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In preparation for my new campaign, I'm taking a look at the various character classes in hopes that I can add moments of cool regardless of which characters my players choose to play and also can sidestep some awkward moments at the table. I'm hoping to go through the core classes (from the 5e player's handbook) in alphabetical order which means we start with the BARBARIAN! (Sorry, couldn't resist the all caps there.)

The primary mechanic for barbarians is their rage. Rage lasts for up to one minute (essentially an encounter) and how many times per day they can rage is linked to their barbarian level. It ends early if the character is knocked unconscious or if they end their turn and either haven't attacked a hostile creature since their last turn or have taken damage since their last turn. During their rage, barbarians gain access to the following modifications:

• Advantage on Strength checks and Strength saving throws.
• Melee weapon attacks that use strength gain a bonus to the damage roll (tied to barbarian level).
• Resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage.
• Lack the ability to cast spells or concentrate on spells already cast.

There's a lot here. The first thing I note is how simplified rage is, especially compared with the Pathfinder barbarian. It feels to me like a good middle ground between the Pathfinder and 4e versions.

In Pathfinder, a barbarian gets to rage a number of rounds per day determined by their barbarian level. Here's what happens when they rage:

• Gain a +4 morale bonus to Strength and Constitution and +2 morale bonus to Will saves.
• Suffer a -2 penalty to Armor Class.
• Gain 2 hit points per Hit Dice (due to Constitution increase). They disappear when the rage ends and are not the first lost.
• Lose access to skills based on Charisma, Dexterity, and Intelligence or abilities that require patience or concentration.
• When the rage ends, they are fatigued for a number of rounds equal to 2 times the number of rounds spent in the rage.

In 4E, barbarians gained access to special Daily powers with the rage keyword. Once a barbarian used one of the rage dailies, one of the following things happened: the encounter ended, the barbarian chose to end the rage or switched to a different rage, or the character became unconscious. Each rage had an ongoing benefit that was tied to the theme of the rage and other abilities might interact with the rage keyword.

The 5E rage acts a lot like the 4E version in terms of the mechanics of how often one can rage and when it ends. One of the nice things about not tying it to rounds is that it lightens the cognitive load of players trying to determine whether or not *now* is a good time to enter a rage.

What further lightens that load is the lack of penalties for entering a rage and for deciding to come out of it. I know when I played my barbarian gunslinger, most of the time I didn't even bother to rage because determining which rounds were the best to do so in and what I'd give up to do so was often more work than I was prepared to spend.

Some people will enjoy that sort of decision making and they'll still have the opportunity to make those sorts of decisions. Instead of making the penalties part of the core raging mechanic, 5e separates them out into additional decisions. For example, at 2nd level, they gain access to Reckless Attack, which allows them to decide on the first attack of their turn to throw caution to the wind, gaining advantage on melee weapon attacks that use Strength during the turn, but granting advantage to any attack rolls against them until their next turn. I need to play it to find out, but this version feels much more dramatic to me than the +4 bonuses to Strength and Constitution and the -2 penalty to Armor Class (but your mileage may vary).

Moving penalties to more precise decisions, with their own carrots, gives the player more control over the risk they are willing to take. Additionally, the added risk due to the resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage a barbarian gets while in a rage (Note to DMs, make note of the resistance rules at 1st level if you have a barbarian in the party). Obviously, there are plenty of monsters, especially at higher levels, that do other types of damage, but this combination sounds like it can set up some great scenes with a cinematic feel to them.

For those who like the ongoing penalty after the rage, the Path of the Berserker offers players the opportunity to go into a frenzy starting at 3rd level. While in a frenzy, barbarians can make a single melee attack as a bonus action on each turn after entering the frenzy. When the rage ends, the barbarian suffers one level of exhaustion (which is some potent stuff). Again, this feels a bit bolder to me.

Also, by not providing default penalties to Charisma, Dexterity, or Intelligence skills, the barbarian is less likely to be turned into a caricature during play. Other options are still available during the encounter. For instance, in 5E barbarians also gain a danger sense at 2nd level that boosts their Dexterity saving throws. This sort of dodging figures strongly in many barbarian stories I've read, it just never was as iconic as strength.

However, I think there are a few complexities to the 5e barbarian that players should be aware of. In addition to the resistance, I'd like to pay particular attention to tracking barbarian resources during play. For instance, there's a bunch of information to keep track of that resets each round while the character is in a rage. The player needs to know if they took damage and/or attacked a hostile creature since the end of their last turn. If they haven't, then they will lose the rage. Also, the damage done by attacks differs depending on whether or not the barbarian is in the rage. The generic character sheets don't really help with this record keeping. (Fortunately, the record keeping ends at 15th level.)

