The backer chose to use the Dragon Heresy character classes and backgrounds, because Dragon Heresy is going to be awesome. He’s a Berserker following the Path of Lausatok, which is basically a grapple-barbarian in 5e terms.

He’ll be 5th level when he’s done. Michael Clarke, who did my cover on Dungeon Grappling and has done the covers, layout, and graphic design on Dragon Heresy did the character sheet template.

The Path of Lausatok’s initial ability is:

Expert Grappler

Starting when you choose this tradition at 3rd level, your study of unarmed combat begins to focus on grappling and wrestling. You gain proficiency with Athletics; if you were already proficient, you gain expertise. Additionally, you gain the following benefits:

• You have advantage if you are making a grappling attack against a foe but have not yet achieved any Control.
• If you have a creature grappled and they attempt to counter-grapple either to reduce control or establish control on you, you may use your reaction to reduce their effect by 1d4 plus your Strength or Dexterity modifier, whichever is better.

The next boost, which will come at 6th level (so only one more!), is called Weapon Wary, which makes it easier to lunge in on armed opponents to secure a grapple (opportunity attacks when initiating a grapple have disadvantage), and you get to give yourself resistance (if you’re not raging) or immunity (if you are) to mundane bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage for one turn, once per short rest.

The Dragon Heresy RPG is the next step in my mission to bring the world of Etera to life for gamers. I have 425,000 words written, and 300,000 of those have been subjected to a first-round comprehensive copy editing pass.

When that’s done, hopefully in the next few weeks, I’ll hack it down to 256 pages (maybe 140,000 words) and present a Kickstarter to develop an introductory set that will cover level 1-5 for some of the more classic races and classes, to get folks used to the world and the new rules concepts.

I’m working out how that’s going to go. I’d love to do the entire three-volume full set at one go; that will be expensive to do as I’d like. So I’m going to follow The Big Dog and bring out an intro set first, followed by The Hunted Lands, a mini-setting tailored to the intro rules. Those two will then pave the way for the deluxe full-spectrum books.

If you’ve been following my 2017 Year in Review and my Financial Updates, you’ll see I’ve pre-invested a rather substantial amount of money in art, layout, and editing. So the barrier to produce the intro set should be fairly low. There are still things I want to do with it (a professional copy edit, and an index, and paying my layout partner for the actual work to do this for real), but those are relatively speaking lower ticket items.

Stay tuned for more!