Preview: Stout Pilgrim

Life outside city walls is often attended by risk and privation, but it offers commensurate rewards. Clarity of purpose is easier to achieve in simple circumstances, untilled earth harbors wonders in abundance, and isolation lends power to human connections. Stout Pilgrims are elemental embodiments of the unvarnished sanctity of the wilderness, and they are united by three qualities.

 Stoutness — an indomitable constitution, in both a physical and spiritual sense; pilgrimage — the continuous pursuit of deeper communion with their spiritual center; and holiness — conviction and ideological consistency of sufficient refinement to produce miraculous effects. Instances of this archetype are as varied as the virtues they embody. A cave hermit nourished only by sunlight and air, a mendicant friar whose laughter can cure or cause drunkenness, or a sainted pugilist wrestling the unquiet dead to their final rest all meet the defining criteria for a Stout Pilgrim.

Leveling up the Stout Pilgrim usually involves choosing between sets of wildly disparate abilities, so incarnations of the class vary significantly depending on the powers chosen. The core template is built around the Divine Spark feature, which give the player access to a set of ability tracks. When the player reaches the first, third, and fifth levels, they can choose to either take an additional divine spark, or upgrade one they already have.

The Stout Pilgrim also has access to ritual Miracles that add even more variety to their problem-solving tool kit. The Unbreakable Will, Unbreakable Back, and Unbreakable Heart features are common to all Stout Pilgrims, and add some circumstantial bonuses and abilities related to the Pilgrim's stoutness of body, mind and character.

Designer Commentary

Joshua Mann: Honestly, John is almost entirely responsible for everything about this class, from the art to the rules to the flavor text, so I'll leave most of the commentary to him. What I will say is that each of the Divine Spark tracks alters the feel of the class to such an extent that they could almost each be classes in and of themselves. There are four Divine Sparks in the rules we've written, so you could conceivably have a party of four Stout Pilgrims and it would feel like everyone is playing a mechanically unique character. On top of that, you can mix and match sparks if you don't want to stick to one track, so I'm really excited to see what people do with this class.

John Cates: Ah yes, the Stout Pilgrim, one of my two significant textual contributions in the main rulebook. You can tell I wrote this class because it has the same energy and thematic complexity as a 5th-grade trapper keeper full of Sonic OCs (this is a point of pride for me). In this case, I think my manic maximalism was apt — I really wanted the essential ecstasy at the core of the pilgrim archetype to come through in the class's mechanics. Additionally, the setting describes the pilgrim's miraculous powers as resulting from the magnitude and consistency of their belief in a principle rather than the principle itself, so I wanted to build enough choice into the class to reflect that diversity. For 100 bonus e-points, see if you can use this information about my class design philosophy (i.e., give many options, probably too many) to spot the class I'm writing for the bonus supplement.

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