Another area to keep in mind is that the Path of the Totem Warrior gives the barbarian access to some spells, allowing them to cast them as a ritual. At 3rd level, the barbarian may cast beast sense and speak with animals spells as a ritual. For DMs who want to make non-combat encounters an important part of their game, they may want to plan in opportunities where these spells are one way to gain a favorable outcome in the game. They may also want to prepare for clever players who use these spells to gain what could be considered "too much" information about a combat encounter ahead of time.

I'm not going to look at everything that gets added at higher levels, at least not in this post. I hope this helps illustrate some of the cool things about the 5E barbarian as well as some of the areas to be wary of, especially for DMs. One last thing, however. During the design of 5E, there was some talk about wanting to make ability scores important again. One area in the barbarian class where that comes up is with the 18th level barbarian class ability called Indomitable Might. This ability allows the player to substitute in their Strength score if the total for a Strength check is less than their score. That's pretty cool!

Note: There's one thing I'd like to point out regarding the barbarian, in particular the Path of the Totem Warrior. Barbarians that follow this path pick a spirit animal as a guide. There has been a lot of discussion about the spirit animal meme online and I think it's something to be aware of. Here's an Atlantic article the discusses some of the appropriative nature of this concept. This is also a great discussion of usage of the term "spirit animal" and counters some of the arguments that the term is not tied to Native Americans and/or First Peoples.

Last week, I mentioned the art and story of Goblin Market, written by Christina Rossetti and illustrated by Laurence Housman. This week, I'm sharing another book from the British Library collection, La Cité à travers les âges, as far as I can ascertain a book about the history of Paris. I'll be up front, I don't know enough French to read the book, but I thought some of the illustrations from the book were well worth sharing. Just a quick note, I don't know how historically accurate the book is but I also don't think that's as important for our purposes here.

Clothing

One of the things I liked about it were the small sketches about clothing through the centuries. Not only does it look at clothing from the 13th through 18th centuries, but the work provides examples of clothing commonly worn by people of different socio-economic ranks. So we see a paysan (peasant) in the same group as a dame noble (noblewoman).

Understanding the differences in dress can make campaigns richer. How far in detail you go depends on you and your group but even just mentioning that noblewomen seem to have more decoration to their dresses and the material seems more flowing or less bulky can help.

Additionally, the various accoutrements can lead provide inspiration for other NPCs in town, someone is either making them or bringing them to the area. Also, if you tire of yet another side quest that could be summed up as a beer run, a necessary item of clothing that was ruined or is unexpectedly needed can provide a diversion.

Items

In addition to clothing, there are a few illustrations of various items including architectural details and furniture. As with clothes, how various items look often change through time, whether due to fashion or advancements (or declines) in technology. In addition to adding richer details, variance in styles, especially in game art, can help show the story of an area in ways that there might not be space to write.

Maps

Books like this can provide nice illustrations of maps that can be reused in a variety of games.

Buildings and Landmarks

Buildings and other landmarks are a common subject for historical illustrations. This book has some that are rougher and older from earlier in the history and others that are more refined (for instance, a cathedral without little to no Christian iconography could be useful as a temple to a god of civilization or knowledge).

Scenes

This book has a number of scenes illustrated as well. Taking the art out of context can provide inspiration for events and NPCs in your game as well. One of the things I liked about this work is the number of women present as key players in some of the illustrations of historical events.

So if you're looking for inspiration, looking at the pictures of old books, even ones written in a language you don't read, can be fruitful. Happy searching!

As mentioned in a previous post, the British Library released over a million images from its collection for public use. I happen to love illustrations so every so often I love to revisit the collection to see what I can find. In this case, I found images from a book called Goblin Market, a narrative poem written by Christina Rossetti about two close sisters. This edition of the book is illustrated by Laurence Housman.

Things to Steal:

• Random encounter: The story describes how a young woman decides to partake in the feast offered by the goblins, even though she doesn't have any money. This feast turns into a curse, however, as she finds that not only is she pining for the delicious fruit the goblins offered but also that she can no longer hear them and the seeds she saved from the feast will not grow. This curse could be used in many game systems.
• A story of a resourceful and brave woman. Lizzie, seeing her sister near death, goes out to find the goblins and attempts to buy some fruit to bring home to her. This angers the goblins and they assault her, including trying to force feed her the fruits. Eventually they relent and Lizzie returns home covered in pulp and juices. Having nothing else, she gets her sister to eat these which at first causes Laura to be repulsed and to act wildly. But when she awakes the next morning, she is cured.
• The art! Seriously, this art is fantastical and well done. Here's a gallery with some of it.
  
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There's a lot more to the work to discuss, such as what appear to be strongly feminist themes and Housman's own work for the womens' suffrage movement. However, I leave it to you to find out more about that stuff if you wish.

