Game idea - 4 semi-original healer classes

I think a good rule of class-based character design is to make sure that a class's benefits always come with disadvantages. That is to say, any one class shouldn't provide a better advantage relative to other classes, because that might knock the game out of balance.

This usually comes up in terms of combat-based classes and their abilities to deal damage. But I'm thinking about healer classes today. For example, your fantasy-standard white mage has powerful curative spells but is awful at direct combat; or there's the AD&D cleric who (if aligned with the benevolent gods) can heal wounds but can't fall out of favor with their deity. Healers are not a flashy choice for a player due to their low damage output; rather, they're good classes for players who are interested in assisting other players.

One more note before this list: just like certain authors deliberately set rules for their writing (e.g. "I'm not going to go over 10 pages with this story,") it can be fun for GMs and players to think about restrictions (or disadvantages) as role-playing opportunities.

So here's a simple list of healer classes and their benefits and disadvantages:

Faith healer Consider the televangelist: a big, loud personality who never misses an opportunity to thank a certain powerful being. A faith healer could be considered a healer-broker: he or she will present opportunities to spirits who in turn will demand payment. Sometimes the payment is steep. Faith healers typically seek easy marks among deities, running the risk of appealing to opposing deities or failing to pay the deities back for favors. Occasionally, faith healers are themselves the targets of spiritual scams. A faith healer might be a former salesperson, and he or she can often be found looking sidelong to benefit from some situation.
Advantages: If they convince their deities or spirits to act, faith healers can invoke powerful curative forces that can heal a wide variety of ailments.
Disadvantages: Faith healers need to persuade their "congregation" (e.g. the other PCs and NPCs) to help convince the spirits to act. If they fail to do so, the deities might not act or might act out of malice. They might also extract high prices from the healer's party.

Leech Think of a medieval physician mixed with a junkyard tinkerer. This person believes in physiological theories that differ from mainstream knowledge of the body, and they deploy commensurate "cures" that sometimes do more harm than good. A leech would think "why fix a broken arm if you can find another?" Leeches are also usually neutral in alignment, forgoing moral action--like the desire to alleviate pain--in order to further their knowledge. A leech might not wait for one's death to begin dissection if death would impede learning.
Advantages: The leech is a master of tissue replacement, transplantation, and reanimation. If the materials are available, there are few bodily ailments for which a leech can't hack a workable fix.
Disadvantages: A leech's medical practices might seem uncharismatic or downright offensive to some.  Leeches arouse disgust and avoidance in most people, and a party of PCs that includes a leech must be ready to suffer penalties to dialogue encounters. The effects of a leech's practices might be permanent and life-changing, such as the functioning of new body parts, the gain or loss of abilities, and physiological needs that don't reveal themselves until later.

Infirmant Infirmants are evil doctors guided by the principal of curing ailments with more powerful ailments. Their treatments are ostensibly curative but always corrupt. An infirmant might treat a grievous wound by implanting a cursed totem to seal the wound with radiant putrescence. He or she might introduce a demonic parasite to eat a tumor, or seek out a particular beast's vitriolic blood for a patient to drink. The only catch to the infirmant's supernatural treatments is that the patient must consent. Infirmants are also occasionally tasked to do a deity's bidding, which is never pleasant.
Advantages: Infirmants are great for quick heals when time, equipment, and concern for the future are scarce.
Disadvantages: Infirmants can't treat PCs that don't consent. Beyond that, the long-term propositions for an infirmant's skills are rarely comforting. Dangers include bodily possession, maddening pain, and the generally intrusive malfeasance of evil forces. Whatever the case, an infirmant's healing powers are never benign. However, if the PC party actually wants to consort with supernatural evil, an infirmant's practices might benefit them over time.

Anatomancer Anatomancers are psychopathologists who can travel through the psychic plane. In an act of intense concentration, the anatomancer's psychic presence enters another close body to fight off a disease or purge a foreign presence. He or she can also influence bodily tissues' physiological processes, like cell regeneration. Although some mercenary anatomancers exist, anatomancers are more employable for benevolent purposes than murderous ones due to the time and patient's cooperation required to treat a patient. Veteran anatomancers can bring other PC's psychic presences with them into a body. (A GM could anthropomorphize a disease to create a combat encounter in a PC's body.)
Advantages: Anatomancers need no specific equipment. Because of this and their occupational interest in the minds of others, anatomancers often learn a wide variety of skills and make good multiclass PCs.
Disadvantages: Since they are unable to create new matter, Anatomancers can only work with existing tissue. Anatomancers also become vulnerable during their healing trances since they lose contact with their bodies.

