Kanalor Far-Travelled, 13th Age Glorantha, Wind Lord Set-up

 After a disastrous TPK (Total Party Kill), our 13th Age homebrew, The Broken Yonder, has come to an impasse.  This though is all good, we'd planned to break at the end of the quest and switch to 13th Age Glorantha, we'd been thinking up character concepts and getting used to differences between 13th Age and 13th Age Glorantha.

Kandalor Far-Travelled

I am quite excited by this, as I love the Glorantha setting, and really enjoyed playing through some of the starter adventures of Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG) but the rules system was not to everyone's taste and we'd not gone on to do anything more than short adventures.  13th Age though seems to keep the Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition (D&D5e) aficionados happy and so it was an easy decision to move on from 13th Age to 13th Age in Glorantha.

I wanted to set out, some of the thoughts I had in creating my character Kandalor Far-Travelled and in particular use this as a series of how a Wind Lord character class works in practice.  

Firstly, Wind Lords are variants of Fighters in 13th Age.  A Fighter in 13th Age is quite complex, compared to a D&D5e fighter, as the rules state "The fighter is simple to play but asks you to make interesting choices between flexible attacks before and during combat."  This places the fighter, as a class, about third in terms of simplicity i.e. decide who to attack, roll your attack, choose which flexible attack to use.  

Here is an example, you decide to attack a Broo, you roll your attack, it's a 19, you choose a Flexible Melee Attack of Carve An Opening - your crit range with melee attacks expands by a +1 - therefore you score a crit and do double damage.

Wind Lords add another level of complexity by factoring in Exploits, powerful effects triggered earlier on in combat by a manoeuvre called Deep Breath.

Wind Lord

But I am jumping ahead, first of all, who is Kandalor and how did he get his name Far-Travelled?  Well, I'd just finished watching the Tom Hanks' film News of the World, the premise of which is that Hanks travels the wild west reading out news from across the world and getting paid for the pleasure.  I liked this concept and transferring it to Glorantha gave me a lot of possibilities - our GM tried to push the idea of a Skald, a nordic poet, bringing the history and tales of their ancestors to the clan.  I liked this also but I wanted the character to be free-spirited and less tied to the traditions of his clan, so he was more a messenger, taking information or goods to other clans, getting into scrapes along the way, but also learning a bit from the other clans and getting seduced by the excitement and discovery of the rest of Glorantha.  

News of the World

Like Hanks' character, Kandalor had learnt to defend himself from wild animals and nefarious folk looking to learn what he knew or take what he had by force, hence a martial character but one quick on his feet and able to cover great distances.  Being Glorantha, I really wanted to go for one of the 13th Age character classes or variants, therefore the Wind Lord, with the alignment of Air and Movement seemed to work well with a Messenger and the style of fighter I wanted to put together - strong, good stamina, quick movement, darting in and out of combat to score hits and then dance away from retaliation.  The other element of adding and combining talents and flexible attacks to build up to a high powered knock out blow seemed to work well with Orlanthi, I envisioned the building up of storm clouds before lightning struck!

Having chosen the background, we were going to use Heroquest to flesh this out, rather than the standard background rules in 13th Age, this would then align our skill tests, but I'll come back to this on a later blog entry.  I moved on to develop my Wind Lord character class.

Wind Lord gives you +2 on Dexterity (DEX) or Strength (STR), as a Human, I could then add +2 on both, this meant I ended up with the following Statistics, these were all rolled as 4d6 minus the lowest and in no order.

STR: 16 DEX: 16 CON: 13 INT: 10 WIS: 6 CHA: 10

An athletic character with above-average intelligence and charm, that Wisdom will come back to bite him, but paints a nice picture of Kandalor with some impetuous character traits who likes to learn by experience rather than thinking things through - that fire looks hot, but only one way to find out, as he plunges his hand into the embers (metaphorically speaking)!