One thing I will point out is that the art might be fun to color in and if you find enough other art of a similar style, you could use color palettes to tie the various works together. As an example, I quickly printed out one of the scenes this morning and began coloring in the woman's dress. To deal with the yellowing of the paper, I used an image editor called Pixelmator and did a combination of desaturation and setting contrast to 50%. I created a zip file with the images I processed in this manner that you can get here.

One of the first things I noticed flipping through the new Southlands Bestiary (Pathfinder) by Kobold Press is the number of monsters that do Constitution ability damage. Over the years I've heard so many complaints from players regarding ability damage and drain, this surprised me a bit. However, I think a well-informed GM can use these monsters to good effect at the table.

First, let's explore what ability damage and drain mean. Ability damage is damage done to one's ability score. Rather than subtracting from the score, you keep track of the damage separately. Get enough damage and you accrue penalties to your checks. Specifically, for every two points of damage done to an ability, you apply a -1 penalty to skills and statistics listed with the relevant penalty. However, your actual ability score remains the same, meaning you don't lose access to spells, feats, and the like.

Ability drain, on the other hand, reduces the relevant ability score. Instead of applying a penalty, you go through your entire character sheet and readjust all skills and statistics related to this ability. Additionally, points lost through ability drain tend to be harder to regain than healing from ability damage. Unless otherwise noted, a character can regain 1 point of ability damage per day. No such natural healing happens with ability drain.

Given how central ability scores are to the game, these general rules help explain why ability damage and drain in general can make players a bit upset but it's important to note that Constitution drain can be particularly thorny. For example, both ability damage and drain can have the effect of lowering one's Fortitude save modifier, often the save type needed to end ongoing Constitution damage or drain or to protect oneself from future reductions. Additionally, Constitution damage or drain reduces both current and total hit points, which means even if the character can deal with the reductions to Constitution abilities, their survivability is lessened. These hit points do not refresh until the ability score damage is healed or the drain reversed. Oh, and unlike the five other ability scores, being reduced to 0 Constitution through ability damage or drain results in character death.

Finally, Constitution is rarely the first or even second most important ability score for most classes. While it's generally advisable to not make it your dump stat (hit points are useful for everyone after all), it's going to be rare for it to be the highest ability score. (For more information on classes that use the various ability scores, see this great Google doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o91Z-s0R7Vf2Ujj1lFqGC5W--9JOyU0I6uC9...) While it's true that getting enough ability damage or drain in the five other score types will still take you out for a while, with Constitution it will kill you dead.

What this all means is that Constitution ability damage and drain easily can lead to an unintended death spiral. To understand, let's look at one of the monsters in Southlands Bestiary, the venomous mummy, a CR 5 monster. It has two abilities that do Constitution damage. One, toxic smoke, happens when the mummy is suffers a particular type of damage. It essentially creates an aura around the creature and any character within it must make a Fortitude check with a DC of 17. If a character fails, it takes 1 Constitution drain or 1d3 Con damage and faces making Fortitude saves for the next 5 rounds. To cure, it must make 2 consecutive saves.

If the effect is drain instead of damage, with every failure the player may need to rework their character sheet. If their ability score was even, this would kick them down one modifier tier. In addition, if there are any feats, spells, or other abilities they have that have a Constitution ability score prerequisite AND your ability score falls below that, you lose access to those items. Thus, the next round when you make a check, you are likely to be in a worse position than you started and yet have to make the same DC.

If the effect is damage instead and the 1d3 gets maxed, you are facing a situation where after two rounds you are taking a -3 penalty to your Fortitude saves plus dealing with a 3 times your hit dice reduction in hit points, and since it's from your current, it's as if the enemy had hit you for damage. And remember, the 2 saves must be consecutive.

Also, it's essentially a 10' aura which means multiple party members could be affected by this. This doesn't even take into account that the mummy has a second ability that also does Con damage, Selket's Venom. This affliction is spread by touch, including through the mummy's slam attack. The effect is 1d6 Con and 1d6 Dex. With an onset of 1 minute, it's unlikely to affect the current encounter but unlike toxic smoke, it continues until cured and no number of consecutive saves will cure it, only the removal of the curse will. The frequency is 1/minute and it requires that both the curse and the poison be removed, and I believe the curse has to be lifted first. While it doesn't say so explicitly, similar scenarios in the Core Rulebook say both spells must be done within 1 minute.

So imagine this scenario, the characters are in a tight crypt when they awaken the venomous mummy. Figuring that "burn it with fire" is always a good response to such foul creatures (hey, it's vulnerable to fire, right?), they light the mummy on fire. This releases the toxic smoke. Half the party is exposed, in particular the melee fighters. Two of them fail their saving throw, starting the up to six rounds of Con drain or damage. At least one of them also gets venom on them, meaning after the combat, that character is facing making a saving throw every minute. Their Fortitude save may already be penalized or reduced due to the toxic smoke and now they are facing the likelihood of an additional -1 penalty each minute, and possibly -2 or -3. Plus, they only have so many Constitution ability points to begin with and when they hit zero they are dead.

