[HR: Races] Deep One Hybrid - Please Critique

Here is a rough draft for my Deep One Hybrid racial template:

http://spacecockroach.blogspot.co.il/2013/11/acks-deep-one-hybrid-racial-template.html

Please critique - I want to balance this, especially the transformation which I’m not sure if it is balanced. Also, when would a Hybrid be allowed to transform into a Deep One? I’d say at any point he/she wants - with consequences (i.e. the Reaction mods).

Hey Golan,

Sorry, I had written a response to your earlier thread on my phone and proceeded to lose it.

I was going to say in the earlier thread that I thought it would work better as a racial template and here you are. Awesome!

Really cool! It looks good to me and the abilities don’t seem out of line when compared to Zaharans, I think. A couple of questions:

I was wondering about the reasoning behind the divine connection - you will have some pretty powerful Deep One priests and clerics. I always thought they were brutal rather than wise. Any reason why the bumps in the racial template don’t add to Fighting Ability like the Thrassian? I’m no expert on the Cthulhu mythos, so just wondering.

Also, you may want to go into a little more detail on the final transformation into a true deep one. With Zaharans, they must either seek out the transformation to undeath (costing them considerable coin, exposure to danger, and time) or they need to be turned against their will (costing someone else considerable cost and coin). Does a willing transformation into Deep One cost the character anything? Does the transformation affect their sanity, for instance? The way that you’ve constructed the template made me think that the transformation should take away a bit more of the humanity of the character turning into a deep one beyond a simple penalty to reaction rolls.

A really cool idea - I’d play one for sure.

Cheers.

The Divine Connection is with their Chaotic gods Dagon and K’tulu; they may harness the powers of Chaos! But you might be right and Fighting ability could fit them better.

How would you model the loss of humanity in transformation under the ACKS rules?

On a second thought, I will give them Fighting indeed. But the Harati Noble class based on this racial template will have Divine 1 to signify pacts with CHAOS!

Yikes, that’s a good question. Hah, I hadn’t thought to deeply about it.

I personally might leaf through the AD&D DMG and make a list of ‘active’ insanity types that the character might choose (or randomly roll) to be afflicted with. I’d only list those forms that can be roleplayed actively… so I would strip catatonia from the list, for instance. I’d say the character has a mild form of the insanity that has a chance to ‘flare’ (triggered by failing saving throw vs. death) for 1dx hours when certain conditions are met such as loss of half of their hit points or failing a saving throw vs. a mind affecting spell or illusion. Perhaps you invert the death saving throw for the flare-ups to represent the face that these creatures become less able to control themselves as they become more powerful and closer to an extreme transformation.

So one deep one might be mildly delusional at all times, but emphatically delusional when his brain is messed with magically or he is under extreme physical duress.

That’s probably where I’d start and adjust from there. It might be too complicated, but who knows! I’d imagine a person wanting to play a race like this might be excited about investing a little bit of extra time with it and you could tweak it to taste.

Ugh, I hate not being able to edit… please forgive my use of ‘to’ to represent ‘too’. And any other thoughtless grammar and spelling mistakes I may have made. I tend not to see these things until after I’ve hit the ‘save’ button.

Here is the updated racial template:

http://spacecockroach.blogspot.co.il/2014/06/acks-deep-one-hybrid-racial-template.html