The multiverse is a crucible. The fires burn away the impurities of each life. Thus, everyone has the potential to become a god. Not the deities of the Prime worlds, for even they are merely powerful individuals awaiting their next stage of ascension. Well, that’s according to the Believers of the Source.
The Godsmen, as they’re usually referred to by others, work to promote the awareness of their multiversal truth. As such, they may help, but they won’t allow people to lose out on life’s little lessons. Also, the quickest way to anger them is to be apathetic or shrug off all opportunities for self-improvement.
Regardless of what others think about them, Godsmen are extroverts with a genuine interest in the progress of the multiverse’s own improvement in addition to their own. Why they’re so interested depends on the Godsman in question.
The Believers of the Source treat everyone with respect, making them feel important. To the Godsmen, they are. No matter the relationship between a Godsman and those he encounters, he accepts it as the trial it is. Whether he passes or fails is no great consequence. After all, his latent divinity will learn from the experience, even if his mortal coil is momentarily shed. If his latent divinity fails to overcome these lessons, however, he descends to a lower form of life.
Godsmen think as much as they act. This is strange to many outsiders when they see a wizard working a hammer in the faction’s forge. To them, it’s as much to shape the body as the mind. Only then can a being climb the ladder to true divinity.
Thus, the Great Foundry serves to strengthen the Godsmen’s determination. The whole complex is a metaphor to the crucible of life. The multiverse is represented by the beating of the mind and body to tempered perfection as hammers on steel in a forge. Much like the blades fashioned by a master blacksmith, the faction firmly believes in iron sharpening iron.
Godsmen templates use all the base creature's statistics and special abilities unless noted otherwise.
Namer
Belief Point Cost: 1
Special Attacks: None.
Special Qualities: Due to their unique outlook, Godsmen gain a +4 bonus on all reactions and suffer a –2 to divine spell checks if they venerate a deity other than the Source.
Saves: Same as the base creature.
Abilities: Same as the base creature.
Skills: Same as the base creature.
Feats: Same as the base creature.
Drawbacks: Godsmen are disliked by the Harmonium, Sinkers, and Dustmen, their situational bonus becomes a penalty.
Climate/Terrain: Same as the base creature.
Organization: Same as the base creature.
Challenge Rating: Up to 3 HD, same as the base creature.
3 HD to 7 HD, same as the base creature +1.
8+ HD, same as the base creature +2.
Treasure: Same as the base creature.
Alignment: Same as the base creature.
Advancement: Same as the base creature.
Factotum
Belief Point Cost: 10
Special Attacks: None
Special Qualities: Due to their unique outlook, Godsmen gain a +6 bonus on all reactions and suffer a –4 to divine spell checks if they venerate a deity other than the Source.
Abilities: as base creature.
Skills: as base creature.
Feats: as base creature.
Drawbacks: Godsmen are disliked by the Harmonium, Sinkers, and Dustmen, their situational bonus becomes a penalty.
Climate/Terrain: Same as the base creature.
Organization: Same as the base creature.
Challenge Rating: Up to 3 HD, same as the base creature +1.
3 HD to 7 HD, same as the base creature +2.
8+ HD, same as the base creature +3.
Treasure: Same as the base creature.
Alignment: Same as the base creature.
Advancement: Same as the base creature.
Factor
Belief Point Cost: 20
Special Attacks: None
Special Qualities: Due to their unique outlook, Godsmen gain a +8 bonus on all reactions and suffer a –6 to divine spell checks if they venerate a deity other than the Source.
Abilities: as base creature.
Skills: as base creature.
Feats: as base creature.
Drawbacks: Godsmen are disliked by the Harmonium, Sinkers, and Dustmen, their situational bonus becomes a penalty.
Climate/Terrain: Same as the base creature.
Organization: Same as the base creature.
Challenge Rating: Up to 3 HD, same as the base creature +3.
3 HD to 7 HD, same as the base creature +4.
8+ HD, same as the base creature +5.
Treasure: Same as the base creature.
Alignment: Same as the base creature.
Advancement: Same as the base creature.
Factol
Belief Point Cost: 30
Special Attacks: None
Special Qualities: Due to their unique outlook, Godsmen gain a +10 bonus on all reactions and suffer a –8 to divine spell checks if they venerate a deity other than the Source.
