Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Class: Royal Wose


The wise know that one must always Enkidu their Gilgamesh. Like the Old Hero, this is not a class that is balanced for normal adventurer play. 


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The Royal Woses are a mystery. They are usually found buried in the earth close to the graves of old heroes, and ancient murals depict these two types as fated lovers, companions, rivals, and tragic victims of a strange insanity that always afflicts them as a pair. 

The stories go like this: if the hero and the wose fight one another with the intent to kill, they will instead fall in love. If they set out to woo one another, the courtship will end in anger, frustration, murder. If they plan conquests and stratagems and deicides and the organisation of cities and populations, they will, by degrees, fall to degradation and insanity. If they instead lose themselves in drink and idleness and the kind passing of time, if they become like beasts, they will wake after decades as though from dream, and find themselves the leaders of empires, cities, great hosts - all that is glorious in human striving and endeavour. 

The wose itself is a monstrous puppet, built from bone or wood, with elongated limbs, long shaggy 'hair' of rotting cord or sinew (the youngest woses are many centuries old), and a hideous, staring human face. They always have a hinged jaw, filled with sharp flint or bronze teeth. They always wear a crown, and they are always weeping. 

The academics conjecture that, in ages past, the great rulers of cities had the woses built to remind them of something that had, with the invention of their royal station, become too easy to forget. The meanings of the many stories of reversal, contradiction, and mutual disgrace are not agreed on. 




ROYAL WOSE




You are a humanoid puppet that stands around 12 feet tall. You do not need to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe. You cannot wear or use anything that is not specially fashioned for you.

You are not a manikin or an entity puppet - no one knows what you are. You move entirely under your own power and volition.

As a Royal Wose, you roll your stats with 5d6 down the line instead of 3d6. You are built from bone or wood - if bone, your have AC12, you move completely silently, and your natural weapons deal d12. If wood, you have AC14, take -1 from all physical damage, float in water, and your natural weapons deal d8. 

Your starting HP is 20 + your CON mod. 


Skills: None

Gear: None


A O! Monstrosity! 
B Farce
Storm Still
Contiguity of Base Materials 


O! Monstrosity!: You move on all fours at twice the speed of a sprinting human. You attack twice, once per attack you received last turn, or once per enemy in melee with you - whichever is highest. You have been made with terrible, tearing claws - natural weapons with a damage dice determined by the base material of your construction. You may make an additional bite attack against a single target who is prone or defenceless - if it hits, it deals 2d8 damage and immediately decapitates anything it brings to 0hp without recourse to the death and dismemberment table. If you kill someone this way, enemies that witness the death must test morale.

Farce: You gain any skill you see someone else make use of. If you use it your mien suddenly changes: you stand on two legs and your movements becomes precise and formal, something like a butler or a courtly dancer. There is no upper limit to the skills you can acquire like this, but you lose all of them when you next kill a thinking person. If you have 24 hours alone with someone defenceless, you can destroy forever their capacity to use language, both spoken and written. 

Storm Still: If you rest beneath a roof for more than one night, the weather worsens dramatically. This gets worse with every night you remain so - it starts with rain, storms, and high winds, and after a week it will be bad enough to begin damaging buildings. After two weeks the raging, screaming storm is composed of acid and boiling chemical steam. Those who enter the maelstrom are lost. It is the end of distinction between solid, liquid, air, and fire. 

Contiguity of Base Materials: You may clasp your enormous hands around a human corpse and spend eight hours compressing it down into an inventory slot’s worth (if you can get it into a container) of shit, blood, or hot, clarified sweat. The shit is a deadly poison (smells awful, save or die), the blood cures the drinker of all disease and illness (it can cure things like blindness too), and the sweat counts as ten rations. All of them lose these properties after 24 hours. You can destroy any entity you get your hands on in a single round - you don’t roll anything, you simply narrate how you tear it apart. Kings, queens, and heroes will recognise both your goodness, and your suzerainty. 





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