Versifier (Archons & Armigers class)

28 Dec, 2023

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank,
A ferlie he spied wi his ee;
And there he saw a Lady bright
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

- E. R. Eddison

Previously, I took a standard D&D class that bugs me (the cleric) and refashioned it into something objectively worse that I nonetheless like better (the Hierodule). Today, I subject the bard to the same treatment.

Bards have a weird history; introduced in a 1976 issue of Strategic Review magazine, the were an odd mix of early-medieval pagan warrior-poet (skald/druid/bard) and late-medieval troubador/jongleur/minstrel:

[Bards are] a hodgepodge of at least three different kinds, the norse ‘skald’, the Celtic ‘bard’, and the southern european ‘minstrel’. The skalds were often old warriors who were a kind of self appointed historian whose duty was to record the ancient battles, blood feuds, and deeds of exceptional prowess by setting them to verse much like the ancient Greek poets did. [...] The Celts, especially in Britain, had a much more organized structure in which the post of Bards as official historians fell somewhere between the Gwelfili or public recorders and the Druids who were the judges as well as spiritual leaders. In the Celtic system Bards were trained by the Druids for a period of almost twenty years before they assumed their duties, among which was to follow the heroes into battle to provide an accurate account of their deeds, as well as to act as trusted intermediaries to settle hostilities among opposing tribes. By far the most common conception of a Bard is as a minstrel who entertained to courts of princes and kings in France, Italy and parts of Germany in the latter middle ages. Such a character was not as trust worthy as the Celtic or Nordic Bards and could be compared to a combination Thief-Illusionist. These characters were called Jongleurs by the French, from which the corrupt term juggler and court jester are remembered today . . .

I wanted to put the Bard into perspective so that his multitudinous abili¬ ties in Dungeons and Drageons can be explained. I have fashioned the character more after the Celtic and Norse types than anything else, thus he is a character who resembles a fighter more than anything else, but who knows something about the mysterious forces of magic and is well adept with his hands, etc.

Bards got the powers of a thief half their level, the ability to cast spells, and percentage chances of knowing obscure lore and charming NPCs. They required at least average strength, intelligence, and charisma, making them tougher to qualify for than other classes. In AD&D, the bard was intensified to essentially the first prestige class, requiring at least 15 strength, wisdom, dexterity and charisma, 12 intelligence and 10 constitution, plus levels in fighter and thief.

Later editions would downplay the idea of bards as an 'elite' character, keeping the 'jack of all trades' combination of thief/fighter/mage but emphasizing the renaissance troubador archetype. The latter is (I think) partly due to the introduction of skill systems that could represent musical performances with a die roll, at the expense of the bard as an orator or loremaster. I would also guess that this shift was mutually reinforced by D&D's gradual shift from wargamer history nerds to 'theater kids'.

Anyways, I'm not a fan of either version. The old-school skald-bard is a) too restricted, and b) thematically a poor match for my preferred setting. The new-school troubadour bard is over-stereotyped, and I find the typical implementation of songs-as-spells game-y and dissociated -- of all the immeasurables systematized in D&D, condensing the art of poetry into a set of mechanical effects is the most barbaric.

Anyways, in Archons & Armigers, bards (AKA Versifiers) work like this:

1. Same stats as a Mountebank (thief)
2. The player has to actually compose and recite poems to do magic

Grotesquely obnoxious, but that's the A&A way!

The Versifier

The role of the versifier is to compose verses. A well-crafted poem can transmute enemies into friends, penetrate (and perpetrate) falsehoods, earn the favor of the mighty and lift the spirits of the lowly, balance gravity and whimsy, nobility and ribaldry.

Versifiers can wear light and medium armors and can wield any weapon.

Their prime attribute is Ethos (ETH) (AKA Charisma).

Verse

Antiborean poetry exists in three primary modes:

• Courtly poetry belongs to formal settings. It is composed in rhyming iambic pentameter at various lengths, typically couplets, tercets, quatrains, octets, and especially sonnets. Authorities, scholars, rituals, cyberians.
• Gnomic poems are epitomized by the haiku and express the inexpressible via cryptic, paradoxical, and abstract formulations. Magic, anchorites, secret socieites, anomalies, extrasolarians.
• Doggerel verse is the ribald, playful poetry of the preterite, epitomized by the limerick. Monsters, fey, taverns, festivals.

In play, the versifier declares a desired modification of reality to evoke. The ML then secretly records which mode is most appropriate for the desired effect. The versifier composes a 1-4 stanza poem, and the ML uses the rubric below to calculate a score and then rolls a d24; if less than or equal to the poem's score the effect succeeds.

Verses composed during the course of a campaign will be included in the campaign record.

#archons-and-armigers #game-design