Leaping down onto the beach, a raider rushes to overtake the settlement's defenders, eager for plunder. A lucky slash from a fisherman's knife slices across his cheek, but with a hiss his skin splits and peels to reveal glittering dragon's scales underneath, barely marred by the knife's passage...
Her boat mired in the mud by a river spirit whose burbling laugher mocks her, a merchant fumes. When the spirit's face appears over the boat's side, she lunges, arms outstretched, and her fingers twist into draconic claws as they dig into the spirit's flesh...
His shield long-since shattered, a mercenary swings his notched sword on the field of battle, driving back one attacker even as another thrusts a spear from behind, catching him in the back. The mercenary's blood boils as it sprays from his wound, splashing onto his attacker in a searing arc, and the spearman screams as his flesh burns...
Standing on the mouth of a dwarven tunnel, a treasure-seeker peers into the gloom for any sign of the stocky delvers. The mad chittering of massive beetles echoes up the tunnel instead, and the treasure-seeker unhinges her jaw to fill the tunnel with a cloud of toxic gas, her breath streaming into the darkness like a poisoned wind...
The Dragon-Cursed
In Bodil's Gap, dragons are cruel and rapacious creatures of toxic nature and influence, and their greed and hunger both seep from them like poison. Treasures that a dragon has brooded over become cursed by the dragon’s nature, and in turn their influence can spread that curse to those who behold them. Lust for gold warps into jealous possessiveness, and those who amass too many such treasures and spend too long admiring them risk changing into dragons themselves. Others may be cursed by their own ill-deeds; their own native greed and bloodlust making them no better than beasts. Whatever the source of a person’s misdeeds, to share the nature of a dragon is to slowly become one.
A Dragon's Poisoned Form
A character can become dragon-cursed by interacting with dragon gold incautiously; a dragon's treasures exert a strong influences on the mind, and if a character fails to control themselves, that influence can overtake them. However, though becoming one of the dragon-cursed is an affliction, for adventurers it can be an affliction with upsides—if one is willing to embrace the power of their curse and ride the fine line between man and monster.
Sufferers of the Dragon-Curse find their thoughts twisting in the presence of gold and other treasures, and the drive to claim and greedily hoard is strong. It can be a distraction, dragging their attention towards plunder even when other matters are more pressing, and it can make dealing with others more difficult. One of the dragon-cursed must always be vigilant in exerting their self-control.
When a person's dragon-curse warps their flesh and not just their mind, it starts in the skin. When one of the dragon-cursed is wounded, their skin splits open to reveal draconic scales underneath, leaving them with the Scarred debility as their monstrous appearance makes their curse obvious. So long as they remain Scarred, they benefit from the armour of their scales, but rest and treatment can banish their debility for a time—until they are wounded again, or voluntarily call on their curse to defend themselves.
A sufferer may also find that their hands begin warping into claws when they lash out in anger, and that this transformation has become tied to their earlier one—scales emerge as the claws do, and the claws grow in response to wounds even as the scales erupt from beneath the skin. And as long as the Scarred debility lasts, neither will recede again.
The breath of a sufferer of the Dragon-Curse can sometimes become a plume of acrid poison, and calling on this power to spew lethal fumes will likewise draw the transformation to the surface. And while transformed, a sufferer may find themselves more at home in a dragon's typical haunts—they may breath water as air, and endure in deadly environments like the boiling head of a volcanic spring, an icy mountainside, or the crushing depths of the inner earth.
Using the Dragon-Cursed
This compendium class is intended to be both a danger and an opportunity to play a character who is a little monstrous and a little conflicted. Dealing with dragons is dangerous, and the risk of becoming Dragon-Cursed is only one facet of that risk. It also offers some combat and survival oriented abilities that may supplement characters whose base playbooks offer fewer such abilities. If it can be summed up in a single image, that image is the dwarf Fafnir killing his father Hreiðmar for his share of the cursed weregild paid to their family at the death of their kinsman, and under the curse's influence transforming into a great linnorm to guard it.
Bodil's Gap is currently in playtesting, and the playtesting version of the Dragon-Cursed compendium class can be found here. If you have any insight or feedback, leave a comment or send an email to brazenhead@zoho.com.
Up Next
Next week I'll be taking a break from mechanics to write about some of the adventures that have taken place in the ongoing playtest game, starting with some unrest in a city on the brink of crisis.
No comments:
Post a Comment