Sunday, September 4, 2016

Oh, Witch-AY Woman!

(Note: Outside of this post being related to The Witcher 3, the title of this post makes no sense, and serves no purpose to the post outside of giving me an opportunity to quote my favorite obscure Seinfeld line.)

After some delays with Real Life going on (not the greatest week of my life, unfortunately), I've managed to make some kind of progress with the Witcher 3 Burning Wheel setting hack that I've talked about before.  Specifically, I've set about trying to come up with the new lifepaths and traits that I think burning a witcher would require.  While the Codex doesn't contain the rules for burning lifepaths and traits that I was hoping would be included, the Burning Wiki does have the worksheets for creating a new trait, which I used as a rough guide when putting the new traits together.  Mostly, though, I just tweaked some existing lifepaths and traits in order to get where I needed.

The big things I was concerned with when trying to put this stuff together were making sure that I covered the crucial skills a witcher would need, along with covering the very specific mutation process that a witcher goes through, leading to the fun cat eyes.  I decided against going with a separate lifepath for the mutation, given that I couldn't come up with any actual skills that would be gained form the process itself, and ended up just rolling an additional two years onto the Witcher lifepath.  I ended up basing the new lifepath on the dwarven Adventurer lifepath, which ended up also providing a pretty sweet bonus guide for the Witcher trait.  I also created one additional lifepath - that of the Witcher's Apprentice.  This was a slight tweaking of the existing Page lifepath from the mannish stock, reducing the years served and adding the Demonology skill, but with a big hit to the Resources points gained.

The one little wrinkle that I will say is probably necessary to tweak the game rules a bit to fit in is that the Witcher's Apprentice lifepath, like the Squire lifepath it's based on, requires that it be the second lifepath a character takes, but is itself an Outcast lifepath.  This means that, due to the lack of Born lifepaths that lead to the Outcast subsetting, you might have to fudge things a bit in order to incorporate this into your games and allow other lifepaths to lead into the Outcast setting.

Anyway, here's what I've come up with.  Please feel free to respond with your thoughts, and to use in your games.  If you DO end up using any of these for a game that you're running, please let me know how they play out.


Outcast Setting Time Resources Stat Leads
Witcher's Apprentice 5 yrs 5 +1P Any
Skills: 6 pts: Brawling, Read, Write, Sword, Demonology
Traits: 2 pts: -
Prerequisites: If chosen, this path must be the character's second lifepath and may only be taken once.
Witcher 7 yrs 10 +1M/P Any
Skills: 12 pts: Sorcery, Climbing, Folklore, Herbalism, Haggling, Brawling, Sword, Crossbow, Axe, Appraisal, Munitions, Survival, Symbology, Alchemy
Traits: 2 pt: Witcher, Mutant
Requires: Witcher's Apprentice or any Soldier lifepath.


Witcher Dt
Witchers are feared by the commonfolk, considered freaks and meddlers. As such, Witchers gain +1 Ob to all Circles tests when dealing with Born Peasant or Villager humans. However, they may take a minor (1D) affiliation with the school that trained them for free.


Mutant Dt 4 pts
The mutation that witchers undergo renders them sterile and unable to produce offspring. However, the procedure gifts them with sight into the supernatural realm. All Observation tests made to see traces of the supernatural are open-ended.

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