Ghosts of Vampires Past
March 29th, 2010
Hello everyone. Today I’d like to spend my article talking about the Risen subtype, and how it came to be. Though, hopefully, you can’t tell by looking at Liber Vampyr, it was never our intention to create a new subtype for undead. In fact, that original Revenants (then called Vampire Warrior, Vampire Monk, and Vampire Sorcerer) were very different from the way they look now.
When we first began playtesting the classes, it quickly became apparent that two of them were heavily out of balance: the problems with the Revenant Ascetic were easy enough to solve, and mostly involved changing the cost of her ability to heal herself (which, in the original version, cost a mere two blood points—the same number as the ki points for the wholeness of body ability). The Revenant Warrior functioned more or less to expectation, but the Revenant Mage was completely out of the ballpark: with more hit points than the Revenant Warrior and save DCs in the mid-forties (this was a high-level playtest) we emerged from the playtest with one thing clear: it was simply not feasible for the Revenant Mage to have its spellcasting, blood powers, AND hit points all tied to one ability score.
The easy solution was to change it from “Vampire Sorcerer” to “Vampire Wizard”. While I’ve always been a fan of the sorcerer, personally, I know that they get a lot of hate in some parts of the gaming community for not being a ‘powerful’ as the wizard. What’s more, this would draw the class out over at least two ability scores, and while that wasn’t quite ideal, considering how many features are ultimately to be had in the Revenant Mage package (full spellcasting plus blood powers, however limited, and essentially free metamagic is nothing to scoff at) it seemed a safe assumption that the Revenant Mage wasn’t going to be that much more powerful than any other kind of sorcerer.
When it came time to write up the rough draft for Liber Vampyr, however, I found I simply didn’t have it in me to write the class as a wizard class. The entire premise behind the Revenant classes was (and still is) that rather than training with sword or sorcery, the character spent his time unlocking the potential of his vampiric blood (in fact, originally the hope had been to be able to make a class which mimicked the popular vampire trope of growing more powerful with age, but that’s a story for another day). It’s a well-known convention of Dungeons and Dragons, ever since the conception of the sorcerer class in the 3.0 player’s handbook, that sorcerers are the casters with inherent magic, who develop their arcane skills through their blood. Hybrid mage classes are far from uncommon (in fact, if you can think of a kind of class, you can find a prestige class that mixes it with wizard: divine caster, fighter, warlock, rogue, even spontaneous arcane caster) but they are, as a rule, prestige classes. Our Revenant Mage could be a wizard/cruomancer mechanically, sure, but as far as flavor was concerned they had to be in pursuit of a single thing. Ultimately, the Revenant Mage had to be some kind of sorcerer.
Bringing this concern before my design team, we settled on a compromise: the Revenant Mage’s spell DCs would be charisma based, but its bonus spells would be intelligence-based. There was precedent for this kind of thing (Archivist, I believe, being the first, from Heroes of Horror, though I wouldn’t swear to that), and it was an elegant little solution to our problem.
Except, of course, that it was no solution at all. Even after dropping the Revenant Mage’s hit dice back down to d4’s (something my design team was loath to do because Pathfinder is trying to distance itself from the d4 hit dice) we found that the Revenant Mage was still consistently among the most durable party members, hit-point wise, averaging higher than 10 hp per level. When Josh Zaback, my main foil in design, began talking about how the Revenants were going to need to be given Constitution scores, I knew I had to act fast or see the entire project suffer for it. After all, vampires with constitution scores simply wouldn’t do: what was the point of playing undead (and taking that huge list of weaknesses) if you were barely going to see any of the benefits of the type? Players would feel cheated. And besides, I knew there just had to be a happy medium: something we could do which would hamper the Revenant Mage without unduly hampering its Warrior and Ascetic counterparts, who were already more-or-less functional.
And then it hit me: why not change the undead use of Charisma (a Pathfinder change, which, ultimately, has proven most problematic for this venture) to Wisdom? Wisdom was nearly as appropriate, flavor-wise (possibly moreso, depending on how one draws the barrier between the two oft-blurred ability scores) and, other than a relatively small AC bonus for the Ascetic, none of the Revenants was using it. In fact, wisdom had been my first choice for the Revenant Mage’s spells per day ability score, but the fact that it was almost exclusively tied to divine magic made that dream impossible and, as it turns out, wouldn’t have solved the problem anyway. Changing the hit point and fortitude save bonus to wisdom, however, proved to more-or-less remedy the entire problem.
This, along with some personal prejudices on my part regarding the undead immunity to mind-affecting spells, and Zaback’s prejudices about the universal immunity to fortitude saves, meant that the beast we were making was no longer truly undead. Thus, the Risen subtype. Now, for today’s bonus question, does anyone have a guess as to why the subtype is “Risen” and not “Revenant”, since the only thing that uses the “Risen” subtype are Revenants?
No?
You sure?
Well, no extra points for you, I guess. The reason, gentle reader, is because I seriously doubt that we’re done with the Risen subtype. You may not see it in the immediate future, and don’t tell anyone I told you because my PR people would give me hell, but just between you and I, I would be very surprised if we didn’t revisit the Risen subtype with some other kinds of player-friendly undead sometime in the future. After all, we wouldn’t make very good necromancers if we could only work with vampires, right?
Until next time, may your pet projects be undying.