First Draft Talents: Introduction

I am still working on a core rules document for Echelon, but I needed some talents in place to give the framework some content.

I have several sources I will be leaning on heavily for talents: Iron Heroes (revised edition), FantasyCraft, and a supplement titled Agents of Faith: Crusaders of the Gods.  All three have some feat chains that can be readily banged into place as talents, in some cases covering the main range of tiers from Basic through Legendary.

These are initial drafts and I have done little to make them align with the rules I am preparing for Echelon, but the spirit is generally there.  The talent descriptions currently make reference to mechanics no longer present such as ability scores, but similar mechanisms are likely to be used.  Also, many are not complete, but my primary interest is in the Basic and Expert tiers, possibly into Heroic, so I’m not concerned if higher tiers are not yet populated.

It is also important to know that the power curves on the talents may differ.  The talents constructed from FantasyCraft feats are a fair bit less powerful than those from Iron Heroes at the same tiers.  This is actually okay in my mind, because it helps illustrate the flexibility available to people playing Echelon.  You can adjust the power curve for a particular application of Echelon pretty easily just by changing the talents available.  For that matter, mechanical balance is not a high priority for me.  From a post earlier this week,

Be aware that “balance” is a nebulous thing. I aim for “balance of awesome. You can’t pick between two talents because they’re both so awesome?

That is the balance I aim for.

I want any obvious talent choices to be driven by how the talent fits the character, not by perceived power. I want players to go “ooh, I want to be able to do that!”, not “hmm, this gives me a little better Armor Class and doesn’t cost me much…”.

I will be posting links to the individual posts here.  The actual talent documents are large enough to be unwieldy when using a web interface, so for now I will be working in Word and making PDFs available for download.

• Divine Talents from Agents of Faith.
• Combat Talents from FantasyCraft.
• Combat Talents from Iron Heroes Mastery Feats.