The druid in my game last night took his last breath. On a 7-9, death offered him the opportunity to return to the world of the living if he cast off his druidic nature and became a defiler – one who consumes nature for power. The player took the deal, citing a few cool reasons rooted in the game’s fiction.
So now I ask… does anyone have a defiler class written up? I understand those were, maybe, Dark Sun things?
What abilities should the defiler have access to through defiling? Shapeshfiting?
Couldn’t you use the Cleric, making an appropriate choices for the deity? In this case though it’s not actually a god, but a primal force of destruction.
Well, I don’t know about defilers, but that seems just the easiest of clues on what to do on all of those missed rolls for druid moves.
You can work around the druid template. To study a spirit they must kill it, when Nature asks for something back they must defile something, whenever they use their power things around them wither and die.
Keep the druid as written and just colour it up. Become evil of course…
Become born of desolation, with only wartorn, human ravaged environments as your polluted soil (with an appropriate tell)…
You can speak the tongue of twisted experiments or planar powers…
Shapechange into plague creatures like locusts or rats or infernal beasts…
Oooh the possibilities.
Also, the wraithlander compendium class is pretty freaking on the money for this character too 🙂
Animals of desolation: Rat, jackal, vulture, giant beetle…
Defilers were wizards in Dark Sun, where arcane magic consumed life force (plants withered, land became barren, water evaporated) unless you were really careful. A quick search turned up the DW-for-Dark-Sun write-up below. Travis handled defiling by giving the wizard’s Cast a Spell a defiling option on 7-9 and by giving Ritual a possible requirement of “it will consume a huge amount of life force.”
Unless you see your player becoming a wizard instead of a druid, though, I think Nathan Roberts, Alessandro Gianni, and Ezio Melega all have the right idea.
https://drive.google.com/?tab=mo&authuser=0#folders/0BwQBDcsLI0e-ZVVzeGRFR2pxUW8
For a while we had a character playing a Blight Mage which sounds similar to the Defiler. Good suggestions on corrupted druids from everyone.
I hadn’t thought of just reskinning the druid as-is. It seems the easiest route.
My initial thought was something more individualized. The defiler would gain “mana points” through destroying large swaths of nature via sucking up life force. Those points are spent to activate certain powers. Hm.
Maybe some kind of hybrid between cleric and druid but requiring the aforementioned points to activate shapeshifting and spells. This might not be as difficult as I thought it would be now that the new moves required has been cut down drastically!
Thanks, folks. 🙂