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Special Episode: Houri (Patreon)

Published:
2022-12-01 23:57:42
Imported:
2023-12
Tags:

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Content

Patreon backer Tim brings you this special episode all about a character class from an early White Dwarf and how to update it for gaming in the modern day!

Get your copies of A Folklore Bestiary here!

Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Solve the Damn Mystery" by Jesse Spillane, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Comments

Anonymous

Interesting! You mentioned the Bene Gesserit, which I totally get. But I was also reminded of Dictators from Die, Companions from Firefly and of Holy Courtesans (I'm not least reminded of one from Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard). I'm envisioning a character that's in the spectrum between all those archetypes: using soft power, and utilizing the emotions and bodies of themselves and others. One part bard, one part monk, one part cleric in D&D terms. Someone who can buff and heal but also hurt and control if you get too close. The way to get around the loss of agency is to put limits to the control. Dictators in Die can give one command at a time. But that allows the other to interpret and subvert the command. And the moment they give a new command, the old one lapses. Of course this is for a particular type of game. If you're mostly meeting demons, gryphons and dragons, this kind of character is not very useful. But in a game where you're mostly up against (broadly speaking) human beings, it can be a very fun type to play.

Luke Slater

In 5e - with its pathological hatred of class proliferation - I can see something like this being best implemented either as a homebrew bard subclass. With NPCs, 90% of what you need for this class is accomplished with expertise in social skills. You'd get most of what you'd need as a cosmetic reskin of the College of Glamour, Whispers or Eloquence, depending on where you wanted to focus.

monsterman
>>96860416

Companions in Firefly were something I thought about including, as were their historical inspirations, hetairai and geisha. Hetairai in particular raise the question of exerting influence through unconventional means. You could also class the history of royal mistresses there as well. The way Dictators work reminds me a little bit of the mind-control powers in a game like Vampire. When described in principle, these powers seem overwhelming, but when you get into what exactly they do, they are limited in important ways. You have to do a lot of regular old bribery, manipulation and so on to get people into the position where a single command or memory-wipe can make all the difference.

monsterman
>>97020582

You can tell that I haven't read any D&D 5E books other than one scenario and all the monster books when I talk about the modern game, can't you? I'm not sure D&D 5E has a "pathological" hatred of class proliferation -- it has 13 classes already, which is quite a lot. I think you could argue that it has at least three too many, and maybe up to five. But on the other hand its zillion subclasses are much more mechanically distinct than a lot of classes in earlier editions, just because they have so *much* mechanical content!