Game idea - creating NPCs

Like I noted in the advice in my last post, I like to prepare a few NPCs that I can insert into different settings for plot purposes. 

For example, I might prep an NPC to be an old priest, but if the players don't even go near the church, but rather travel to an old shack in the desert, I might change the NPC from a priest to a grizzled old seer while keeping the same general characteristics. Here's a simple NPC table that I've used for my homebrew (mostly D & D 2.0 and 4.0) games:

Name: Sex: Race: Class: Alignment: Voice: Quirks: Personality: Garb: Look: Secret: Location: Purpose: Misc:

For voice, quirks, and personality, I write at least 2 adjectives in each spot that will help me roleplay the NPC. (I'll post some tables of these soon.) Yeah, I try to use voices, even though my friends say they all sound the same.  Garb refers to clothing and look refers to salient features and/or a more general sense of appearance, e.g. grizzled, fat, curiously old, etc I like to invent one secret for every NPC; it's good to have more rather than fewer potential storylines at hand. Location and purpose are to help me remember where and why the NPC exists for the story.

I should mention now that my games are generally light on combat and heavy on exploration and skill use. But inevitably some of my more intractable friends want to be able to fight any NPC--from the cocky soldier to Granny Applesheets, the beloved old breadmaker. So to prepare for this, I also use this NPC table:

Name: Sex: Race: Class: Alignment: Voice: Quirks: Personality: Garb: Look: Secret: Location: Purpose: Misc:

Type: Abilities: Skills: Hit Points: Size: Condition: Armor Class: Attack 1: Attack 2: Special Attack: Special Qualities: Saves: Buffs: Debuffs:

These tables have worked out well for me, but I can see some disadvantages:

• They're not useful for fighting groups of NPCs (especially if there's a controller and some minions).
• There are no equipment spots, so they're not great if you like to emphasize equipment and inventory realism.
• They're generally only good for humanoids.

I generally only use these tables for NPCs that are important to the plot. For NPCs that I'd like to remain meaningless to the plot, I'll just invent a name, a voice, and a look.

Game idea - Creating potions and other consumables

First, a quick word on potions and other consumables: unless the adventure's progression hinges on a potion's effect(s), I like to let the players examine potions at their will and not blatantly explain them. Personally, I also tend to stay away from magical effects in potions, preferring to leave magic to strange items and the people who cast them. Maybe it's just my experience, but I've found that using magic items with fantastic effects often leads to excessive metagame commentary. (For example, I introduced a potion of demonic possession in one game; it lead to a half-hour conversation on whether demons could inhabit bottles.)

When creating potions, use your senses to make them lively. Here are a few good questions to consider:

• What does the container look like? How big is it?
• What material does the container comprise? (e.g. Glass? Wood? Metal? A corked skull?)
• Is the container's material colored or opaque? Old or new? Brittle or malleable? Etc.
• What material does the container hold? (e.g. Liquid? Powder? Gas?)
• What color combination is the held material? Any other descriptive words come to mind?
• What consistency is the material?
• What does it sound like when the potion is disturbed and scrutinized?
• What's its full name? Is it scientific? Arcane? Folky?
• And of course: what are the effects? How long do they last? Could they break the game?

For your own purposes, you should keep track of the metagame details:

• How can you connect this item to the plot?
• Anticipate what your players might do with it: might they apply it to a weapon? Mix it in a drink?
• Who might be immune to it? Is there an antidote that might help you move the plot?
• Where is it found? On an apothecarist's shelf? In a suspicious satchel? Hidden in a tree trunk?
• Why is it found in this particular location? For roleplaying reasons? To flesh out a location? Just for fun?

