CGNefarious
2016-07-14, 04:22 PM
So after seeing Lords of the Night, Lords of the Wild, and Lords of the Mists, I gained hopes of a continuation of the series to some of my favorite types of fantasy creatures. My favorite D&D creature has always been the dragon (it's cliche, so sue me) and I really do hope that Dreamscarred Press will eventually do a Lords of the Scale type supplement in the future. But in the meantime I decided to start on my first ever homebrew, my own draconic themed discipline for the Path of War system.
For now, I'm calling this discipline Scaled Tyrant (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cA4viy-d6kfL3IAF3aURt-zBBBlNOpD58ZkjWAyGIVY/edit?usp=sharing). The name is a working title, as are most things in the discipline.
The concept is fairly simple, and borrows a lot of ideas from already existing Path of War disciplines. The first thing I wanted to give this discipline was the fairly strong dragon themed stances. At early levels they're pretty simple, but the higher level stances give you more and more dragon-like abilities until you can eventually take the form of a dragon.
Another big thing for this discipline was the breath weapons. I wanted to give access to breath like attacks as maneuvers, so they can be used even by people who choose not to take the form of a dragon. But I also wanted it to be a focus of the discipline, so I added special boosts that only interact with breath weapons and breath weapon maneuvers. These include extending the range of your breath weapon, increasing the damage of your breath weapon, and even completely changing the effects of your breath weapon to offer more utility. Since these boost can only be used in conjunction with breath weapons, I wanted to make sure their restrictive nature was offset by their usefulness, but I also don't want to make them too powerful. Unfortunately game balance isn't exactly my strong suit, so these are likely to change (so is the rest of the discipline, but that's beside the point).
I also blatantly ripped off the major theme of Elemental Flux where your active element will determine the damage type and special effects of certain maneuvers. The difference here is that when you gain access to Scaled Tyrant you have to choose a dragon type, and once chosen it cannot ever be changed. This will make the discipline considerably less flexible, and your dragon choice will be much more important, but by sacrificing flexibility I want to give the added effects a little more omph. Again, not too much, because I don't want to upset balance, but enough to make this discipline competitive with the other Path of War disciplines of similar natures. Currently I'm only working on options for the five chromatic dragon types, and coming up with special effects for just those five is difficult enough as it is. But after I get the basics of the discipline down and figure out everything for the chromatics, I do want to add in options for the metallic dragons.
I'm also considering doing a prestige class that will help a disciple truly embody what it means to be a dragon. Unfortunately the name Dragon Disciple is already taken. :smallfrown: But I can worry about that once I have the actual discipline completed.
Comments have been enabled on the Google Doc and I both welcome and would greatly appreciate any criticisms or suggestions you all may have, either on the doc itself or in this thread. Like I said, this is my first homebrew, so I'm bound to be making a lot of mistakes that would be obvious to the more experienced of you. Thank you all in advance.
For now, I'm calling this discipline Scaled Tyrant (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cA4viy-d6kfL3IAF3aURt-zBBBlNOpD58ZkjWAyGIVY/edit?usp=sharing). The name is a working title, as are most things in the discipline.
The concept is fairly simple, and borrows a lot of ideas from already existing Path of War disciplines. The first thing I wanted to give this discipline was the fairly strong dragon themed stances. At early levels they're pretty simple, but the higher level stances give you more and more dragon-like abilities until you can eventually take the form of a dragon.
Another big thing for this discipline was the breath weapons. I wanted to give access to breath like attacks as maneuvers, so they can be used even by people who choose not to take the form of a dragon. But I also wanted it to be a focus of the discipline, so I added special boosts that only interact with breath weapons and breath weapon maneuvers. These include extending the range of your breath weapon, increasing the damage of your breath weapon, and even completely changing the effects of your breath weapon to offer more utility. Since these boost can only be used in conjunction with breath weapons, I wanted to make sure their restrictive nature was offset by their usefulness, but I also don't want to make them too powerful. Unfortunately game balance isn't exactly my strong suit, so these are likely to change (so is the rest of the discipline, but that's beside the point).
I also blatantly ripped off the major theme of Elemental Flux where your active element will determine the damage type and special effects of certain maneuvers. The difference here is that when you gain access to Scaled Tyrant you have to choose a dragon type, and once chosen it cannot ever be changed. This will make the discipline considerably less flexible, and your dragon choice will be much more important, but by sacrificing flexibility I want to give the added effects a little more omph. Again, not too much, because I don't want to upset balance, but enough to make this discipline competitive with the other Path of War disciplines of similar natures. Currently I'm only working on options for the five chromatic dragon types, and coming up with special effects for just those five is difficult enough as it is. But after I get the basics of the discipline down and figure out everything for the chromatics, I do want to add in options for the metallic dragons.
I'm also considering doing a prestige class that will help a disciple truly embody what it means to be a dragon. Unfortunately the name Dragon Disciple is already taken. :smallfrown: But I can worry about that once I have the actual discipline completed.
Comments have been enabled on the Google Doc and I both welcome and would greatly appreciate any criticisms or suggestions you all may have, either on the doc itself or in this thread. Like I said, this is my first homebrew, so I'm bound to be making a lot of mistakes that would be obvious to the more experienced of you. Thank you all in advance.