Wisdom is only possessed by the learned

As a Wind Lord I get two Class Features - Deep Breath (The Inner Wind) which triggers my Exploits (more of those later) and Wind Step which allows me to use a quick action as a move action, in theory, I could use a move action, then my standard action as a move and my quick action as a move, moving around the battlefield like veritable forked lightning.

Next, the Wind Lord can choose three Adventurer-Tier Class Talents, I went all out on the new Wind Lord Talents.  Firstly, Path of Heroes, which gives an additional exploit at 1st level and gives some extra healing when you use an exploit.  Secondly, Storm Spear, which ups the damage dice from d6 to d8 for thrown ranged weapons (spears, axes, javelins) and gives you some miss damage, also, at adventurer level, once per battle I can use a manoeuvre that normally requires a melee attack as a ranged attack if I can storify it appropriately.  Lastly, I selected Umath's Warband, it gave me a +1 bonus to attack, whilst I wear light armour and twice per day I can reroll melee attacks.

After Talents, I can select my Manoeuvres, I get two at first level.  I went for Catch One Breath, this allows me to heal hit points on a miss when I am staggered (half hit points or less).  My last choice was Spear Thane's Manoeuvre, this is a very cool Flexible Melee Attack, enabling me to make an additional ranged attack at half damage.

Kandalor favours combat with Spear and Shield

On to my Exploits, these are the special powers that are triggered by my Deep Breath, the aim is to trigger your Deep Breath early and then you can select an Exploit later in the battle, or as needed, but these cannot stack.  My first exploit was Four Sacred Breaths, at first level I get The Calm Breath - automatically save against a Mental Defense (MD) attack and The Storm Breath - expanding the critical hit of thunder or lightning damage from 20 to 19-20 per battle - I think this should help the Storm Voice player in our group too.  I would get the other two breaths at later levels.  This is a quick action but can only be used once per day.  After this Exploit, I go for The Laughing Cut, used once per battle, it deals half damage to the target as weapon damage and then deals full damage as lightning or thunder damage, combined with The Storm Breath, I am thinking this could stack as we get into a boss fight especially as when the escalation die is 2+ you get an extra weapon die.  My final exploit (the extra one given to me by choosing Path of Heroes) is The Sandals of Darkness, similar to the Rogue talent, that allows you to, once per battle, disappear from melee and then reappear the next turn and do double damage.

An important point to remember on Exploits is that the number of Exploits you can use each battle is equal to the number of battles you have fought in a day plus one.  I need to remember this, firstly don't use Daily Use Exploits like Four Sacred Breaths in my first battles and remember when I can use multiple items that link together like Four Sacred Breaths and The Laughing Cut, i.e. only from my second battle can I use two Exploits. 

As a Human I also get two more Adventurer level Feats as well as the Racial Feat, Quick to Fight - you roll initiative twice at the start of a fight, choosing the roll you want.  I then went with a General Feat Improved Initiative, giving me +4 on initiative rolls, combined with Quick to Fight, which should mean I am going to be near the top of the round when we roll initiative.  My final choice was an improvement on Spear Thane's Manoeuvre, giving me full rather than half damage.  

There, complete, I feel that is a lot of variety and some fairly powerful Exploits that can be saved up to use against deadly opponents i.e. The Laughing Cut combined with The Storm Breath and lots of options to increase damage and reroll attacks.

Orlanth Lightning Strikes

There is usually flexibility with these choices and with our GM, so hopefully, we will see how this develops and fine-tune it after a few combats... some of this will depend on the party and where best to get Kandalor to develop, perhaps aligning more with a Tank role (Tank characters distract enemy attention and attacks toward themselves in order to provide protection or decoy for teammates) and maybe using Skilled Intercept, The Shield of Arran, Tough as Iron, etc.  Our previous TPK was probably due to an unbalanced party - too many Glass Cannons (A character class that has remarkable offensive power but has low defence), as well as stubbornness and lack of communication on knowing when to Flee.

So Kandalor is now complete, we'll flesh out the other details through the 30+ questionnaire via the Heroquest mashup and some early in-game Roleplay, skill tests and combats and with the other players in our next session.