Prestige Class - Pilot-in-Dreaming

Bad things happened in the Old Capital. This is generally known. The men and women who witnessed it, whatever it was, were wiped from history, and the Barony is, in many ways, still recovering from the aftershocks two hundred years later.

Very rarely, the desperate looters and explorers who have travelled into the cursed ruins report seeing people there. These are usually dismissed as tall tales - who (or what) could possibly survive in that blasted and annihilated place? Nonetheless, the Baroness has given strict instructions to her operatives that any who seek congress with these shades are to be killed. 

Aleksandra Waliszewska

PILOT-IN-DREAMING

You cannot normally gain templates in Pilot-in-Dreaming, nor can you start your adventuring career as one - they might make a good replacement character, but will only be encountered in the ruins of the Old Capital. Unlike other prestige classes, you start with an A template and level up as normal. 

Starting Proficiencies: courtly etiquette from another time (something like a Texan gentleman, true for all genders).

Starting Gear: skinsuit (light armour, can be worn inside a Warbody), +1 knife in a ceramic chest sheathe, 3 suicide pills (tasteless, take effect in ten seconds). 

A Pilot-in-Dreaming never has to eat or sleep. The have suppressed emotional responses, and never take fear damage. 

Rules for Warbodies are here. 

A - Pilot, Dreaming
B - Under the Skin
C - Black Gulfs of Time
D - An End

Pilot: you know how to use a Warbody, how to feed them, how to recognise when they are hungry, etc. If you are wearing your skinsuit, you don't need barrier cream to enter one safely. You also never take damage from improper use of a Warbody. When piloting a Warbody you can use your templates as though it were your own body, and receive +1 to all rolls to hit. 

Dreaming: Something was done to you, in the last terrible days before the ruin of your city and people. You have something living inside your head, a second mind, docile, lobotomised, thoughtless, dreaming. You have no memories at all that aren't the silence of the black city, the desperate combat against the things that survive there. When you die you instead WAKE UP from the awful dreaming of your death. You snap awake, screaming, exactly as you were ten seconds before the killing blow was struck. To an outside observer this looks like a weird visual and mental distortion: you die and you are as you were and then you are not dead and you are as you were. When this happens you gain a permanent point of fatigue and lose d3 WIS. Anyone who sees it happen takes d6 fear damage. You can never travel to the dreamlands. 

Under the Skin: You have no memories, but sometimes you can feel something happen that feels like you - something that you recognise in your dim way. Once, on receiving this template, you can choose to embrace this thing or reject it. If you embrace it, you gain 2 WIS permanently, now need to sleep like a normal human, and lose 2 points of permanent exhaustion sustained from Dreaming. If you reject it, you instead gain 2 STR and 2 CON, which are shared by any Warbody that you pilot. 

Black Gulfs of Time: How many times have you woken up in this body? What have they done to the thing in your mind? If it could speak to you, would it speak in words? You get a single use of Dreaming per week that carries no side effects (although those witnessing it will still take fear damage). If your derived WIS modifier is ever negative, you may ignore that many permanent points of exhaustion sustained from Dreaming. You also get a corresponding bonus to any damage you inflict while piloting in a Warbody. You can remember how to direct Exterminator Orbs. 

An End: Your human face becomes impossible to recognise. The first time that you enter a Warbody after gaining An End, its (usually impassive, beatific) face becomes your face. You may leave it as normal, but must subtract d6 from your max HP to do so. Your face remains unrecognisable, and the Warbody's face remains your face. The Warbody that wears your face can now eat meat to sustain itself. If you die inside the Warbody that wears you face, you do not WAKE UP. If you die in your human body, you WAKE UP as a feral NPC under the control of the DM, who attacks everything around you. You still WAKE UP in this state, and will be impossible to kill; hopefully your friends can come up with something creative to dispose of you. The Warbody that wears your face will henceforth try to kill anyone else who enters into it, crushing and digesting them for d8 per turn that they are inside it. 

Aleksandra Waliszewska