Undead Posts: "Playing a *Twisted* Fey Knight!" - Part 3

Part 2 of this series was the last one that came from the dead blog of 2011.
But we are talking D&D and fantasy here, so with a bit of cheap necromancy, we can raise even dead blog posts, so from here on we have an undead blog series, shambling forward from its grave into its new third chapter! What undead, you ask? Well a death knight, of course!

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PLAYING A *TWISTED* FEY KNIGHT! - III

Saturday, January 11, 2020, 1:32 AM

First of all, the CRUNCH

It comes too easy to me to talk about game mechanics, I just can't miss the opportunity even if I know most readers don't or can't care, because they either never played D&D 4e, or hated it. But yes, I re-did Carwyn using D&D 4e rules, and had to change quite a few things, so before continuing (or actually starting) his story, I want him to be a "legal" character in at least one game system. If he is balanced in the game system, he is credible in the story, this is my mantra.

So a Blackguard/Binder hybrid Bard dilettante (wow, three B classes), turns out, could just not work.

He needs to be Paladin/Warlock hybrid Bard dilettante. This turns out, allows for just the same powers, but first of all it's game-legal (before I was using a Paladin basic at-will which a hybrid Blackguard simply can't have if not fully Human), and secondly it's basically exactly the same. The only unintended downside is that it's his magic user side to have the striker potential, instead of his melee fighting side. This is bad because I still took mostly controlling magic, so the potential to deal high damage went down big time. In exchange, we got an actual at-will Defender mechanic, which before the character lacked even if he was supposed to emulate it through some tricks.

Funny detail: both his Paladin side and his Warlock side use exactly the same powers I would have used for his Blackguard and Binder sides before. This is because Blackguard and Binder are subclasses of Paladin and Warlock. So no big deal. 

However, I said "would have used", because between then and now, better options came out that I just couldn't pass. In particular for the Binder, for which an actual Fey Pact came out on Dragon magazine. True, Carwyn was supposed to be from the Court of Gloom, and he aptly drew power from a Gloom Pact, but this turned out to be the fruit of a fantasy philology mistake: there is no Court of Gloom, and the Gloom Pact is not related to the fey. By Court of Gloom I must have meant The Gloaming Court (which is actually a Seelie/Good court), or the actual Unseelie Court which draws power from shadow magic, which is what the Gloom Pact is about. However, the magic that actually is closest to both the Unseelie Courts and the Gloaming Court, is not the Gloom Pact magic, but the Fey Pacts made with Unseelie Fey which are basically corrupted by Shadow. And this is the type of pact Carwyn has as a Warlock.

The powers coming from this Pact are much, much more suited for Carwyn. Here is an example, his basic at-will spell:

Now it would be time to remind or explain to new readers what a "Defender" role meant in 4e: to punish enemies that attack your allies instead of you. Something that the Paladin can do even without swinging his sword. This power's synergism with the Defender role is double: you pull enemies towards you (making them potentially provoke opportunity attacks if they move away, or at least making it more difficult for them to attack your allies), and then also punishes enemies for attacking you. Lose-lose situation: if they attack you they get damaged, if they attack your allies, as well.

In addition, the pull is to be considered, as the power suggests, a "lulling" and "fascinating" effect on the enemy: very Carwyn-esque!

But this is actually the low end of our fey knight's arcane arsenal... Watch this:

Level 7: Fey Pact Encounter Power

Though many might dismiss tales of men being enchanted by a fey
song or by the whispers of a dryad, there is one warning from those
tales that all travelers in the Feywild know: never let a creature
touch you, for that is the surest way for a capricious fey to make
you its slave. The binder masters the magic that makes this possible,
and by laying a hand on a foe that gets too close, a warlock can make
that enemy into a slave for a short time.

Now, in theory Carwyn doesn't count anymore as a having a Fey Pact (Binder) since he is not a Binder, so he shouldn't apply 5 damage here, but this being a Warlock attack means he would apply the Warlock Curse extra damage which a Binder doesn't have, so it's more or less the same.

What's really good here is: the Paladin mechanics pretty much force enemies to attack him, and then what does he do? He react to the attack by DOMINATING the enemy. This means the attack is lost completely AND the enemy will most probably attack its own allies next. Extremely Carwyn-esque!

Although these new "Dark Fey" powers are great (there is one more that is so twisted I don't even want to show you, cause it will spoil the moment he will use it in a story), I couldn't avoid taking some old truly shadowy powers that Carwyn either had or wanted at higher levels, such as this:

Level 5: Daily Power
 

Deathly Conduit   The Shadowfell's darklands are some of the most blighted places in that plane–regions where death holds no release for the creatures that fall there. This dread spell tears open twin portals to such
a site, drawing you through it from one to the other as their noisome
influence blinds and tears at your enemies.

Anything involving teleportation and blinding enemies is Carwyn's thing: he is supposed ti be Half-Eladrin instead of Half-Elf (a variant which never came out, strangely enough), so anything emulating the innate teleportation of his mother's race is welcome. Blinding is amazing because it's one of the ultimate forms of defending.

Now, he will have some more ways of screwing up enemies, but my favorite is the following, which is his basic bread-and-butter attack:

Seems normal, apart from the abusable "can be used as a melee basic attack", but the real power here comes through the combination of two feats which were famous back in 4e's times:

Apart from enabling a cool sequence of accurate sword swings and extra-accurate spells or additional swordswings (since by making these powers arcane and then giving bonus to arcane, it buffs itself), this power means suddenly Virtuous Strike is an Arcane At-Will, which means it can enable one of the best feats in the game: White Lotus Riposte, dealing damage equal to the ability modifier used by the At-Will (Charisma, a nice +6 for Carwyn) to an enemy that attacks you after you hit it with the attack. So there we go again: punished for attacking Carwyn, punished if they don't thanks to the fundamental Divine Challenge coming from Paladin.

But didn't we mention Bard before? Oh yes, and in particular Skald, through the "Master of Stories" feat. This, combined with Carwyn's Half-Elf heritage granting him another class's At-Will as an Encounter power exploits this powerful and thematic little thing:

Since this is an At-Will that has an Encounter-long effect, having it only as an Encounter power means having... IT. And since Virtuous Strike as I said is a basic attack, now every time Carwyn hits some enemy, he makes his allies better at hitting stuff themselves. Note that this is actually a Martial power, making Carwyn use FOUR power sources (Arcane, Divine, Martial, and Shadow) but all related to the Feywild, as the nice intro text about this Bardic power reveals:

Luck and fate are two concepts that find their way into almost every song and tale about the Feywild, for the fey races seem to be masters at bending chance to their will. Bards who sing about these events often find that their allies are suddenly overcome by a streak of good luck themselves. Some believe that it is enough to sing of the fey in order to steal their luck, but most bards believe it is simply the ally making his or her own good fortune.  

Enough about "crunch", and enough with this third part: next time we will put to good use this and other powers and abilities of Carwyn in some crazy story.
For now I will just anticipate that I have no clue myself about what I will make him do!