Lastly, here are three examples of potions. The first is factual, the second is a mix of details and story, and the third is just story:

Effusion of Dropknife - On a small shelf next to an assassin's weapon rack rests a dusty, brown glass bottle. Beside it lies a pile of some rusted blowdarts, arrow-tips, and a dull razor. It looks like the bottle hasn't been disturbed for years, but the infamous, hand-scrawled name on the label is still legible: Dropknife. When a few drops are added to a drink, this paralyzant, a respected addition to any rogue's occupational inventory, causes the drinker's hands and feet to tingle and go numb for up to a half-hour, rendering useless one's abilities to pick up objects, manipulate weapons, and ambulate normally. Although it is tasteless, odorless, and clear, those familiar with it will warn potential users of its tendency to thicken any solution it's poured into. Dropknife's ubiquity is due to its common effect on most humanoids. Only a few drops are needed; anyone who has ingested more has either asphyxiated due to muscle inactivity or fallen victim to a more violent death.

Fleshwood extract - My side was killing me. Walking 10 leagues with a host of old war wounds will do that to an old man. I began to feel as derelict as this run-down border town we arrived at three days ago. I've been sitting up in bed at the local inn, unable to walk, but this morning a maid saw me in my pathetic state and pointed me to a shoulder bag someone forgot after leaving the inn last week. It was mostly empty, but I noticed a familiar, small, corked ceramic bottle that was laquered with an off-white enamel. A somewhat-useful folk remedy, extract of the fleshwood tree primarily causes the drinker's skin to look grainy and knotted for a day or so. It's a rather unattractive state, if you ask me, but the wonderful side effect is that this process heals scar tissue and other chronic skin and muscle injuries for a time. War veterans like myself will sometimes talk of "going grainy" to help with chronic pain. If you can put up with the bitter, piney taste of fleshwood--I like to mix mine into beer, nature's other wound-healer--this'll give you a couple days of pain-free walking.

A large glass jar of swirling blue oil  - I know two things about this jar. First, old Barl Eggthorn's idiot son Danney drank this on a dare and we all watched him turn white and walk right into the ocean. We would have stopped him except for those swirling tendrils of icy smoke that came out of him. Nobody wanted to get near those things. Hell, I tried to talk some sense into him, but the closer he got, I started to hear screams. Some of them were my own, to my surprise, but some came from the direction of the beach. It took a while to get up after he walked past me and the other folk. The second thing about this is that no one knows what to do with the jar. Anyone who picks it up instantly loses the desire to get rid of it. It's not that they want to keep it, it's just that they feel like they just can't part with it. Even throwing it into a bag and carrying it out that way has this effect. So as you can see, we're stumped. No one can even say for sure how it got onto that basement shelf. But for now, we've chained and locked the door, and there's not one person in town who even wants to broach the topic of this particular depravity.

Terrain - Tone Forest

  Not many people know the origin of the tone forests. The legends tell of a network of colossal piped instruments that echoed lengthy, low passages to each other. It would make sense if this were a system of communication--after all, the cities in this region are far apart and separated by flat lowlands where cover is hard to find. It’s never been very safe to send riders back and forth.

  Some recent study of the tone forests has revealed a less purposeful, though not mundane, origin. In 3706, while visiting one of the local tone forests on a family vacation, Grix Belbenor, a mine inspector and amateur geologist, noticed a particular phenomenon in the terrain--the towns here have been built on basalt deposits from ancient volcanic activity. After consulting the lore scrolls, he found that there did exist “leagues and leagues of crystalwood forests that were burned to the ground by an flume of earthen fire. This was before the world-time was written.”

  Should Belbenor’s theory prove correct, it seems that a series of prehistoric eruptions sent cascades of lava across the lowlands, burying the crystalwood trees at the roots. As the trunks shattered, the crystalwood shards came to rest on the pyroclastic flats. When disturbed by the occasional traveler, the crystalwood collides with basalt to make tones of different pitches. According to one local wagon driver, the effect is “not unlike throwing a cartload of windchimes down the castle stairs.”

  Tone forest appears as black basalt flats covered by thin, hollow, light purplish-blue crystals. Except for the chiming tones of crystals being knocked against the basalt, tone forests are otherwise soundless since no plants can grow on the flats and the crystals are easily broken and razor sharp, thus making traversal exceedingly difficult. Across the flats, there are also tall formations of basalt that provide sights for ambush. Traveling across a tone forest makes any traveler’s movement audible for 50 yards unless the character succeeds a difficult dexterity check.