Talents: Divine and Weird

After looking at fighter/rogue and ranger/wizard talents for use in Knave and similar rules-light whatever-games, we come to cleric-analogues and... everything else. The "weird" list has made appearances across the blogopshere and seems to be the witchy/eldritch/esoteric bucket for various and sundry curious abilities. I've very much enjoyed what I've seen elsewhere, and tweaked and added my own thoughts to finalize what I'd like to leverage in terms of flavor and mechanics.

Divine Talents

1. Future Foreseen: Once per day, roll 2d6. These two results can be substituted for results on any friendly or hostile d6 roll until the following dawn.

2. Cast Lots: Once per day, perform an elaborate ten-minute ritual of your choosing, then ask the referee any yes-or-no question. They must respond honestly.

3. Banish Evil: Once per day, force a number of undead or fiendish monsters equal to your level+1d6 to flee from you for up to an hour.

4. Blessed Victuals: You can purify a number of rotten or corrupted food and drink consumables equal to your level+1d6 daily.

5. Holy Ceremony: You can perform hour-long ceremonies overseeing marriages, adoptions, and similar community events. Anyone in attendance must treat you with respect until the end of the day.

6. Ban Hammer: When wielding a blunt weapon or shield, you can always knock an enemy flat on their back if you also simultaneously attempt to convert them to your professed faith.

Clerics are a mixed bag across systems, editions, settings, and player expectations. I find that they often come strapped with so much baggage that doing anything original with them either seems like a transgression or try-hard gesture, but if you roll with the tropes, they tend to be played flat and predictable. Knave and similarly class-less games get around that by not even using the word "cleric" in the first place, but what a cleric represents is quite cool. Divine talents, then, are a way to infuse some of the trappings of the oft-troped "holy person" archetype into go-getter adventurer format.

The power of my desire for gold pieces and stabby halfling compels you!

I like augury and divination, but many modern RPGs associate that with wizarding magic. I don't look at it that way. If the divine and arcane talents are not wholesale replicas of "clerics" and "wizards," I'd rather put divination under the divine category, hence Future Foreseen allows for a portent-style pool of 2d6 for the player character to substitute for any roll in their presence, bending fate to suit their needs. Similar, Cast Lots further ramps up the meta-element of divination by allowing the player character to ask the actual referee a yes or no question and expect an honest answer, fourth wall be damned.

The latter four talents are likely more traditionally in the cleric wheelhouse. We have Banish Evil, which is basically your Turn Undead (though I include fiendish monsters, such as devils/demons/ex-lovers in there). In B/X D&D I am struck that Turn Undead is quite vague, albeit still very useful, and wanted to zero in on both quantity and duration of fleeing baddies. Keeping in lock-step with my exploration-/forage-heavy intentions for this style of game, Blessed Victuals is the cleric/druid-esque answer to dealing with crappy rations which will otherwise likely hurt you more than help you.

Something I've thought about for a while is the cleric's role as friend of or emissary for the common people's interests, and developed Holy Ceremony as a result. In this manner, the player character can indulge some chunk roleplaying opportunities in the setting while also allowing for their divine magic to win over NPCs to their favor for the day. It's a sort of half-charm, half-baking-cookies-for-rivals sort of setup. Finally, I've always thought the phase, Ban Hammer, is amusing. So grab a shield or hammer, then smack some yet-unproselytized fool upside the head (and onto the ground).

Weird Talents

1. Blink Step: Make a body save. On a success, teleport to a location you can see within 50’. On a failure, one of your limbs teleports the same distance without the rest of you.

2. Rat Whisperer: You are a friend to all rats everywhere. You can attract a single rat per round, and control a number of rats equal to double your level. The rats obey anything you ask them to do, but common rats cannot inflict any damage. Dogs and cats unequivocally hate you.

3. Spell Eater: Once per day, you can make a doom save to negate a spell cast on you. On a success, you eat the spell and keep it inside yourself, and may later release it by casting it without a spellbook. On a failure, the spell still affects you, and you gain two points of fatigue.  

4. Temporal Hiccup: Once per day, you can make a doom save to bend time. On a success, roll back time exactly ten seconds... you're the only one who knows that his occurs. On a failure, you forget everything that happened today.

5. Fey Dealings: When you make an agreement with someone, you know immediately if they break it. Additionally, you can track their location if you have their signature of personal effect.

6. Imbued Totem: You fashion a totem of wood, bone, or clay which occupies one inventory slot and allows you to transform yourself into an animal no larger than a pig. You remain self-aware and can speak normally. If you transform more than once a day or if any one use lasts for more than an hour, make a body save. If you fail, you remain trapped in animal form and must quest for a solution.

There has been some great content produced for the "weird" bucket of abilities across the discord/blogosphere as of late. Is it "witchy"? Or does it have to do with "druid" stuff? Are "weird" characters "strange" or does it mean "whatever isn't in the other categories?" ..... yes? Yes to all of that? Well, at least, that's my take on "weird" or "fey" or "esoteric" or "whatever you want to call it. It's a catch-all and it's filled with odd things.

So there.

He's just a rat looking for love.

I'm looking at weird talents as high-risk, high-reward, and often filling in spaces where other abilities can't quite hack it. Blink Step is an amazingly-useful teleportation effect. Of course, that is, if you can pass your save. If not, your arm might go sailing through the aether while the rest of you stays put. That... could be a boon, perhaps if you want to last-ditch punch the bad guy from fifty feet away. I'd do it. Rat Whisperer is effectively constant campaign fodder. Rats are everywhere in D&D-esque stuff, right? But also people who hate rats. You are now a person who is hated by all people who hate rats. Roll with it. 

Spell Eater is a bit more primal. As with tattooing magic to your body, this one is a bit visceral while the rest of the arcane and divine talents tend on the more "normal." Still, gobbling up a spell and effectively vomiting it back onto someone else at a later date is delicious (if that's  your thing). Now, I DID just rewatch Galaxy Quest for the 117th time last week, which is probably where Temporal Hiccup comes from, but think about it--the Omega 13 effect of being able to undo effectively a single combat round or dungeon mishap or social faux-pas... at the risk of NOT undoing it AND forgetting the entire day's proceedings? Sign me up for that narrative debacle!

A friend of mine talked to me at length regarding how deals should be more sinister in RPGs. I immediately thought of Gavin Norman's Cold Prince from the Dolmenwood setting, as well as the fey as expanded in Susanna Clarke's magnificent Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell novel. DO NOT make deals with faeries. But... what if you made deals with the power of faeries? Fey Dealings allows not only the omniscient supervision of your agreements, but also the possibility of adding some creepy scrying elements to it. 

I was a bit torn on the last option for "weird" talents. In keeping with the aim of making rough, but malleable analogues to more traditional archetypes, I wondered if this should be a bizarre wizard's familiar, or a warlock's fel pact with some timeless demon who is, in fact, obsessed with reforming history so that Ringo Starr is the actual frontman for The Beatles. In the end, I decided those ideas are better translated through typical (read: odd) adventuring. So I landed on Imbued Totem, which allows a player character to lug around a very important and likely-bulky object which allows them to to shift into the form of a honey badger or mantis shrimp or, maybe (just maybe), as surly capybara. The world (and possibly your own body composition) is your oyster. It's modern wild shape transformed into something riskier and more creative.