ awesome.  Oh, it’s not that powerful—many folks online claim it’s the weakest of the paladin subclasses—but, flavor-wise, it’s easily the best thing to happen to paladins since ... well, ever.  Because it’s about as far from a goody-goody as you can get.  I like to call them “avengers.”  Not like Avengers like superheroes, just avengers, like a character granted supernatural powers of vengeance.  Sweet.

So I decided I wanted to punch up my avenger a bit with some arcane power, to supplement my eldest’s arcane rogue a bit (and to keep myself from getting too bored with the character).  I kind of wanted to go warlock, because I really love that class.  But in the end I decided that warlock doesn’t really lend itself to multiclassing very well, so sorcerer was a better way to go.  So right now Arkan is a dragonborn dragon sorcerer⁶ 1 / avenger paladin 2 (although paladins don’t actually hit their subclass until 3rd level, so he’s not really an “avenger” yet—but, you know, that’s the plan).  Sorcerer and paladin actually synergize pretty well: they’re both charisma-based casters, so that’s nice, and sorcerers are the only class that gets the constitution save proficiency, which is what you need to make when you take damage while trying to concentate on a spell.⁷  So it’s fairly workable.  My current plan is to leave it at just a single level of sorcerer until I get to avenger 4, because of the mildly weird multiclassing restrictions we talked about last week: if I don’t go all the way to level 4 in paladin, I delay my ability score boost⁸ by even more than the 1 level I’ve already delayed it.  And I don’t think I can reasonably afford that.  So I’ll stick with avenger until 4th, then take another level of sorcerer for my 6th level, then we’ll have to just see what makes good sense in-story after that.

That’s fairly long for a “short” post, so I think I’ll wait until next week to tell you all about Arkan’s backstory and describe his general look.

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1 Although not an arcane trickster, for those of you familiar with the D&D subclass system.  It’s a 3rd party archetype called a shadow warrior.  Pretty cool, actually.

2 To satisfy my craving for the unusual and non-traditional, I played a non-standard race both times: once a half-ogre, and once an alaghi.

3 As I mentioned last week in one of the footnotes.

4 Even though I actually like the paladin’s signature ability (lay on hands) much more than the ranger’s signature ability (favored enemy).  Mainly because every version of favored enemy I’ve ever seen is worthless, either at low levels or at high levels, and occasionally both.

5 And, as I’ve stated before, I believe Lancelot to be the ur-paladin.

6 By which I mean a sorcerer with the draconic bloodline: more on that next week.

7 I’m pretty sure I’m going to be accused of min-maxing for taking sorcerer first, because people will think I specifically did that in order to get the Con save.  Honestly, I didn’t even think about it until afterwards: I specifically started out with sorcerer for backstory reasons, which we shall see next week.

8 Or feat acquisition, assuming my GM allows it.  Oh, wait: I am the GM.  I think I’ll allow it.