Fox Magic: Martial Feats
Beginning with Martial Power, feats that offered a benefit to a particular race/class combination made their appearance. These feats often serve to shore up what might otherwise be subpar choices, and to offer a little extra flavor — a tiefling warlock can vengefully spread his Warlock’s Curse around to whoever hits him, while a deva wizard can draw upon the knowledge of past lives to recall extra spells, giving her more to choose from each day when it comes to preparing.
Below, some kitsune feats for martial characters.
Categories: Mythic Japan, Original Game Content | Comments (0)
Fox Magic: Feats
Kuniyoshi's woodblock print of the legendary kitsune Kuzunoha.
Most of the fourth-edition races boast race-specific feats. Even the half-elf has one or two, in addition to being able to choose from among the elf- or human-specific feats. The only races presented as potential player-character options that don’t have feats associated with them are the ones from the back of the Monster Manuals — and those are incomplete writeups, not suggested for open PC use, which are slowly getting fleshed out and given the full treatment in Dragon and future rulebooks. The lack of racial feats is often cited as a weakness of these races. The strength of the humans’ feats — particularly Action Surge at the heroic tier — is considered one of their biggest plusses.
Clearly, racial feats are of some importance. So it’s only fitting that kitsune should have a few of their own.
Categories: Mythic Japan, Original Game Content | Comments (3)
Fox Magic: Inari
Today’s short article is a writeup of Inari, patron deity of the kitsune.
A small note first: the previous post has been revised. I reduced the power of the previously-existing racial abilities, and diversified a bit by adding additional minor abilities — the celestial got a bonus to save against charm and fear and a group insight modeled off the elf’s group perception; the wilder got a racial bonus to physical defenses against traps.
The wilder’s ability score bonuses also changed from Cha/Dex to Cha/Int; I’ve been vaccilating over this for a bit, but I’ve come to think the Int bonus suits the folklore better. It also makes them very well suited for the fey warlock and illusionist wizard builds, both of which are also very appropriate for the kitsune of legend. Of course, artful-dodger rogues would have been appropriate too, but so it goes. With their skill bonuses, wilders should still make pretty good rogues.
Now, back on topic.
Categories: Mythic Japan, Original Game Content | Comments (2)
Fox Magic: Kitsune
Kuniyoshi's woodblock print of the legendary kitsune Kuzunoha.
A year or two ago, I wrote a couple of articles for Dragon magazine, back when Paizo was still publishing it as an actual print-on-dead-trees magazine. You won’t find those articles by looking through back issues, because they were never published. Something about Paizo losing the print-on-dead-trees license and Wizards releasing articles as PDFs to subscribers, now.
But this left me with a bunch of 3.5e stuff on my computer for which I had little use, and had in fact more or less forgotten about until I came across it recently while looking for something else entirely.
My loss of a publishing credit is my gain of some blog posts, because I’m going to update at least some of it for fourth edition. Given my inclinations toward Mythic China and Mythic Japan elements in my game, I thought I’d start with my article about kitsune, the shapeshifting foxes of Japanese folklore.
Wikipedia’s article on kitsune (which I wrote large chunks of, back in the day) is pretty good for a compact overview of the folklore. Japanese folklore in general is pretty interesting stuff; if you’re looking to spice up your game, I’d recommend getting your hands on some, reading it, and looking for elements to adapt. But I digress. On to the kitsune. For today’s installment, the basic writeup.
Categories: Myth Direction, Mythic Japan, Original Game Content | Comments (6)
A Pack of Vicious Grithiks
One of my favorite parts of fourth edition is the ease with which it’s possible to create monsters that are fairly assured to be a reasonable challenge for the party. Given a careful selection of powers, there’s not much to worry about; a monster of a certain level, when placed with sufficient other monsters of around that level in an encounter, will provide a decent challenge to the typical party of around that level. To top it off, Asmor’s provided a wonderful tool for automating most of the annoying bits that remain.
As a result, I find myself developing custom monsters a lot more often than I did in third edition. Case in point: in my most recent game, the PCs found themselves delving into a massive cavern system chasing a lead. (Apologies for the vagueness, but I don’t want to give away any potentially still-active plot points when my players might read this.) This cavern was home to, among other things, a clan of troglodytes.
Categories: Original Game Content | Comments (1)
