Dreamscarred Press Introduces: Akashic Mysteries

[Ssalarn]

I'm surprised there's no elephant folk in a game like this.

I second wanting akashic spell options. Hell, while you're at it akashic psionic options and akashic maneuver options could be cool too....and akashic invocations and vestiges if you ever get around to porting the warlock or binder.

I'd also like to see the daevic passions get more versatility. Losing half my class features if I want to play a dominion without a shield or gaining no benefit from my capstone or AoO modifiers if I'm a wrath deva with a one handed weapon or trying to finesse is...eh. I know there's an image in your head of how these specializations are meant to be portrayed, but some flexibility there would be nice.

It's funny that you mention Vestiges. Alexander Augunas, author of Pact Magic Unbound, the Pathfinder port for the vestige system, recently reached out to DSP on our Facebook page and he and I are now in talks for a future collaborative vestige/akashic release.

Daevic Passions are... I'm going to call them a work in progress. There's a reason the Daevic will be the last of the three classes to release, and those are pretty much our primary culprits. I wrapped up alpha testing on a system where the Passions had kind of a light side / dark side thing going on (Dominion had Tyranny and Benevolence, Wrath had Justice and Vengeance, Desire had Love and Lust), and unfortunately the feedback was pretty universal in that there were just too many moving parts. The Daevic was supposed to be the easy entry class for the akashic system, and unfortunately his evolution during playtesting has moved him farther and farther away from that.

I'm currently thinking about a bit of a revamp where we cut out a lot of the benefits currently obtained through the Passions (defensive abilities, bonus feats, etc.), and we give him a set of bonus feats that can be spent on Akashic or Combat feats, and some flat bonuses through his Daevic Possession class feature that sync up with his new abbreviated but expanded Passion list. So, we go with 9 Passions, 6 of which are like specialized subdomains that work mostly like the primary but subbing out very specific differences.

For Example:
Rickard is a Wrath Daevic. New Wrath would normally grant Rickard a +1 competence bonus per point of Essence invested on all attacks made with slashing weapons, but Rickard has chosen to specialize with Vengeance which replaces that benefit with a +1 competence on all natural attacks. His brother Bran reacted to the trauma that led them to bond with daeva differently and instead follows the path of Justice. Brand gains a +2 competence bonus on all damage rolls made with two-handed slashing weapons.


And the differences would kind of scale out from there, so that the individual Passions offer you smaller benefits than they do currently, but with more directions to build your character in. I'd probably couple this with cutting the Daevic's Essence Pool in half and removing his free Improved Essence Capacity, but then allowing him to count his Passion Veils as automatically acting as though they have 1/2 the Essence invested in his Passion to represent the symbiosis between the Daevic and his daeva.

Thoughts?

I'm surprised there's no elephant folk in a game like this.

There's going to be a total of 5 races. I was seriously considering a race of elephant men for race #5 (race number 4 are the Shiva-esque half-daeva), but Andreas was pretty clear that I had reached and/or exceeded my quota of anthromorphs for this book.