Preview: Faetouched
Few who taste fae magic come away unchanged, and faetouched have drunk more deeply than most. It isn’t blood or moonlight that fills their veins, but something between the two. This quality makes them apt emissaries for humanity to fae courts when an accord might be reached, but they can also be gleaming armaments against arcane machinations if negotiations fail.
The core Faetouched ability is Minor Arcana, which allows it to learn and wield magic spells of the player’s choosing. Each spell has a base level, which costs no resources to cast, and Minor Arcana and Major Arcana levels, which give access to thematically similar — but more dramatic — powers. A high-level Faetouched ability gives them access to the Major Arcana versions of a small number of the spells they already know.
Most of the variety for the class comes from the spells themselves, which offer a dependable suite of tools in much the same way as normal class abilities. Tinker, for instance, lets the caster mend non-living objects at will. The Minor Arcana version causes man-made objects to collapse into component parts, while the Major Arcana version can amalgamate raw material and lose objects into more complicated constructions.
Other Faetouched abilities make them more capable of holding their own when interacting with Fae creatures off of the battlefield. Moonlit Eyes makes it easier to discern the honesty or intent of an interlocutor, while Lunar Aura offers some measure of protection from Fae magic.
I really tried to capture the feeling of having a broad toolbox of powers that I like in the spellcaster classes of other TTRPGs. That was really important to me because we couldn’t (and didn’t want to) lean on a combat system as a source for spell effects — we actually only have one spell focused on doing damage. In fact, combat abilities in Cold Iron more broadly don’t scale at all as the characters level up (the Cold Iron Knight is the exception to this rule). Players keep the same hit points and damage potential through the whole game, so it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to have an ascending ladder of more and more powerful fighting spells.
John Cates: I was acquainted with the trope of fae taking changelings or orphans as pets through fantasy books I borrowed from the bookshelf in my parents' room when I was a kid, and the idea really stuck with me. I wanted the faetouched in this illustration to come from that background, so I decided they would present somewhere between a feral child and a rich kid playing make believe in a fancy little costume — their fae parents never educated them in human social mores or hygienic customs like cutting one's hair to a manageable length, but were generous to the point of excess with material luxuries.
The core Faetouched ability is Minor Arcana, which allows it to learn and wield magic spells of the player’s choosing. Each spell has a base level, which costs no resources to cast, and Minor Arcana and Major Arcana levels, which give access to thematically similar — but more dramatic — powers. A high-level Faetouched ability gives them access to the Major Arcana versions of a small number of the spells they already know.
Most of the variety for the class comes from the spells themselves, which offer a dependable suite of tools in much the same way as normal class abilities. Tinker, for instance, lets the caster mend non-living objects at will. The Minor Arcana version causes man-made objects to collapse into component parts, while the Major Arcana version can amalgamate raw material and lose objects into more complicated constructions.
Other Faetouched abilities make them more capable of holding their own when interacting with Fae creatures off of the battlefield. Moonlit Eyes makes it easier to discern the honesty or intent of an interlocutor, while Lunar Aura offers some measure of protection from Fae magic.
Designer Commentary
Joshua Mann: This class offers a pretty high level of customization, just because of the modular nature of spells. In describing the spell effects, I tried to stay away from mechanical descriptions as much as possible. So, for instance, there’s a spell that causes nearby moonlight to brighten significantly. There’s nothing in the description about what that does to ability checks made to notice things, or anything like that, because I wanted to leave the mechanical interpretations up to the GM.I really tried to capture the feeling of having a broad toolbox of powers that I like in the spellcaster classes of other TTRPGs. That was really important to me because we couldn’t (and didn’t want to) lean on a combat system as a source for spell effects — we actually only have one spell focused on doing damage. In fact, combat abilities in Cold Iron more broadly don’t scale at all as the characters level up (the Cold Iron Knight is the exception to this rule). Players keep the same hit points and damage potential through the whole game, so it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to have an ascending ladder of more and more powerful fighting spells.
John Cates: I was acquainted with the trope of fae taking changelings or orphans as pets through fantasy books I borrowed from the bookshelf in my parents' room when I was a kid, and the idea really stuck with me. I wanted the faetouched in this illustration to come from that background, so I decided they would present somewhere between a feral child and a rich kid playing make believe in a fancy little costume — their fae parents never educated them in human social mores or hygienic customs like cutting one's hair to a manageable length, but were generous to the point of excess with material luxuries.
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