The main spells required in this case are remove curse and neutralize poison. Remove curse is a third level spell for bards, clerics, and paladins, and a fourth level spell for sorcerers and wizards. Neutralize poison is a third level spell for druids and rangers and a fourth level spell for alchemists, bards, clerics, oracles, inquisitors, paladins, shamans, and witches. Thus, unless you have a bard, cleric, or paladin in the party, it is unlikely that one character can both end the curse and neutralize the poison. Additionally, clerics don't get fourth level spells until 7th level and they'll only have two 3rd level spells at that level (perhaps more with a high Wisdom score). Paladins don't get 4th level spells until they are level 14 and bards don't get them until 10th level. That's not to say that there aren't other ways potentially to overcome this, but remember this is listed as a CR 5 monster.

If you want to revert the damage or drain, you have a few options available to you. Lesser restoration will cure 1d4 points of ability damage to one ability score. It's a first level spell for paladins and a second level spell for alchemists, clerics, oracles, druids, inquisitors, and shamans. However, it does nothing for ability drain. Restoration will cure all ability damage and restores all points permanently drained from a single ability score. It's a fourth level spell for alchemists, clerics, oracles, inquisitors, paladins, and shamans and requires diamond dust worth 100 gp. Greater restoration will cure all temporary ability damage and restores all points permanently drained from all ability scores. It's a level 7 spell for clerics, oracles, and shamans and requires diamond dust worth 5000 gp.

Another option is for a character to spend 8 or more hours providing long-term care. It requires a heal check. If it is successful, 8 hours will help up to 6 characters recover 2 ability points and 24 hours will allow them to recover up to 4. However, you cannot give long term care to yourself.

Additionally this isn't the only creature that does Constitution ability damage or drain. Out of the 99 monsters listed in the table of contents, I counted 23 that have some ability to affect a character's Constitution. One example, the Dau (CR 5) require a Fortitude save after a touch attack. Failure results in 1d6 points of Constitution drain. The amphiptere (CR 3) attempts to poison creatures it bites or stings. Poisoned creatures that fail their Fortitude save take 1d2 Con damage until they save. Any creature that takes 4 or more points of Con damage are also fatigued until at least one of those damage points are healed.

One thing to keep in mind is that the three people who heard me describe these monsters wanted to go up against them. So don't take this post as being negative on the product, it's definitely useful and will scratch the itch of some players. In fact, here are some game types where this sort of bestiary might be well-received:

• Some types of tournament play
• Games with experienced players who crave a challenge and/or something new
• Adventures that use the Mythic Adventures rules since it often gives player characters resources they wouldn't otherwise get. For example, cure light wounds heals some ability score damage in addition to increasing the healing.
• Campaigns that are more liberal about giving out items, especially as a reward for exploration. For instance, maybe parts of the area where a venomous mummy can be found have staves or potions to give the party more resources. However, I'd still suggest talking about this upfront rather than surprising players with it after they've dealt with something they feel is unfair.

So don't be afraid to use monsters like these, just try to go in with eyes wide open. Have fun! And if you have a story about ability damage/drain monsters you'd like to share, feel free to do so in the comments.

Notes: A huge thanks to Michael Phillips (Twitter|Website) for being willing to review my rough draft and do a quick soundness check. Venomous mummy artwork by the always awesome Jared von Hindman.

One of the parts of Gen Con I love is Artist Alley, the portion of the exhibitor floor reserved for those who bring our fictional worlds to (visual) life. Among those present this year is Emily Fiegenshuh (Wikipedia, Website). In terms of game art, she has done work for Paizo and Wizards of the Coast. In addition, she provided character designs and illustrations for multiple fantasy stories published by Cricket Magazine and illustrations for Inuit mythology magazines and books published by Inhabit Media. Finally, she created The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures, a how-to-draw book (more on that in a bit).

Emily's art has a style that reminds me of the fairy tale books I grew up with. I love her balance between things that exist in the natural world and the fantastic. Additionally, I get from her artwork that she likes to do world building and is making conscious choices with both what she chooses to present and how she does so. This comes through in her book, The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures. Here are some example images of the book.

I can't wait to dig into this book more and give drawing a try.

From my brief conversation with her at Gen Con, it sounded like she would love to do more RPG work. I don't know her rates, but if you are interested, please contact her. Her contact info is emily at e-figart.com and her website is www.e-figart.com. Also, I love her card.

Also, here's what we picked up from her table at Gen Con.