Bardic Avatars
Hello everyone, and welcome to another Foursaken Feature. Today’s article is for all you bard-lovers out there. It provides a new keyword and a number of new powers associated with that keyword. So what do these powers do, precisely? Well, they use the power of music to conjure mystical, spectral avatars which fight for you in battle. Different songs ‘unlock’ different avatars, allowing you to make different kinds of attacks. Though the powers below give suggested forms for these avatars, and these forms are the default of what an avatar looks like for a given song, any musician capable of performing the power in the first place is also capable of adjusting the form of the avatar they create, making cosmetic differences to its appearance.
Before we get straight to the powers, though, let’s talk for a moment about the “avatar” keyword. Powers with the avatar keyword create an avatar, which fights for you on the battlefield. Unless a power specifically says otherwise, all avatars use the following rules:
- An avatar is always considered your ally for the purposes of powers or effects which care about who is allied to whom. It is also considered an ally of anyone you are considered an ally of.
- The avatar uses your defenses.
- The avatar does not have hit points. Anything that could cause the avatar to take damage instead causes you to take that much damage. If you would be reduced to less than 1 hit point in this fashion, you are instead reduced to exactly 1 hit point and your avatar is immediately destroyed. Your avatar still suffers any conditions placed on it (such as stunned, weakened, etc); these are not ‘transferred’ to you in the same manner as damage. Similarly, the avatar does not have healing surges.
- The avatar is not strictly a creature, but rather a manifestation of your will, controlled through your music. You must sustain the avatar each round as a minor action or it is immediately destroyed. As part of this minor action, you may choose to have it make a single move or minor action of your choice that it is capable of performing. You may use additional minor actions to direct it in this way in a given turn.
- Most avatars have special attack options. By expending the specified action, you may have your avatar perform one of those actions.
- If a creature would provoke an opportunity attack from your avatar, you may have it perform one of its attack options. This attack counts against the number of opportunity attacks you can make in a round.
- Any attacks or checks made by the creature use your bonuses, as it is simply a manifestation of your will
- Unless a power says otherwise, as long as you continue to sustain it, and it is not destroyed, your avatar lasts until the end of combat.