Abilities: as base creature.
Skills: as base creature.
Feats: as base creature.
Drawbacks: Godsmen are disliked by the Harmonium, Sinkers, and Dustmen, their situational bonus becomes a penalty.
Climate/Terrain: Same as the base creature.
Organization: Same as the base creature.
Challenge Rating: Up to 3 HD, same as the base creature +4.
3 HD to 7 HD, same as the base creature +5.
8+ HD, same as the base creature +6.
Treasure: Same as the base creature.
Alignment: Same as the base creature.
Advancement: Same as the base creature.
The HarbingersThe Harbingers rarely work in the Great Foundry for extended periods of time. They are charged with protecting those closest to ascension from themselves and the multiverse at large. As trying as it can be to deal with an emerging deity, the harbingers feel that by caring for these souls that they will learn their path to ascension.
When rumors of a budding divinity emerge, the harbingers are amongst the first of the Godsmen to act. In a way, they are like bloodhounds tracking the emerging divinity. When found, they whisk the being away to a safe house. To that end, the harbingers attract rangers to their ranks and employ.
The Forgers
Consisting mainly of warriors, the forgers use the Great Foundry to hone their physical form while designing weapons and armor to fit them and their specific fighting styles. Since they prefer physical challenges to test their worthiness, many of their training implements – which they forge – require the user to exert himself.
The forgers are the muscle of the faction. Though they may focus more on brawn than brain, they are a necessary component of the faction. Who better to help guard manifesting divinities than those who seek to be as hard as anvils themselves? Through fire and sweat, the forgers climb to ascension.
The Singing Hammers
Intellect and creativity guide this fraction. The singing hammers stress that through patience and planning, anything can be wrought, no matter how tough. The rhythmic pounding resounding through the Foundry strikes a thunderous chord for these poets. Singing or chanting their latest song or story, they sculpt iron into art.
Still, the singing hammers swing about with pens, instruments, or bodies in entertainment more than they do actual hammers. After all, if a song can bring a smile and a play a tear, isn’t that a forging all of its own? The soul itself is malleable, but infinitely harder than adamantine.Why: As part of the templates I'm using to run a pre-FW campaign and to provide interesting characters post-FW with "relic" feats and PrCs.Pro: It allows for the play of the Godsmen pre- and post- Faction War.
Con: Only if they hate Godsmen.
The penalty for divine spell checks blurs the lines between the Godsmen and Athar until neither is very distinctive.
The reaction bonus is the kind of dull and generic advantage that characterized 2e kits, but does nothing to make the faction interesting.
The flavor text, however, is decent. That seems to be your strong point. The mechanics you posted could use a lot of work. I recognize that you're just basing it on what The Factol's Manifesto said, but we can do better.
Wow...looking at this again, there are several problems with the layout. For one, there are 4 seperate templates to represent the ranks from the 2e version.
As to the issue of the CR, this is part of the problem from the porting of the material over. For some reason the daggers disappeared. The CR is only applicable if you do not wish to use a Belief Point or XP cost to gain the templates.
We've had a *LOT* of trouble with entries that are copied and pasted from word. In the course of trying to clean them up there's even been points where text has gotten completely lost because of the tags MS Word and Wordpad like to put into things (Nemui is familar with this). We've put a warning up about this in the PW entry system, with any luck people will start reading it so we don't have to fight with the Word tags in the future. That's why we recommend folks use the RTF editor itself for your layout.
I'm also working on a clean up script for our editor to make it handle these things a little more robustly - basicly I try to fix things as best I can without data loss. (BTW - it should look a little clearer with some separating lines in there now.)
I'll have to make adjustments later to the template, I can see compared to my other templates that this one is weak.
As to the tags included in Word, I did read the disclaimer, but when I looked at the text in the box, my daggers were still attached to the Belief Point Cost & Callange Rating lines...
Well, it's a bit unfortunate the daggers didn't port over with the rest of the text... I'll have to do an edit request for the scalable templates to address that...
WAIT a sec. You mean that if a 8th level human fighter (say) becomes a Godsman Namer, he gets a +4 bonus to reactions against most NPCs and some pretty fluff text, and for THIS his CR goes up by +2?!?!?
This ain't material for a character template, this is situational roleplaying that's been left out in Limbo too long!