Thursday, November 22, 2018

The White-Haired Witch Class for Neo School Hack

So in my buddy Steve's Pathfinder-based campaign I'm playing a witch character with the healer Hedge Witch archetype. The most recent hex I added to the character was Prehensile Hair, which allowed her to awesomely apply the finishing strike to a demon.  More recently, I was on YouTube, consuming some media, when I came across a clip of the scene from The Forbidden Kingdom (功夫之王) movie where the young punk Seeker battles the obviously more awesome White-Haired Witch (白髮魔女) and she takes the magic staff from him with her magic hair.  In that movie she's depicted as a villain, even though the character in the original novels Lian Nichang (練霓裳), nicknamed Jade Rakshasa (玉羅剎), is formidable martial arts vigilante fighting injustice.  And I thought to myself "Why isn't there a character class like that?"


Pathfinder does have an archetype for the witch class called White-Haired Witch, but all it does is swap out all the cool witch hexes--which are the core of the class--for a couple enhanced hair-weapon abilities and a handful of rogue talents. The class has no monk-style martial arts abilities. It would not play anything like the character in The Forbidden Kingdom.

So, since I'm still a bit OCD about my Neo School Hack rules, I decided NSH needed a White-Haired Witch class to remedy this glaring gaming oversight.
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White-Haired Witch

- The White-haired Witch is a female wuxia martial artist with unique powers to use her hair. She may appear as a dedicated avenger of injustice or an implacable tracker assassin.

Inherent: Magic White Hair/focus: you can magically extend your hair out 30 feet and grapple or roughly manipulate with it; however you cannot perform fine manipulation skills such as writing with a pen.



Classic Weapon: whip (In addition to normal Light Weapon attacks with it, the witch may trip, disarm, grapple, or choke an opponent following a successful whip strike.)



Martial Witch ("巫侠")/constant: the witch is trained in martial arts, allowing lethal unarmed attacks as a Light Weapon and a special dodge (spend your turn to pass a Cunning check against the attacker's dice score to flip or spin out of the path of an attack)



"Men are such liars"/constant: a witch can always tell if a male is lying



"Hmph"/focus: with a quick bad-girl smirk and slight snort, the witch summons qi for the fight; gain one temporary Awesome Point which can only be used in the current action scene



"Misfits following a misfit"/focus: after sizing them up for a few moments, the witch taunts her opponents, causing all of them to be Disadvantaged on their first roll against her in the current scene.



"Where have you flown, little Sparrow?"/rested: the witch has an uncanny ability to intuit where to find her quarry.




"Kill them!"/rested; a small gang of armed thug minions suddenly appear from nearby and perform acts of intimidation or violence for one action scene



Far Sighted/focus; taking a few moments to concentrate, the witch can see to three times as far as a normal person; this vision negates all distance penalties for ranged shooting attacks.



Lashing Leap/rested: the witch can perform a long, drifting leap covering up to 50 feet; she can double this distance if lashing her whip to generate extra qi.


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And, here are some awesome video clips from The Forbidden Kingdom of the witch in action which I based the character class on:

Scene at the inn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auGlY9fFvws

Scene in the cherry blossom orchard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5ThLvktqls

Scene at the Jade Warlord's palace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5uhElLMLbA

Sunday, November 4, 2018

New Campaign Hex Map Early Draft

So I'm slowly working on the hex map for my Forest of Fiends campaign idea which may or may not actually be a real thing one day. I'm using Hexographer which is is a very simple program.  It makes getting started easy, but it's not long before you begin wishing it had more features. For most people making basic hex maps it perfectly adequate. For people who start making a crazy big map right away it leads to a lot of re-thinking your map as you go along, just saying.  The map is for a semi-sandbox adventure with a coast, deep jungle filled with adventure, and finally a great cliff atop which lies (reportedly) the homeland of the fey.