Errant (GLOG Drifter Warrior Class)

I haven't touched this blog in a year. This has no relation to Ava Islam's OSR game, Errant.

Errant

Or Yóuxiá, Bogatyr, Rōnin, Knight-Errant, etc...

Lǔ Zhìshēn [from The Water Margin] uproots a willow tree.

A: Drifter, Oath

B: Inspire Hope

C: Load-Bearing Boss

D: Bare Steel

A: Drifter

When you first enter a new named locality (a town, village, city district, dungeon, valley, stretch of forest, etc...) the GM will tell you the names of the richest person, most powerful person, and most dangerous person in the area.

A: Oath

Any oaths you swear are unbreakable. People will instinctively know that your word can be trusted. You can push yourself to perform incredible physical feats in service of an oath (something someone with 18 Strength/Dexterity/Constitution could do with an excellent die roll), but you are exhausted and cannot fight or exert yourself afterwards until you're offered bedrest and a humble meal by a truly innocent person.

If you die with an unfulfilled oath you return as a revenant.

B: Inspire Hope

When you stand up to a corrupt or vile person thusfar unchallenged, your example stirs courage in the heart of onlookers. You rile up a squad of 2d4 bystanders (HD 1, Morale 7) who will fight at your side for the remainder of the encounter.

C: Load-Bearing Boss

When you kill somebody, any henchmen or retainers in their service will flee without a fight or a morale check.

D: Bare Steel

The first blow you ever strike with your sword in a new named location will instantly kill your opponent where they stand.

This class is supposed to emulate various wandering vigilante warrior type archetypes, and to create the types of adventures they have in the genre fiction surrounding them. I intentionally neglected statistics, because every GLOG has its own version of that stuff. I also didn't specify skills or equipment, because that's very much reliant on your game's cultural context. Bare Steel assumes you're the kind of itinerant vigilante who carries a sword, but it could very easily be a bow, spear, or even gun.

The intended core loop of this class is for you to roll up into a new place where something is terribly wrong, swear some Oaths to right these wrongs, use the information granted by Drifter to figure out who's responsible, use Inspire Hope to rally fighters to your side, and then Bare Steel and strike them down, relying on Load-Bearing Boss to do the clean-up. After that, you drift off to the next town.

The fact that you need to save your first strike incentivizes craftiness and lateral problem solving until you've identified the best target--when these types of heroes finally do violence it's a big pivotal moment, not a filler action scene. This works best in a kind of game where people aren't tied down to a single location, though even in the case of a more trad dungeon-crawler features like Oath and Load-Bearing Boss are quite powerful.