Having played Freebooters with three different groups each consisting of Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User and Thief players, I am finding that I want to tweak the cleric class. I can easily imagine that other players or GMs might not find the same to be true, but my cleric players are exhausting favor quickly, and poorly rolled tests of Faith are wiping them out early and frequently—turning them into staff/mace wielding fighters. I’ve therefore made some changes to Bless/Curse:
BLESS/CURSE:
When you call upon your deity to empower, protect, hinder, or afflict someone or something, describe the boon or bane you wish to invoke, how it falls within your deity’s domain, and roll +WIS or CHA.
10: The blessing/curse is granted with short duration ( minutes). If you used Favor to invoke this blessing/curse, it is not spent but retuned to your reservoir of favor to be used again.
7–9: The blessing/curse is granted with brief duration. If you used Favor to enact this blessing/curse, it is spent and must be replenished through prayer, sacrifice or the like.
6-: Mark XP, and if you are at also currently at zero favor, roll on the TEST OF FAITH table.
You may permanently sacrifice one ability point of WIS/CHA to make a curse permanent.
Just so we’re clear — you do know that Bless/Curse doesn’t cost faith to use, right? I assume we’re talking about spending the faith to take +1 forward to the roll.
It’s true that the gods of Freebooters as written are a fickle and punishing lot. In our sessions that’s translated to Clerics talking a big game but only invoking their deity at critical moments (i.e., when it feels like a real prayer on the player’s part). One tradeoff is that those blessings and curses can be pretty powerful — we had a first level Cleric of Life bring a fellow PC back from the dead once (“I call upon my god to bless her with renewed vitality”), and a first level Cleric of Death kill 4 giant spiders in a disturbing manner (“Since they poisoned me, I curse them in the name of Salmak with the most painful of deaths”). Of course, if either of them had failed those rolls…
All that being said, this is a nice minimal hack that seems just forgiving enough. I may start using it in our home game.
The FAVOR rule would only apply if it were spent to take +1 (or more…) forward to the roll.
I’ll also be reducing trips to the Arcane Accidents table to those instances where the caster is not suffering one of the conditions of having previously rolled a 6- or 7-9. It’s more fun when it is rare.