Toil and Trouble (GLOG Class: Witch)
Yes, I know there are too many witches already. Yes, I'm making another one. I am not apologizing.
Part of a series on de-fragmenting the fragmentary implied classes and rules from the Tower of Salem-Sounan. This is Marina Vega's class. Intended to be a mixture of a classic witch and Medea.
Witch
Skills: Poisons, Herbalism, and one of 1. Folklore, 2. Mythology, 3. Monstrous Biology
Starting equipment: Sacrificial dagger, small cauldron, peasant clothing, black robe, firestarter.
Choose the high or low alchemy list. Gain a recipe from your chosen list each template (1d6 at A, d8 at B, d10 at C, choose at D). Most witches use low alchemy.
A: Witch’s Brew, Dark Studies
B: Enhanced Brew, +1 MD
C: Workings, +1 MD
D: Curse, +1 working, +1 MD
Witch's Brew: You know how to craft brews from the right ingredients. This requires the body part of a creature or a particularly strange plant, along with an alchemical essence. The essence in question determines the kind of effect, while the part/plant sample determines the specifics. Each has a given example based on a sample from a dragon.
- Air: Brew causes a sample-based shift in the subject's perception (e.g. can smell gold)
- Water: Brew causes a sample-related physical transformation (e.g. grow clumsy wings)
- Perdition: Brew inflicts a sample-related vulnerability of some kind (e.g. become exceptionally vulnerable to fire)
- Fire: Brew directly inflicts harm (e.g. explodes into a fireball)
- Order: Brew heals or cures sample-related maladies or afflictions (e.g. cures burns or unnatural greed)
- Earth: Brew fortifies against sample-related harm (e.g. fireproofing)
Brewing takes about an hour, but can be done over the course of a rest with no loss in time. For direct healing or damage, use [R]d6 for healing potions or thrown poisons/bombs, [R]x2d6 for imbibed poisons, and ([R]/2)d6 for injury-based poisons. Duration of other effects is 10 minutes, increasing to an hour and then a day with 1 and 2 extra essences respectively. As there are two ingredients by default, the base [R] is 2.
Dark Studies: When gathering from a source of reagents, you may choose to gather doses of poison that a creature or plant naturally has in place of other reagents at no risk. Additionally, you have a [templates] in 6 chance of immediately understanding any sort of witchcraft, curse, or similar magic upon encountering it. If you fail, you may try again on the same magic when you level up if you haven't already figured out the hard way. Finally, you know what a placebo is.
Enhanced Brew: You may use your MD to enhance your concoctions. MD can be treated as an additional typeless essence to increase the potency directly, or they can add additional effects to a brew. This can be basically anything, with some examples being "the brew occurs on a delay," "the brew can be applied to clothing," "the brew only affects specified subjects," or "if the brew kills a subject, its remains affect anyone else who touches them with the brew as well." Get creative. You can apply multiple modifications if you have enough MD, though this does risk hubris. Invested MD do not return to you until the brew is used.
Workings: You are now capable of casting proper spells. Roll 2d8 on the Workings list, and you can learn other spells in the appropriate fashion (persuading spirits to follow you, scribing scrolls, etc).
Curse: You can use the Evil Eye at will, which inflicts a -1 to all rolls on a subject without glaring distance until they are cleansed by a priest or other witch or you dismiss it with a simple touch. If someone has genuinely wronged you, intentionally or otherwise, you may instead pronounce a proper curse if you are within earshot of them or possess a piece of them. This can be effectively anything, as long as it's sufficiently ironic, and can either be an immediate effect or a prophecy of doom. Doing so immediately inflicts one hubris on yourself, and if the DM determines that the subject has not wronged you, they are instead affected by the evil eye.
Workings
I do not have a custom list of workings right now, but this post has a good d8 list you can use.
Hubris of the Witch
I much prefer hubris to mishaps and dooms. Less explosive, more gradual corruption.
At 5 hubris, You become hateful of the simple-minded, and easily fall into the habit of spiting them out if bitterness. When dealing with people less intelligent than you, reroll any rolls for social situations and take the worse result (intimidation is exempt from this).
At 10 hubris, Your bubbling vitriol for others in general turns you physically ugly and gives you a most bizarre appearance. Roll two mutations, and take the most weird-looking result. Do this twice.
At 15 hubris, You simply don't see the point in even trying to be nice anymore. Remove Charisma from your character sheet entirely. You fail any checks involving it. Feel free to compensate with garish displays of niceness like overly-sweet nicknames for yourself or inopportune cackling. It won't help.
At 20 hubris, You've went and done it. You've put little Timmy into the soup. And it's only downhill from here. You've gone full hag. You lose your humanity and become a child-eating monster. [roll a new character]